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Eric Bergaglia, Booking.com's VP of homes and growth segments, told Skift's Short-Term Rental Summit on Wednesday that short-term room nights made up about 25 percent of all bookings before the pandemic, rising to 36 percent in the first quarter of 2024. The company expects that growth to continue.
Key takeaways
The Amsterdam-based company has focused heavily on the U.S. market in recent years and is increasingly highlighting homes in its communications;
Demand for home rentals on the platform is growing, with one in three customers now looking for a home, up from one in seven a year ago;
Booking.com, like many others, is using artificial intelligence to address specific needs and refine search results.
Where should the hospitality industry be putting its technology investment? Cloud computing? Artificial intelligence? Sunsetting legacy technology? What are the priorities and is it spending enough?
Recent research from Amadeus into hospitality technology investment trends revealed that 70% of IT decision makers are planning “moderate” investment in technology next year while 24% are planning “heavy” investment. The rapid pace of change combined with the many existing technical challenges faced by the industry makes for interesting discussion at industry events.
Organizations are already seeing material benefits from gen AI use, reporting both cost decreases and revenue jumps in the business units deploying the technology. The survey also provides insights into the kinds of risks presented by gen AI—most notably, inaccuracy—as well as the emerging practices of top performers to mitigate those challenges and capture value.
What will define the next age of travel? Digital technology and artificial intelligence are empowering the industry to reimagine the travel experience and unlock long-term growth.
The world wrestles with the implications of generative artificial intelligence as the landscape evolves at breakneck speed, with new models arriving, new product launches popping up seemingly every day and an ecosystem of parallel services flourishing.
While the interfaces for research, shopping and booking are the center of attention, several other use cases stand out on the consumer side. The following is an excerpt from Phocuswright’s travel research report From Buzzword to Bottom Line: Keeping Pace With Gen AI in Travel.
"Google Hotels is the largest and most comprehensive metasearch engine in travel. Skift Research did an analysis of thousands of hotel listings on Google to learn how OTAs and hotels are bidding for bookings.
But for the big legacy OTAs, Booking and Expedia, this fragmentation is bad because it means more competition. And Booking, Expedia would rather have a more consolidated space, which they lead as a duopoly, rather than seeing all this re-fragmentation in the industry.
Key takeaways
Examining the Google sponsored results reveals that Booking Holdings and Expedia Group, along with their sub-brands, not only dominate these results but are also significantly dependent on Google;
In the US, Booking and Expedia have an 80% share of sponsored results. Notably, Booking.com appears most frequently, indicating that it invests the most to secure prominent placement in these paid results;
However, if you look at the organic results, which are free to list, you'll see a more democratized landscape. This means that smaller OTAs and direct sites are gaining more prominence on Google. This suggests that Google recognizes and values direct sites as a better option for booking hotels;
For Booking and Expedia, however, this fragmentation is unfavorable as it leads to increased competition. Both prefer a more consolidated market where they dominate as a duopoly, rather than face the refragmentation of the industry."
Generative artificial intelligence has made a big leap in the past few weeks, some of the most significant advancements since it came on the scene 18 months ago.
OpenAI, Google, and Meta each released updated AI models this spring. And they all showed how they envision their chatbots as personal assistants that can understand text, video, photos, and audio.
Each of them used travel-related examples to show how they want users to adopt those assistants — potentially undermining travel companies releasing their own products built on top of tech from OpenAI and Google.
Au courant de la dernière année, on a appris à connaitre et utiliser les outils d’intelligence artificielle (IA) générative. De ChatGPT à Google Gemini en passant par MetaAI, Poe ou Perplexity, ces modèles de langage élargis (LLM) ont ceci en commun: pour générer des résultats pertinents, il importe de rédiger un bon prompt. Le terme « prompt » vient d’ailleurs tout juste de faire son entrée officielle dans Le Petit Robert en 2024, et il s’agit essentiellement de la requête qu’on rédige afin faire comprendre à l’outil d’IA générative ce que l’on souhaite obtenir.
