Booking.com Chief Technology Officer Rob Francis’s early efforts for generative artificial intelligence were often focused on travelers. Now, he wants to get the online travel company’s workforce more engaged with the fast-evolving technology.
“When gen AI first popped, we spent more time up front on customer-facing experiences,” says Francis. “This year, we’ve been focused much more on the internal side of things as well.”
Francis has started to authorize the generative AI capabilities from vendors including video conferencing platform Zoom, AI-powered search software from Glean, and Google’s Gemini chatbot, highlighting his priority to lean on vendors that have the biggest reach across Booking.com’s employee base. The online travel company’s technology culture is often “build first,” especially when it comes to external product offerings, but Francis says he’s not afraid to make use of the latest software-as-a-service generative AI tools.
Booking.com looks at efficiency to measure the success of the generative AI tools deployed within the organization, whether it's technology to help customer support representatives or engineers and developers.
Externally, success is going to look very different. Francis said he was wary of the generative AI ‘FOMO’ that emerged in late 2022 and early 2023 and avoided rushing to connect ChatGPT plugins to third-party applications. “We didn’t think that was a particularly great experience,” says Francis. “And so we took a little bit more time to think of what a richer experience might be for our customers.”
In 2023, Booking.com launched its new AI Trip Planner tool, which leveraged large language models—including OpenAI’s ChatGPT API—to answer travel questions. After an initial launch in the U.S., the tool has launched in additional international markets across Europe, Asia, and Australia. Booking.com's research shows that 48% of travelers would trust AI to plan a trip for them and with that in mind, it launched additional generative AI tools last year like Smart Filter, which allows guests to type into the tool: “Hotel in Paris, with a rooftop bar and an indoor pool,” and the LLM would scan Booking.com’s inventory to find properties that match that criteria.
Francis says Booking.com is monitoring how many rooms are booked using these generative AI tools, but there's not a firm target that must be hit for the AI tools to be deemed a success. Experimentation is important too. “We’re still learning the best way to have the right outcome for an experience,” he adds.
Booking.com built the company's own orchestration layer that allows product and engineering teams to switch easily between OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and open source models. Francis says there’s so much innovation in the market, he wants the team to have the ability to choose from a variety of LLMs for the best desired output.
Prior to joining Booking.com in 2019, Francis served as CIO at audio equipment manufacturer Sonos, worked as a director for nearly six years at Amazon, and served as a VP at financial institutions JPMorgan Chase and Lehman Brothers. But he says he was lured to the opportunity at Booking.com because his family loves to travel: Francis’s children have been to 45 different countries before they turned 15.
Initially, Francis joined as CIO but rose to the CTO title two years later after his predecessor left the company. Francis says his more recent role aligns with his past engineering expertise.
Another reason he joined Booking.com was to steer a technology modernization journey, away from a tech stack that was built on the bread-and-butter hotel accommodations business to instead reflect the company’s vision of a “connected trip.”
Booking.com has sought new revenue streams by helping travelers book airline flights, automobile rentals, and reserve museum visits and other tourist attractions. But rather than build those systems atop of the legacy hotel bookings system that’s very specific to that industry, Francis needed to re-architect the tech stack and create more generalized ordering software.
This north star goal is to make travel bookings across the entire value chain—from flight to hotel to experience—as seamless as possible. “The more that we can be connected to the right place to stay, the right flight, the right date, with the right partner; that’s what we do well,” says Francis. “And we think we can do that even better the more we understand our travelers and partners.”
John Kell
Send thoughts or suggestions to CIO Intelligence here.
