Booking.com is positioning itself to capture bookings after travelers complete their research on AI chatbots. A company survey found that 64% of travelers in Asia-Pacific use AI to plan trips, yet Booking Holdings reports that traffic from large language models represents less than 1% of room nights booked.
Laura Houldsworth, Booking.com's vice president for Asia-Pacific, explained the disconnect. "They might be searching on Claude one minute, ChatGPT another, Gemini, then rounding out with Google, and then coming to us directly," she said. Travelers move between multiple AI tools during planning, so no single chatbot captures the full journey to payment.
Booking.com frames its strategy around staying relevant when travelers are ready to pay. The company sees this as its core challenge in the region, regardless of where trip planning begins.
The dynamic echoes a lesson from superapps in Asia, where high daily usage failed to convert into travel spending. Generative chatbots may face the same conversion hurdle, the company suggests.