Expedia moves to keep trust as AI reshapes booking

Expedia prepares – Expedia Group is preparing for a future where travelers may use AI assistants to plan trips without visiting travel websites for booking. Company leaders argue the real battleground won’t be the interface, but the systems behind it—payments, refunds, inventory

For Expedia, the next disruption may not look like a new website at all.

The company has lived through nearly every major shift in how people book travel—surviving the rise of Google. the collapse of desktop computing. the mobile revolution. platform monopolies. and a pandemic that temporarily froze global travel. For decades. Expedia controlled much of the journey inside its own ecosystem. from discovery and booking to loyalty. customer support. and payments.

Now, AI is threatening to pull those pieces apart. Expedia executives worry that instead of booking through a travel site. travelers could move through chatbots. recommendation engines. and autonomous assistants—planning inside one interface. transacting inside another. and asking for help wherever the conversation happens to be.

Expedia’s origin story adds weight to the moment. Founded inside Microsoft in 1996 by Rich Barton. Expedia was built on an idea that ordinary people should be able to plan and book travel themselves. without relying on agents or opaque reservation systems. Barton says he learned early that people want control. “Expedia didn’t have business hours because the web never closes,” he told Fast Company. “The biggest hurdle back then was getting people to trust their credit cards on the internet.”.

He sees a parallel in the AI era. The new challenge, he argues, is less technical than psychological. “We’ve been here before,” he says. “Every single time, we worked through the fear and incorporated it into our lives, mostly for the better.”

The transition Expedia already weathered came under former CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, now CEO of Uber. When smartphones changed how people booked trips, Expedia responded by consolidating scale and acquiring Orbitz, Travelocity, and HomeAway. But the next shift looks different. Expedia executives say travelers increasingly start planning somewhere other than a travel site—asking chatbots for hotel recommendations. using natural-language prompts to build itineraries. and using AI tools to compare destinations. prices. and routes.

That’s where Expedia’s leadership draws a key distinction: generating inspiration isn’t the same as handling transactions.

“The future belongs to platforms that deliver trust, fulfillment, and accountability,” Expedia CEO Ariane Gorin said. “Two-thirds of our bookings come from people who come directly to us. ChatGPT, Gemini, Google, wherever it may be, we’re going to make sure our brands show up well there.”

Expedia describes its current effort as a “third chapter. ” aimed at adapting to AI systems without losing the operational machinery it spent decades building. “We are revisiting everything on our platform to ensure all capabilities are AI-readable,” Gorin said. “Our advantage is 30 years of deep expertise and knowledge in the travel industry.”.

The pressure building under those words is practical, not theoretical.

Expedia’s own “AI Trust Gap” report captures the central contradiction facing the industry: travelers may feel comfortable using conversational AI to brainstorm trips. monitor prices. and surface destinations they would not have otherwise considered. but fewer are willing to hand over the moment that matters—money and accountability.

Nearly 68% of travelers say they would rather book through established travel companies than AI chatbots. Two-thirds say they would not trust an AI assistant to purchase or book something on their behalf, and just 8% say they feel comfortable booking directly through an AI platform.

Barton puts it bluntly: “Consumers don’t want to hand over control for stuff they care about—they want to feel more in control.”

He describes the AI assistant he believes travelers want as less of a remote decision-maker and more of a guide that does the research first. Barton calls it “a brilliantly prepared friend in your corner,” someone who narrows options without making the final decision.

“You’re still deciding,” Barton said. “but you just have a much better foundation to decide from. That’s meaningfully different than ‘the algorithm picked this for you.’”

Travel makes that difference especially sharp because trust tends to show up when something goes wrong—when flights get canceled. hotels are overbooked. and refunds stall. In Expedia’s survey, a third of travelers worried about customer service failures tied to AI booking systems. Others cited concerns over privacy, payment security, and loss of control.

Gorin ties the stakes to the lived reality of travel disruption. “Trips are not like T-shirts,” she said. “If something goes wrong, you’re not going to get that time back.”

Behind Expedia’s consumer-facing brands—Expedia. Hotels.com. and Vrbo—lies the part of the business that Gorin believes will matter most in an AI economy. Airlines. hotels. banks. loyalty programs. and other partners rely on Expedia’s infrastructure for inventory. booking systems. rewards integrations. and distribution. The company has also accumulated decades of traveler data, roughly 70 petabytes.

“Our consumer brands may be less than 10% of the global travel market, but our B2B business can power all the rest,” Gorin said. “We get to participate in the entire ecosystem because we have both B2C and B2B. We don’t see what other people are doing as a threat.”

That operational depth is now being tested in real partnerships that reflect a broader industry shift: travel may behave less like a destination website and more like embedded infrastructure.

Last month. Uber announced a partnership with Expedia allowing users to book hotels directly inside the Uber app while integrating Uber rides into Expedia’s travel ecosystem. Khosrowshahi said in a statement to Fast Company: “What excites the company about this partnership is a shared belief that travel should feel more connected.”.

Expedia appears increasingly comfortable with that direction. Gorin repeatedly frames the company as infrastructure underneath a fragmented travel ecosystem. “We get to power the ecosystem and be the plumbing,” she said.

At the moment, AI-driven traffic is still a small slice of Expedia’s business—less than 1.5%, according to Gorin—but the company expects it to rise quickly as conversational interfaces reshape how people search and plan trips.

Even as Expedia leans into infrastructure, it is still trying to keep a consumer-facing travel identity. The company recently launched the Expedia Trails Fund. a $4.3 million conservation initiative supporting parks. trails. and coastlines through partnerships with groups including The Nature Conservancy and Trust for Public Land.

The fundamental question is whether ownership of the customer interface will matter less than ownership of the systems underneath it. AI startups can generate itineraries quickly. but the hard parts—refunds. payments. inventory management. loyalty programs. multilingual servicing. and customer support at global scale—are far less easy to replicate.

That challenges one of Silicon Valley’s favorite assumptions: that technological revolutions naturally favor startups over incumbents.

“The companies that will be successful are companies who have a clear purpose and understand what travelers want, how to deliver it,” Gorin said.

Whether that proves true remains open. AI could weaken the role of travel brands altogether. leaving booking platforms as interchangeable back-end utilities beneath more powerful consumer interfaces. Or it could strengthen the companies already built for the messy, operational work required to move people around the world.

Either way, Expedia’s message is clear in the way it is positioning the business: the battle may no longer be over who owns the homepage. It may be over who owns the fulfillment layer underneath it.

Gorin argues that travel has always relied on operational trust—integrations airlines still need. distribution hotels still require. and refunds. loyalty programs. customer service. and accountability when trips fail. She says the companies that win will understand travelers and align the whole organization around delivering for them.

Since becoming CEO, she has reorganized Expedia around “Serve the Traveler,” while also pushing teams to use Expedia’s own products through an internal Dogfood program designed to expose operational weaknesses faster.

Technology may solve travel complexity, Gorin said, but only if it stays connected to the traveler experience. “If you can look at the product and say, ‘This is valuable to travelers,’ then you’ll be fine,” she added.

Her three strategic priorities reflect that approach: “Create more traveler value, invest where there’s growth, and drive margin expansion while making every dollar count.”

Expedia Ariane Gorin Rich Barton AI booking AI Trust Gap Uber partnership Orbitz Travelocity HomeAway Vrbo travel industry travel payments refunds customer service travel data Expedia Trails Fund consumer brands B2B infrastructure