Can Kayak.ai Solve Travel’s 'Complex Problems'? Here’s How it Works
Photo Credit: The home screen of Kayak's new AI trip planner. Skift
Skift Take
Kayak's new AI trip planning experience — the latest of several experiments — is easy to use and seems to work without too many glitches. Now the trick is getting people to use it.
Kayak was among the first travel companies to embrace generative AI in 2023, launching a plugin for ChatGPT. That plugin has since been discontinued, but the company has released a handful of other experiments, including a travel search chatbot and a price-checking tool.
Last month, Kayak appointed Yaron Zeidman as its new chief technology officer. Zeidman, previously CTO at Agoda – another Booking Holdings brand – is overseeing the launch of Kayak’s latest initiative: a new AI-powered trip planning site called Kayak.ai.
The trip planner on Kayak.ai primarily includes a chatbot that can search Kayak’s flights and hotels. When a user clicks on a flight or hotel option in the chatbot, it opens a link to Kayak.com.
“It's still hard to say what exactly the end goal is because I think that all the new AI is still shaping and changi
