Skift Take

The industry is getting closer to the vision of the comprehensive digital travel agent, but it's still far away.

Justin Dawes

Despegar and Kayak both released travel planning and booking tools this week meant to integrate generative AI more comprehensively. 

Booking.com, Expedia, and several other big companies released simple chatbots powered by ChatGPT about a year ago. Those chatbots have generally existed as independent interfaces, doing little to really transform the travel planning and booking experiences as industry experts have touted.

While the business models for Despegar and Kayak are different, the new tools give us a better understanding of how the future could look. 

Despegar is an online travel agency primarily for the Latin American market. 

Kayak is a metasearch site owned by Booking Holdings, meaning it compiles options from various booking sites, allowing users to compare rates and navigate to a third-party site for bookings.