The PhocusWire team has been immersed in second quarter earnings this week to bring you the highlights from Airbnb, Booking Holdings, Expedia Group and many more.
Unsurprisingly, Expedia Group’s Q2 earnings call had a significant focus on artificial intelligence (AI) developments, and it was our most popular read. CEO Ariane Gorin provided some color on projects that are delivering returns compared with those on a longer burn.
Booking Holdings president and CEO Glenn Fogel also gave an update on its AI strategy, including details around visibility on large language models and referrals.
By contrast, Airbnb’s earnings call was more about its hotels push, which CEO Brian Chesky said is going better than expected. Earlier in the week, Airbnb announced a partnership with boutique hotel operator Lark to bring 75 properties to the platform.
We also published several articles centred on corporate travel during the week, as many gathered in Chicago for the GBTA event. An opinion piece from Oversee discussed how to ensure agentic AI finds its way seamlessly into the corporate travel workflow. If not, the technology will not be adopted, according to co-founder and CTO Ami Goldenberg.
And we delved into the impact of AI on corporate self-booking tools. There has been some debate in recent months about whether the tools could become obsolete. Executives interviewed believe the corporate travel sector will be slower to adopt AI but that it could fundamentally change how travel is managed.
Traffic from LLMs accounts for less than 1% of Booking Holdings' room nights, CFO Ewout Steenbergen said during the company's second-quarter earnings call.
Oversee CTO and co-founder Ami Goldenberg argues that agentic AI in travel operations succeeds or fails on adoption—and what decides adoption is the interface agents touch every day.
Lou Zameryka, Airbnb’s global head of hotel enterprise and connectivity partnerships, said the STR giant is focused on adding “unique, localized-feeling, hospitality-driven hotel partners.” Read More
The Travel Experiences 2026 report, produced jointly by Phocuswright and Arival, sizes and forecasts the global experiences market through 2029 and examines how consumers engage with experiences in practice. Read More
0 تعليقات