Travel industry employees, whether they work for Agoda or somewhere else, need to adapt to AI workflows. If they don't they'll be obsolete and looking for new jobs.
There's no doubt that an independent and privately held Kayak, freed from the broader considerations of Booking Holdings, could have benefited from focused investment and attention.
Expedia and Booking are trying to be both the storefront and the supply chain. AI is squeezing the middle, and “doing both” starts to look less like diversification and more like diluted power.
Booking's CFO thinks artificial intelligence can put his company on the offensive rather than the defensive. The odds are long but based on past performance you can't count them out.
Booking.com wants to engineer a future where payments unlock the full travel journey. As AI and agentic systems loom, it is making the case that the its future lies in easing friction, striving to be hyper-local, with fintech as a foundation.
Saving a basis point or two per transaction in Booking.com's payments business can turn into a windfall of millions of dollars. That's an edge that Booking.com is leveraging in payments, which are also central to its connected trip strategy.
Google has been downplaying free organic links for many years. In the past year, its AI Overviews and other ad formats have basically forced travel companies to spend more for traffic. Kayak isn't the only player feeling the squeeze.