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.

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.

Less than one month after launching its pop-culture aligned exclusive Icons experiences in partnership with companies such as Disney, Pixar and Marvel, Airbnb has alerted about 5,000 tour and experience operators around the world that their experiences are being pulled from the platform.

“We’ve made the difficult decision to remove your Experience from Airbnb,” Airbnb wrote in an email sent to the affected operators on Friday. 

In a statement sent to Phocuswire, Airbnb said, “We regularly evaluate Experiences based on the host’s expertise, the activity’s uniqueness and local relevance, and guests’ ratings and reviews and remove those that continue to provide low quality experiences.”

In the email to operators, Airbnb said it removed experiences that do not “meet our standards.”

A day after OpenAI announced its newest artificial intelligence model, Google unveiled big changes to its search engine among numerous other AI-driven product updates that include new trip-planning capabilities that travel insiders are already saying could represent an improvement in the sector.

Gemini Advanced, Google’s premium AI chatbot service, already had the attention of travel thought leaders. Tuesday’s product updates at the company’s annual developer conference, Google I/O, showed how Gemini Advanced can use spatial data and reasoning to prioritize and make decisions while building a personal itinerary.

“I'll show you how Gemini is taking a step closer to being a true AI assistant by planning and taking actions for you,” said Sissie Hsiao, a Google vice president and general manager of Gemini. “Now we all know that chatbots can give you ideas, but there's a lot more that goes into planning a great trip. It requires reasoning that considers space-time logistics and the intelligence to prioritize and make decisions.”

Le géant de la tech a effectué la nuit dernière une démonstration de puissance en présentant de nombreuses innovations autour de l’IA lors de sa conférence I/O, notamment dans la recherche et les assistants personnels

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.

Die Gesetze und Regeln in Europa sind den Realitäten der digitalen Welt nicht mehr gewachsen - das war der Eindruck, unter dem die EU-Kommission im Dezember 2020 ein großes Digital-Paket vorgeschlagen hatte. Dazu gehört das Gesetz über digitale Märkte (Digital Markets Act, DMA). Dieses soll die Marktmacht von Digital-Riesen wie Google, Facebook und Amazon beschränken. Dazu gehört, dass sie eigene Produkte und Angebote nicht mehr bevorzugt gegenüber denen der Konkurrenz behandeln dürfen. 

Google begann Mitte Januar mit der Umsetzung der DMA-Anforderungen und schloss diese Anfang März ab. Wie nun Phocus Wire berichtete, zeigten sich nur wenige Tage später bereits die Auswirkungen auf Kampagnen in Google Hotel Ads. Auch drei Monate späte würden die Ergebnisse für Hotels noch immer schlechter, so die Analyse. So zeigten die Anzeigen in den vom DMA betroffenen Regionen einen Rückgang des Klickvolumens um 30 Prozent im Vergleich zu nicht betroffenen Regionen. Das Volumen der Direktbuchungen sank um bis zu 36 Prozent, wodurch die Abhängigkeit der Hotels von Vermittlern zunimmt.

The tech giant is expanding the travel planning capabilities of AI Overviews, the AI feature it introduced to traditional Google search this year. Initially available only to U.S. users who opt in, AI Overviews is rolling out to all U.S. users this week and will soon expand to other countries.

Key takeaways

During its Google I/O developer conference, the company demonstrated how the chatbot is progressing toward its goal of becoming a "true AI assistant;”
One example scenario began with a request: "My family and I are going to Miami for Labor Day. My son is passionate about art and my husband is craving fresh seafood. Can you pull my flight and hotel details from Gmail and help me plan our weekend?" In the background, AI generates potential travel options from various information channels, creating a personalized vacation agenda;
In addition, Google is enhancing Search to provide more comprehensive recommendations during the initial brainstorming phase, especially when requests are less specific. The AI-powered response includes categorized sets of suggestions.

Following several months of adaptation, on January 19 Google began to roll out changes it made in order to comply with the European Union’s DMA (Digital Markets Act) requirements; a rollout that finished on March 7.

Just days after the first changes were implemented, we began to see how they influenced hotel campaigns in Google Hotel Ads. Three months on, results for hotels are still getting worse:

Just over three months following implementation, click-through data has shown a 30% decrease in traffic volume in EU markets affected by DMA implementation compared with those markets where DMA has not been implemented. 

The graph below shows the Google Hotel Ads click differential between regions affected by the DMA vs. those not affected, revealing a click volume drop of 30%. This is based on our comparison of traffic volume of 3,450 hotels from January 1 through April 22.