Booking Holdings Chief Financial Officer Ewout Steenbergen said Tuesday the traffic that his company receives from the large language models “is very small” and “it’s not growing.”
“I think that’s, for me, a bit of the surprise over the last few months,” Steenbergen said at a Morgan Stanley tech conference in San Francisco. “It’s more or less stable. Some months slightly higher, other months slightly lower. But there’s not really an underlying trend.”
While many investors think the OTAs are about to see travelers abandoning them in droves, Steenbergen said, “I don’t think disintermediation is really a risk at all.”
On the other hand, the Booking CFO said a potentially “more realistic risk” is that Booking would lose some of its direct traffic. In its consumer businesses in 2025, direct traffic to Booking’s platforms was in the mid-60% range.
Steenbergen said travelers are using answer engines — such as ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini — to do research, and build itineraries, but then they go to websites or apps they trust such as Booking to make the booking.
Steenbergen said Booking has two internal startups working on agentic tools that would cover all phases of a trip, including before and after. The goal is that Booking’s agentic tools would be as good as the agentic features on the big horizontal AI platforms. And that’s one way Booking will compete to retain or even increase its direct traffic, he said.
Among Booking Holdings brands, Priceline’s Penny is already a “very advanced” AI travel tool, and Booking.com and Agoda are working on AI tools, as well, Steenbergen said.
People who think the LLMs can connect directly to supply and cut out the OTAs are committing a “gross underestimation of the complexity that goes in between in terms of fulfillment, in terms of customer service, in terms of payments, in terms of dealing with tax matters,” he said.
Steenbergen said there are also regulatory and data privacy issues to consider where the LLMs could fall short, and they’d also have to help supply partners fine-tune the visibility of their listings, and to market them, too.
Steenbergen said he queried one of the major LLMs about cancelling a flight and getting a refund for a flight planned to Dubai. He said he got an unsatisfactory response, and then asked another question.
“Hey, but aren’t you the agent that helped me?” he asked one of the LLMs. “And I got the following answer: It said, ‘Yeah, that’s a very fair question. Short answer, no, I’m not an airline agent. I can’t directly cancel or refund flights to you. I don’t have the ability to.’ And then it gave me a few elements, and then it said at the end, think of me as your travel strategy advisor, not the one pushing the button.”
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Booking CFO: The AI Threat Isn’t ‘Really a Risk at All’
