I'm Expedia's marketing chief. Here's how we're preparing for a future when people use AI to plan their vacations.

Business Insider

3 days ago

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Jochen Koedijk, Expedia Group's chief marketing officer. It's been edited for length and clarity.
The way consumers are using the internet to make their decisions is fundamentally changing.
I have two kids, 10 and seven years old, and I think it's very unlikely they will ever put a query into a search box, as I've grown up doing. The way people are using voice and having real conversations is going to be a long-term change in how people are using the internet.
What we're seeing today is that a lot of the inspirational travel searches are evolving rapidly with things like Copilot, ChatGPT, and even Instagram Reels.
There are a lot of moments where my wife sends me Reels, and she's like, "Where is this?" And I have no idea. So then, we were like, what if we can develop something where you send those Reels to Expedia, and then we will tell you: "It's this destination, or this hotel. Here are a couple of things to do. The best time to visit is between May and July, and here are a couple of booking options so you can get started."
Right now, it's still early access, which means it's only with Reels, but we're looking at other forms of content as well.
It's a very different journey versus going to Google.com and typing in "best hotels in Miami with pool, minus spa."
We're also focusing on the visibility of our brands in agentic search engines. It's really evolving.
We've launched with Operator for OpenAI, which I still see as a precursor to an agentic interface because you're looking at the cursor moving on your screen. Of course, true agentic, where it's going, will be more behind-the-scenes. But it's very important to be early so that we can experiment and iterate.
Another example is being a launch partner for Copilot Plus, which is the way Microsoft is evolving. There's so much development between each of these LLM providers and depending on which week of the month, there's a new model here, and things completely change.
There are a lot of AI experts popping up left, right, and center. It's important for us to make sure that we do a lot of our marketing in-house — the majority — and that we further evolve our in-house functions to be ready for the future.
Google is a very important partner of ours. A lot of our traffic is still from Google. The way they're using Gemini with AI Overviews is already impacting our existing traffic in a big way.
We look to understand which search queries are triggering AI overviews, and then we look at our traffic trends, and we triangulate. So we could, for example, see that certain keyword buckets trigger more overviews than last month, and that will have a certain impact on traffic and conversion. Traffic may go down, but conversions may go up because the traffic becomes more qualified.
I do believe the funnel — as we call it as marketers — will start to collapse more and more over time. We want to make it a lot more seamless so that there is not that kind of disconnect between the inspiration and the action.