In an effort to get ahead of its competitors in the travel ecosystem, online travel agency Expedia said it will soon launch an AI assistant to bolster features like search, itinerary building, trip planning and real-time updates like flight delays.
The company, which runs a variety of online travel aggregators and metasearch engines, is debuting a bot named Romie that’s been trained on a mix of in-house and OpenAI models. The bot can help users search for hotels, build itineraries for their trips and make small changes. The bot can be included in iMessage chat groups, or you can talk to it one-on-one on WhatsApp. For these apps, the bot sits behind a phone number and leverages ChatGPT.
You can chat with Romie by mentioning the bot on iMessage and ask it to summarize an itinerary it has built or suggest restaurants. The bot can take you directly to the Expedia app with links to an itinerary or suggestions.
Expedia is also introducing smart search on its site, which lets users describe…
