AI Powered Trip Planning

As the Executive Experience Leader, our team was determined to solve the traveler's big problem of trip inspiration and planning. Our mission was to make it easy for travelers to find, organize, and book their dream trips, simplifying the whole process.

Opportunity

Can we help them with:

Finding Relevant Ideas Quickly. On average, travelers spend 23 hours visiting 140 sources of information over 6 weeks to find what they need

Searching in a Flexible Manner. OTA search typically requires a destination despite 37% of Expedia users coming to us without having one in mind

Having to Go Back and Forth. Organizing and bringing your consideration set into the next phase of planning (shopping) is frustrating.

Approach

Find and Search The Way You Want

Using several quick cycles of ideation and research, we created a series of and evolution of hypothesis and concepts. This process involved every discipline with scientists, conversation designers, product strategy leaders and more. Plus, in a few quick workshops we were able to leverage the knowledge bases from may parts of the organization. The outcome was a high velocity push to beat the market with a personalized experience that delivered on all three customer needs

Using the power of prompts we made it easy for travelers to type or select a prompt that would immediately return relevant ideas
The open nature of an LLM allowed maximum flexibility even allowing for previously required information such as destination
Each conversation automatically stored "trip items" in a conveniently accessible trip. So travelers could make shopping considerations or return to the conversation easily.

Results

A Fully Integrated LLM That Leveraged Our API

Our Beta successfully integrated OpenAI’s ChatGPT large language model quickly onto our Conversation Platform and into our iOS BEX app. Seen here is an early promotional prototype that is fully functioning. It is leveraging OpenAi's LLM while using its entity recognition to travers Expedia's core travel services.

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An Incredible Number of Publications Picked Up On The Excitement

In addition to the platform and application capabilities to the traveler experience on iOS, the value drove an incredible number of PR wins!

We're number 1 – The brand's biggest launch so far for 2023
1k+ – Over 1,000 articles published about this product launch
Big Breadth – The impact spanned from popular morning news hours all the way to Fast Company
100% Positivity – One hundred percent of public sentiment regarding the experience was positive or neutral

Conclusion

While we successfully captured the buzz and made international news, we have yet to achieve product-market fit (PMFT). We believe that we've just scratched the surface of what's possible, and we're confident that we'll achieve PMFT by leveraging ongoing traveler research, utterance audits, and monitoring of our Engage Save Return funnel metrics. What's in store: Define future system and interaction model in support of traveler needs and PMFT Partner with Trips E2E and other teams around opportunities where the capabilities we're building can enhance and accelerate those teams' ability to delight and serve travelers