Booking.com Bets Travelers Will Research With AI but Book With It

Photo Credit: Laura Houldsworth, Booking.com's managing director, Asia Pacific, at Skift Asia Forum in Thailand April 29, 2026. Skift Booking.com is okay with travelers starting their trip planning with AI. It just wants to be the platform to close things. Travelers are increasingly researching trips with AI, but that doesn’t mean the booking follows. Booking.com frames its challenge in Asia-Pacific as staying relevant at the moment people are ready to pay, wherever they may begin. A Booking.com survey conducted earlier this year found that 64% of travelers in the region use AI to plan trips. Yet Booking Holdings, its parent company, has said recently that traffic referred directly by large language models is rare, representing well under 1% of room nights. Laura Houldsworth, Booking.com’s managing director and vice president for Asia-Pacific, told Skift the gap exists because travelers don’t stay in one chatbot. “They might be searching on Claude one minute, ChatGPT another, Gemini, then rounding out with Google, and then coming to us directly,” she said. In this common sc