Booking.com is a globally recognized online travel agency (OTA) that arranges and sells a variety of travel-related products online. Founded in the Netherlands in 1996, the company grew as the use of the Internet progressed in the 2000s, and now handles airline tickets, car rentals, local tours, etc., with its core business of online hotel reservations. Booking.com is now a familiar name to independent travelers who use the Internet to make travel arrangements. James Waters, CBO (Chief Business Officer) of Booking.com, is in charge of IT technology development. I had the opportunity to speak with Mr. Waters during his visit to Japan, and asked him about the company’s IT strategy.
The introduction of generative AI, which has begun in English-speaking countries, makes it possible to create itineraries and reservations as if you were talking to a human being — Please tell us about Booking.com’s expansion in Japan. Mr. Waters: Needless to say, inbound travelers are important for our business in Japan, but outbound travelers are also important. I believe that the global nature of our business helps people to recognize Japan as a destination in that we can break down the language barrier. For example, it may be easy to find information on tourist destinations such as Rome or Paris in Europe, New York in the US, or Tokyo, Kyoto, or Osaka in Japan. However, it is not easy to find information on other tourist destinations. We are responsible for introducing such destinations globally, and we “discover” that there are other great destinations in Japan besides Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka by looking at the content introduced by Booking.com. And vice versa, we believe that we are also providing Japanese users with an easy way to discover new tourist destinations globally. Even destinations that are unfamiliar to Japanese users, such as Slovakia and Argentina, can be booked in Japanese and receive support in Japanese if they use our service. Whether the purpose is business or pleasure, the value is in being able to book hotels and flights in your own language at ……. My job is to provide IT services that offer new value to these customers, and I am working on updating them every day. –Do you think Japanese tourists are different from global customers in any way? Mr. Waters: That is a very difficult question to answer. It is a very difficult question to answer, because every visitor has different needs, not only in Japan, but everywhere in the world, and it is difficult to say what is or is not different. However, outside of English-speaking countries, language barriers are not small. For this reason, we believe it is important to prepare content written in the local language, just as we do in Japan with Japanese content. To put a finer point on it, each country has different tourist trends. For example, when Japanese visitors go to Europe, they often make reservations for four or five countries at once. On the other hand, visitors coming to Japan from Europe tend to make reservations for familiar tourist destinations such as Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka first, and their needs are concentrated there. There are differences in language and culture, but we believe it is important for OTAs that do business globally to absorb these differences by using IT. –In the IT industry, the use of generative AI is progressing, and Booking.com has added to its “AI Trip Planner” (author’s note: currently available in the English version) a simpler search, priority-specified questions, and a review summary function that uses generative AI. The company has also announced the addition of a review summary function that will use AI-generated reviews. How will generative AI change the OTA business in the future? Mr. Waters: We recently introduced AI Trip Planner and our customers are using it. It will be able to do three major new things. The first is more sophisticated destination discovery. We have introduced a foundation model called LLM (Large Language Model) to introduce generative AI, just as other large tech companies are doing, and we have created an orchestration layer that allows us to leverage it from our various services and build a system that combines it with our We have built a system that combines and utilizes this model with our data. This allows users to ask the AI to find a solution to a destination that they would not be able to find in a search. For example, if you are traveling in October, and there is a restaurant that serves good food at that time of year, and there is a museum that interests you, and you have decided on a destination that combines multiple things, you can ask the AI using LLM, and it will provide you with the answer. The second is the automatic creation of plans and reservations. At the same time, it will be easier for our partner hotels and service providers to find us. If I ask a generative AI, “I’m going to Tokyo for a week, what are the five things I can do while I’m there? The AI will then create a travel plan for you, and at the same time, you can use our service to list hotels, arrange car rentals, make dinner plans, and make reservations. The third is AI-based customer service. I spoke earlier about the language barrier, and we are now using AI to utilize a translation function that utilizes generated AI between partners, travelers, customer service, and agents. We are also providing customer support to users using the chatbot function, and we are offering that service as a hybrid of AI and human. At this point, the use of generative AI is still in its early stages, and we believe that it can be developed into a more sophisticated communication tool in the future.
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