The Era of Radical Innovation in Travel Booking Has Arrived

Ever since the launch of ChatGPT in late November, Skift has been on top of what this new generation of generative AI could bring to various parts of travel.

Over the last week, as Bing has relaunched integrating OpenAI’s latest engine, I have been thinking through what these new tech innovations could mean for travel booking online. What for years I have been calling “the tyranny of the travel booking search box” that has essentially remained the same for three decades, is now in for complete rethink, in a world of where natural language conversation — in this case a chatbot — is very likely to become the new interface for the world searching for information on the internet, as opposed to the search box construct.

In this short 10-minute video I posted on LinkedIn earlier this week, I piece together the various threads we have written at Skift since 2015 — about messaging and voice search potentially changing travel booking, about Airbnb’s subtle attempt to change booking search behavior through its relaunch last year — and how these tie to the revolutionary tech moment we are in now with AI, and what that means for travel booking interfaces and consumer booking behavior.

Scroll down in this Linkedin post and watch the video.