Booking.com’s AI Trip Planner Got an Update. Here’s How It Works

Booking.com has made an update to the AI trip planner on its mobile app.

The company released the first version of its AI trip planner in June 2023. It could only answer general travel questions at that time and search for hotel bookings, not answer questions much more complicated than that.

The company said on Wednesday that mobile app users can now ask the AI trip planner questions about specific properties, and there’s also an AI tool for quickly filtering results. 

To answer property-specific questions, the AI scans the property listing, traveler reviews, and photos. Users can ask property-specific questions now through the general AI chatbot after asking it to perform a general search for hotels. Another version is coming to individual property pages soon, the company said. 

The AI filter tool is located in the property filter section of the results page in the app. There’s now a box at the top of that page where the user can simply type preferred amenities — like gym, parking, or rooms with a view — and then the AI checks the most relevant filters automatically, meant to remove the need for manual filtering.

Next, Booking.com is getting AI-generated review summaries, meant to provide key insights about a property without the user needing to browse through the list of reviews. 

In the future, the company plans for AI to play a role in managing trips, such as helping travelers navigate solutions to flight disruptions, according to a statement from Joe Futty, vice president of product marketplace at Booking.com.

The AI trip planner is available to users in the U.S., UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore. It’s coming in local languages to users in Spain, Italy, Germany, France, Poland, and the Netherlands in the coming months. A desktop version of the tool will also follow, the company said.

How it Works

Booking.com has been moving more slowly than its competitors. Expedia in May said it would be adding multiple AI tools, and property review summaries have been available for a while. Among others, HomeToGo has been working on its AI trip planner for some time.

All of them have proven to be clunky, however, often making it easier to search for bookings the traditional way at this point. 

Despite Booking.com’s updates coming later than competitors’, its tool is still about as clunky as the rest. 

To test the tool, we started with the prompt that Booking.com suggested: “Hotels in Amsterdam with a great gym, a rooftop bar, and canal views from the room.”

It started by asking the dates for the trip, and then it provides several options. No major issues yet.

The property-specific feature also seems to work well at first. But, it won’t answer questions about multiple properties, only one at a time.

And, asking property-specific questions shows that the AI-powered general search results don’t work like magic. One option that the AI provided in response to the original prompt (which included mention of canal views) was for the Urban Lodge Hotel. But, when asking a property-specific question later about whether that hotel has canal views, the AI couldn’t determine if it does: “The Urban Lodge Hotel does not specifically mention having canal views from the rooms.” So, the results for the original search didn’t align very will with the original prompt — showing that the AI-powered general search needs some work — but then the property-specific response worked well.

It broke down more when trying to re-perform a search by adding to the original prompt: “Find me a hotel with similar parameters that also allows pets.” The first hotel suggestion was Via Amsterdam. The AI then said that hotel did not allow pets or have a rooftop bar.

The AI filter tool is pretty simple and seems to work as intended. But it’s limited in what it can do because the number of filters is limited. That speaks to an overall industry problem, which is that guests usually are unable to filter for certain attributes because that property data simply doesn’t exist online yet. For our test, the text entered into the AI filter box was: “Gym, a rooftop bar, and canal views from the room.” The AI then selected the filters for “Fitness center” and “View,” but there isn’t a filter for “Rooftop bar,” so the user would need to search for that manually. And, the user would need to ensure that the view is the correct one.

This article has been updated to clarify that the AI chatbot had already been able to perform general searches. And a Skift test of the Booking.com app’s new AI filter tool was added.