Metasearch giant Kayak, a Bookings Holdings subsidiary, launched its conversational AI-powered query engine Kayak.ai on April 10. The site, which Kayak is calling its “test lab for AI first features,” is a first step toward deeper AI integrations. Just before the launch, aviation editor Robert Silk spoke with Kayak CEO Steve Hafner at the ATPCO Elevate conference about AI and other topics.
Steve Hafner
Q: You said you can envision a time when many third-party travel sites disappear as shoppers take advantage of evolving transaction capabilities within the large AI engines. How do you see Kayak and other travel metasearch companies fitting into that world?
A: If you go to an AI site, ChatGPT, etc., and ask them a trial query request, the AI could decide to go to 100 different suppliers individually and get answers, or it could go to Kayak, which already has those connections. We’re a single source for travel information. It’s a lot more efficient and commercially monetizable for the AI to go to us. And then, when there’s an actual booking or a change in travel plans, again, we have those connections with all those airlines and other travel partners and OTAs, so the AI can come to us.
Q: Does that mean you see Kayak’s model changing over time to primarily being background support for engines such as ChatGPT, Microsoft CoPilot or Google Gemini?
A: I think everybody wants to have user loyalty to their own sites and services. So we’ll continue to invest most of our resources in that. But do we want to facilitate AI? Absolutely. Right now, it’s a side hustle. But could it be bigger than Kayak.com? Perhaps. It’s way too early to tell.
Q: Are there other ways in which you see Kayak’s role in travel shopping changing?
A: Yes. People need to compare prices. And they won’t go single supplier or single OTA to do that. That piece of the value chain, we’ll always be involved in. But we’ve been bad at transactions. We had to hand you off somewhere to book. And we provide no customer service. We’ll fix both of those.
Q: Does that mean you are going to move to transacting ticket sales as OTAs do?
A: We won’t be the merchant of record. We won’t actually take payment. We’re not going to have thousands of agents. But with AI, we can sit on top of everybody else who is already doing that stuff. You can go to Kayak and say, “Yes, I want to book this on AA.com without leaving the Kayak site.” That’s what Operator [a new agentic AI tool] does, for example, on ChatGPT.
Q: As airlines place more products in the marketplace via digital NDC-supported offerings, how does it impact Kayak? You said onstage at ATPCO that for some market segments, too much choice is a problem.
A: It’s a careful balancing act. NDC is great because it expands what’s possible and what’s feasible. But until you actually have customers interacting, you don’t know exactly how to merchandise it. Just because you can make 200,000 products doesn’t mean you want a store with 200,000 products on the shelf. There’s a lot of nuances with what to show someone, how to show it and with what frequency. Every site needs to do their own research and use their own data to look at that.
Q: Southwest began displaying flights on Kayak in August. How is that going?
A: We’re selling a lot of their tickets. Not as many as they thought they would sell, but we’re selling a lot of their tickets. A lot of customers for some reason already thought we had Southwest even though we didn’t. We had their schedules and fares, but it wasn’t bookable. We didn’t see a big uplift in conversion even though we made their fares bookable. I think when they fix some of the aspects of their boarding system that lag behind other airlines that should come up.
