5 minBusiness
Booking Holdings Spends $9 Billion a Year on Reach as AI Reshapes Trip Planning
Booking Holdings CFO Ewout Steenbergen says AI is changing how travelers discover and book trips, and the company is measuring returns through unit economics rather than isolated pilots.
Booking Holdings spends roughly $8 billion to $9 billion annually on paid customer-acquisition channels, including search, social, and metasearch platforms, as the online travel giant positions itself for a future in which artificial intelligence plays a larger role in how travelers plan and book trips.
Ewout Steenbergen, executive vice president and chief financial officer of Booking Holdings, described that shift during an interview at the Fortune AIQ Summit on Oct. 1. He said AI could make travel planning more seamless, personalized, and proactive — suggesting an indoor visit to the Louvre when rain threatens a Paris itinerary, automatically moving a restaurant reservation after a delayed flight, or recommending an activity based on a traveler's preferences and open time.
The goal is not simply a better chatbot. Booking is pursuing what it calls a «connected trip»: an integrated experience that ties together flights, hotels, restaurants, rental cars, and activities. If successful, that approach could create more loyalty, trust, and frequency of engagement with the company's brands, which include, Priceline, Agoda, KAYAK, OpenTable, and.
For finance leaders, Steenbergen offered a practical framework for judging AI investments: move past isolated pilots, but keep a close eye on unit economics. About one-third of Booking's consumer traffic comes through paid channels, while the other two-thirds arrives directly on its platforms. As consumers turn to more AI tools and agents for discovery, he sees greater channel diversification as potentially positive for Booking's unit economics.
Early signals are encouraging. Customers using Booking's AI tools are booking somewhat faster, converting at somewhat higher rates, and canceling less often, Steenbergen said, while cautioning that the data remains early stage.
Asked how he measures the financial return on AI investment, Steenbergen said there is no perfect answer. He noted that even the hyperscalers spending hundreds of billions of dollars on large language models do not really know what the return on investment will be. «They have maybe some assumptions and some hypotheses, but the whole point is, you don't want to fall behind,» he said.
He argued that the biggest returns come not from layering AI onto existing processes, but from rebuilding processes end to end. In customer service, Booking has seen booking units grow at a high single-digit rate while total customer-service costs declined slightly. Customer satisfaction increased at the same time, driving down average servicing cost per booking.
In engineering, the company's roughly 9,000 technologists have used AI tools to increase the number of merge requests put into production by about 30%, Steenbergen said. Crucially, that figure reflects code that has been tested and cleared quality controls, not merely generated.
The CFO's job, then, is to measure both sides of the ledger. Steenbergen said Booking monitors token and licensing costs and uses «effective model-cost routing,» reserving lower-cost or open-source models for simpler tasks and more expensive models for complex ones. One engineering metric combines human and AI costs: total IT cost per merge request. That, he suggested, is the more mature AI-finance question — not whether a model costs more in isolation, but whether it lowers the all-in cost of producing a valuable outcome.
Steenbergen is applying the technology personally as well. He has an «AI coach» and uses two AI agents: a «strategic thought partner» for board materials and strategic analysis, and a «critical equity research agent» to pressure-test earnings-call preparation.
Booking Holdings ranks No. 169 on the Fortune 500. Its portfolio of travel brands gives it a broad view of how consumers search for and purchase travel, and the company's spending on paid acquisition underscores how competitive the market for traveler attention has become. As AI tools and agents become more common in discovery, Booking is betting that a connected, integrated experience will help it convert that attention into repeat business.
4