AI determined high and low seasonality patterns
AI is capable of processing and analyzing huge amounts of data, and this helps implement sustainable solutions in travel.
For instance, our team created a heat map that illustrates the “tourism load” in every country, highlighting where our travelers visit the most. AI helped us identify the most popular routes and determine high and low seasonality patterns
Taking stock of AI ROI is challenging but essential. IT leaders and industry observers lend insights on how to get a clear idea of whether your AI efforts are paying off.
Viele CIOs sind sich unsicher, ob sich die Investition in künstliche Intelligenz lohnt. Das zeigt eine neue Studie von Gartner. Demnach sollten Unternehmen zuerst konkrete Anwendungsfälle identifizieren, bevor sie mit KI experimentieren.
Fait remarquable, 40% des outils mentionnés dans le tableau n’apparaissait pas dans la version précédente, publiée en septembre 2023, soit il y a moins de 6 mois! De plus, depuis le mois de mars 2024 on a vu l’apparition de Meta AI dans notre fil de nouvelles Facebook et Instagram. OpenAI a lancé sa toute nouvelle version de ChatGPT, la version 4 « Omni », ou 4o. Et Google a dévoilé sa nouvelle version Google Gemini Flash, et promis un assistant virtuel tout feu, tout flamme, avec le projet Astra.
This week was easily the biggest week so far for generative artificial intelligence - especially for the travel industry. Let’s look at three of the big announcements.
OpenAI
On Monday, OpenAI introduced a new AI model called GPT-4o. The event was small and fairly low-key, and the updated products looked like mostly iterative improvements on many earlier versions. The demo was good, but we’ve been taught recently not to trust these demos. GPT-4o as large language model (LLM) looks like it’s the best model yet, though not a huge step up from the latest GPT-4. It’s free to chat for users, and 50% cheaper via API. It’s also much faster, which is important.
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If you're in marketing, you've likely heard about the recent Google API documentation leak. On May 27, SEO practitioner Erfan Azimi exposed more than 2,500 pages of Google’s internal API documentation, providing unprecedented insights into how the search giant’s algorithm functions.
It's worth noting that many details in the leak contradict Google's past public commentary. However, Google has confirmed that these documents are indeed from its internal sources. The key takeaway for the travel industry is that success in SEO requires a multifaceted approach, beyond simply producing high-quality content.
For far too long, a significant segment of the short-term rental (STR) industry has been starved of the tools necessary to professionalize and scale.
The majority of the STR market is made up of individual hosts and self-managers. Yet these critical players are being sidelined and denied access to the cutting-edge tech they need to stand toe-to-toe with the big players. Why? Because traditional software connections have demanded that everything routes through the property management system (PMS), placing unwarranted barriers between hosts and the tools they need.
Les administrations publiques et les entreprises suisses n’ont pas attendu le boom de l’IA générative pour s’intéresser aux outils qui peuvent automatiser certaines décisions. L’ONG AlgorithmWatch a publié un atlas qui recense les systèmes déjà déployés en Suisse. Sa responsable de plaidoyer Estelle Pannatier explique en quoi le recours à de tels mécanismes soulève des questions sur le respect des droits fondamentaux
First quarter financial figures from four of the largest online travel agencies in the world show Expedia Group, Booking Holdings, Airbnb and Trip.com Group opened 2024 much as they closed 2023 — a year in which they spent a record amount to promote their brands and attract customers.
The four brands spent a combined $4.08 billion on sales and marketing (reported by Booking Holdings as just marketing) over the first three months of the year, a 10.6% increase over the $3.69 billion they spent in the first quarter of 2023 when the companies went on to spend a total of $16.8 billion for the year.
