The era of radical innovation in travel booking has arrived

Since the launch of ChatGPT in late November, Skift has been excited about what this new generation of generative AI can bring to various segments of travel.

Last week, as Bing relaunched by integrating OpenAI’s latest engine, I was wondering what these new technological innovations might mean for online travel bookings. What I’ve been calling the “tyranny of the travel search box,” which has remained unchanged for three decades, is now being completely rethought, in a world where natural language conversation—in this case, chatbots—is likely to be the world’s new interface for searching for information on the Internet, as opposed to the construction of a search box. It is high.

In this short 10-minute video I posted on LinkedIn earlier this week, I pulled together various threads we’ve written on Skift since 2015 — about messaging and voice search changing travel bookings, to Airbnb’s subtle attempt to transform the booking experience with its relaunch last year. – and how these relate to our current era of revolutionary technology with AI and what it means for travel booking interfaces and consumer booking behaviour.

Scroll down this LinkedIn post and watch the video.