Expedia poised to take flight with generative AI
CTO Rathi Murthy sees the online travel service’s vast troves of data and AI expertise fueling a two-pronged transformation strategy aimed at growing the company by bringing more of the travel industry online.
Artificial intelligence is poised to disrupt the travel industry, and Expedia CTO Rathi Murthy, who oversees a massive online travel network with 168 million loyalty members and more than 50,000 business partners, believes her company is well positioned to capitalize.
That’s because, outside of its top brands, which include Travelocity, VRBO, Hotels.com, Orbitz, Trivago, Wotif, and CarRentals.com, the $14 billion online travel service’s most prized possession is its data — the 70 petabytes of traveler information stored on its AWS cloud.
“Data is our heartbeat,” says Murthy, who joined Expedia Group as CTO and president of Expedia Product and Technology two years ago after serving as Verizon Media’s CTO during the 5G buildup. “We have a very giant ecosystem and with that what we have been able to do is really drive personalized behaviors across for our travelers.”
And with the expansion and consumer popularization of AI fueled by recent advances such as ChatGPT, Expedia’s extensive use of analytics and machine learning to fuel that personalization strategy should enable the company to help evolve the travel industry, even as its pool of customers and partners grows, says Murthy.
“AI is a huge enabler for us. It’s not new to us, but ChatGPT democratizes AI for everybody and bringing the two together — data and AI — is very powerful,” she says, noting that Expedia currently runs roughly 600 billion AI predictions annually from its massive data repository.
Two-pronged transformation
The Seattle-based travel giant has come a long way since being founded as a division of Microsoft in 1996 and spun off as a public company in 1999. Expedia Group has more than 21 brands and more than 50,000 B2B partners connecting them with more than 3 million hotel and rental properties and more than 500 airlines and cruise companies, as well as car rental agencies.
Still, the online travel service has strong upside potential, Murthy says, estimating that just 20% of all travel professionals and consumers use online systems for booking reservations today.
According to 6sense Revenue AI numbers, Expedia has roughly 10% share of the reservation-and-online booking market and competes with more than 20 rivals, including TripAdvisor, which owns a 46% share of all revenues; Airbnb, which takes in 23%; and Booking.com, which holds about 7% of the online reservation market.