Expedia Debuts a ChatGPT-Powered Assistant ... but It's Totally Disappointing
Some brands are riding the hype instead of adding value, Bing Chat is better
Expedia announced a new ChatGPT-powered travel assistant last week to help customers plan and book trips. The company positioned the chatbot as a “collaboration with OpenAI” and said the beta program is rolling out globally in English for its iOS app. According to the announcement:
Expedia members can now start an open-ended conversation in the Expedia app and get recommendations on places to go, where to stay, how to get around, and what to see and do based on the chat. But much more than that, the new trip planning experience brings in intelligent shopping by automatically saving hotels discussed in the conversation to a “trip” in the app, helping members stay organized and making it easier for them to start choosing dates, checking availability, and adding on flights, cars or activities.
You may notice in the video above that no trip is booked. The chatbot merely answers questions about the travel destination and responds with hotel information. It also says you can save a trip, but I could not get that functionality to work. This will certainly get better over time. However, the initial implementation falls considerably short of expectations and of Bing Chat’s abilities.
Get Ready to be Disappointed
I am heading out to the Project Voice conference in a couple of weeks and I thought I’d try Expedia’s new chatbot for booking my trip. I quickly learned that Expedia’s ChatGPT-powered solution can only offer reviews and activity ideas. My first request for flight information came back with the response:
I can’t help with that yet. But you should be able to find that information on the Expedia website.
After asking that same question in a couple of different ways, I received very similar responses, each time suggesting I go to the Expedia website even though I was using the iOS app. The example in the video focused on hotels. I already know where I’m staying, but I thought I’d see if I could make more progress with lodging.
This time it offered to help me book a hotel and asked for the type of details required for a real booking. I provided that information and was once again directed to the Expedia website. It did offer hotel reviews when I inquired, but again could not book those hotels for me.
Bing Chat Can Actually Do This
As you know, Bing Chat is powered by GPT-4. I decided to see how it performed on flight booking. Bing Chat answered me with flight details from the departing airport and refined them when I provided the correct departure date. It did repeat a single departure several times in the chat response, but the data was correct in the “touchable” graphic that enabled me to click through to book the flight.
Moreover, Bing Chat offered to book the flight for me. After I said “yes,” it asked for traveler and payment information to execute the transaction. Bing is a search engine. Yes, the pre-GPT-4 Bing has travel booking integrations, but its priority for Bing Chat is conversational search. And yet the GPT-4-powered Bing Chat also enables the secondary feature of travel booking while Expedia did not.
One more thing of note. I executed all of these steps on Bing Chat with voice, and I had the option of touch. It is the UI that Expedia should implement.
Failing to Deliver on the Core Product
Expedia may want to become better known for travel planning and reviews, but its core product is searching for and booking flights and hotels. Why did it introduce a ChatGPT-powered travel assistant without those features or even offer some mention that they will come in the future? Did they think no one would notice?
The announcement includes the statement, “With today’s news, conversational trip planning powered by ChatGPT is directly in the Expedia app, allowing members to now get the benefit of dreaming about travel in the app experience.” This may be true, but the company doesn’t tell you travelers can only “dream about travel” and not actually book a trip.
What Expedia actually needs to do is integrate the chatbot with its travel booking systems. Of course, that is a more complex undertaking than deploying a chatbot that can harvest internet data or pull from an internal database about hotel reviews. The marketing department could have said booking features were coming in a future release, but instead, used language that obscures the fact that it doesn’t actually help travelers with the task they expect of Expedia.
I hope other brands will do better. Maybe the marketing department will be rewarded for getting a lot of headlines for the announcement when no journalists could actually validate the functionality. Then again, I will now be suspicious of the veracity of future AI-related Expedia announcements.
Generative AI could do wonders for travel planning AND booking. This is a complex task that would benefit from automating some steps. If this is your goal today, I’d head over to Bing Chat and skip Expedia.