Generative AI use cases for consumer travel While the research, shopping, and booking interfaces take center stage, several other use cases stand out on the consumer side May 29, 2024 The world is grappling with the implications of generative artificial intelligence as the landscape evolves at a...
Booking.com and Agoda.com are being investigated by the Dutch consumer watchdog ACM for allegedly misleading customers about costs and discounts. "These are deliberate tactics to make consumers believe they have found a good deal and need to decide quickly," said Sandra Molenaar of the Consumentenbond.
Key takeaways
Booking.com was previously reprimanded by the European Commission and national regulators, including the ACM, four years ago for using manipulative practices and fake discounts to attract customers;
The ACM said it would investigate the Consumentenbond's latest claims and could impose fines if it found Booking.com had broken the rules. "We see this as a serious indication and will look at it critically," a spokesman said.
Okay, first, a point of clarification: There are no universal best times to post on social media for every single brand and every business.
Each brand’s audience is different, their behaviors and interests are not the same, and as such, there’s no one-size-fits-all, prescriptive approach that’ll ensure that you get the best results every time that you post.
That said, “best times to post” guides can be helpful, in both highlighting broader trends in engagement, and prompting you to think about when you might want to start your experiments, in order to find your ideal posting cadence.
Au courant de la dernière année, on a appris à connaitre et utiliser les outils d’intelligence artificielle (IA) générative. De ChatGPT à Google Gemini en passant par MetaAI, Poe ou Perplexity, ces modèles de langage élargis (LLM) ont ceci en commun: pour générer des résultats pertinents, il importe de rédiger un bon prompt. Le terme « prompt » vient d’ailleurs tout juste de faire son entrée officielle dans Le Petit Robert en 2024, et il s’agit essentiellement de la requête qu’on rédige afin faire comprendre à l’outil d’IA générative ce que l’on souhaite obtenir.
Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is the No. 1 type of AI solution deployed in organizations, according to a new survey by Gartner, Inc.
According to the survey conducted in the fourth quarter of 2023, 29% of the 644 respondents from organizations in the U.S., Germany and the U.K. said that they have deployed and are using GenAI, making GenAI the most frequently deployed AI solution. GenAI was found to be more common than other solutions like graph techniques, optimization algorithms, rule-based systems, natural language processing and other types of machine learning.
Finding the return on investment for AI remains elusive for many organizations, even as they rush to adopt the technology.
Difficulties estimating or demonstrating the value of AI technologies to the business have been or will be a top barrier to their implementation, according to a recent Gartner survey of more than 700 IT leaders at organizations that have adopted or plan to adopt AI. Nearly half of respondents pointed to challenges with showing its value.
Other top concerns include a lack of talent and skills among employees and a lack of confidence in AI technologies. Even with the questions, adoption is widespread, with more than 95% of IT leaders saying AI has been implemented in at least one business process. More than a quarter of those responding have adopted AI for multiple business processes across several business units.
Today the Council approved a ground-breaking law aiming to harmonise rules on artificial intelligence, the so-called artificial intelligence act. The flagship legislation follows a ‘risk-based’ approach, which means the higher the risk to cause harm to society, the stricter the rules. It is the first of its kind in the world and can set a global standard for AI regulation.
The new law aims to foster the development and uptake of safe and trustworthy AI systems across the EU’s single market by both private and public actors. At the same time, it aims to ensure respect of fundamental rights of EU citizens and stimulate investment and innovation on artificial intelligence in Europe. The AI act applies only to areas within EU law and provides exemptions such as for systems used exclusively for military and defence as well as for research purposes.
This first post took a deep dive into each of the six areas in the metasearch funnel, explaining the most important variables in each step and their meaning.
In this second post, we’d like to analyze the factors that affect each step in the funnel, the performance benchmarks you should aspire to, and how to identify areas for improvement and know what to do about them. Let’s remind ourselves first about the six levels in the Google metasearch funnel: opportunities, participated opportunities, eligible impressions, impressions, clicks and conversions.
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