Skift Take
Will the big AI chatbots — those that survive — ever become online travel agencies in their own right? Booking Holdings’ CFO doesn’t think so, but the company is trying to prepare for all scenarios.
Booking Holdings is “preparing for all scenarios” when it comes to emerging travel offerings from the big AI chatbots, but they won’t likely become full-fledged online travel agencies.
That’s the word from Booking’s Chief Financial Officer Ewout Steenbergen. “Even Google never stepped into it. You could say they had a very good possibility if they wanted to, but they never said, ‘You know what, I want to be in that part of the value chain,'” he told the audience at a Morgan Stanley Technology, Media and Telecom conference in San Francisco last week.
That question — whether Google would transition f
