• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, June 6, 2023

Trying to find a hotel near a cruise port typically requires the traveler to toggle between mapping site, search engine, and hotel websites. Priceline and Google plan to make it easier through a partnership announced Tuesday.  

Priceline’s goal is to build a travel assistant chatbot powered by generative artificial intelligence (GAI) that can help consumers easily get through the travel-planning and booking process.

Marty Brodbeck, CTO at Priceline, believes it's not just about having the latest technology, but also about targeting innovation to the correct challenges and opportunities.

"Priceline is charting a course to transform the novelty of generative AI into lasting value for our customers and our business,” he said.

The travel site, part of Booking Holding, will build out the experience using Google Cloud's GAI in consumer-facing and internal application across parts of its business.

While customers will soon have the ability to interact with a Google GAI chatbot to receive more personalized results when searching for hotels worldwide, employees will benefit from increased and easier access to internal information. Priceline plans to use the GAI internally to automate some time-intensive coding and content generation tasks.

Priceline's initial Google Cloud GAI deployments will begin rolling out this summer and include a travel-assisted chatbot to provide customers with a conversational experience when answering questions about trip planning, and the ability to book a trip directly in the chat experience.

Priceline also will provide a personalized hotel booking experience backed by AI, as well as a list of preferred hotels by proximity to local attractions, restaurants and activities.

The features will become available through its web and mobile experiences as part of Priceline’s "Connected Trip" strategy. Powered by Google Cloud's Vertex AI, and displayed in a map view on the hotel's details page, an upgraded hotel booking experience will let customers access current neighborhood information personalized for them.

With GAI-powered descriptions of places of interest, Priceline customers can learn about nearby attractions, local restaurants, seasonal events and conveniences, like gas stations and grocery stores. The travel planner for a family of four can have an easier time finding and booking accommodations that meet a budget and needs.

Priceline marketing teams will have access to technology that automatically generates marketing copy and images for customers, and enhanced automation and internal database mining tools expanded through internal information search capabilities and software production.

Priceline is not the only travel site with plans to use GAI. In April, Expedia made available on the iOS app an OpenAI ChatGPT bot in beta that it hopes will provide vacationers specific information based on the query.

The interface aims to let users plan their vacation by entering in the chatbot specific preferences, time of stay, and budget. The system offers hotel or activity suggestions.

Expedia Group CEO Peter Kern in the release explains that Expedia already uses machine learning to compare hotels and price tracking for flights. The company had already partnered with OpenAI for a plugin using Expedia data like hotel and flight prices. Now it is testing GAI.