When Rajesh Naidu envisions the future of travel, he sees a world powered by artificial intelligence. As Chief Architect at Expedia Group, Naidu is spearheading an ambitious initiative to integrate AI deeper into the travel giant’s technology stack — with the ultimate goal of revolutionizing how people discover, plan, and book travel.

Expedia wants to be the starting point and one-stop-shop for trip planning, leveraging its trove of data on flights, lodging, attractions and more. The company is actively training AI models on over 70 petabytes of historical booking data to generate personalized recommendations on destinations, hotels, activities, and full trip itineraries.

“By being able to train large language models on our data, this rich 70 petabytes’ worth of data we’ve gathered over the years, we can eventually recommend places to go and stay and do and continue to refine and personalize that,” explains Naidu.

Naidu calls this the beginning stage of an AI-first travel experience. He envisions an Expedia trip planner that feels almost like a virtual travel agent — getting to know users over time and using that insight to not just recommend relevant options but to actively build and book full trip itineraries on command, complete with automated price tracking and rebooking if better fares pop up.

Expedia’s AI push has an added benefit — giving the company independence from search engine giants like Google. Online travel is one of Google’s largest traffic categories, but Expedia wants users coming directly to its site rather than just clicking over from Google searches.

Naidu shares that internal data shows traffic and conversion rates stagnate even when Expedia substantially increases its Google ad spend.

Expedia’s AI capabilities today consist mostly of virtual customer service agents and tools for property managers. But armed with mountains of behavioral data, advanced machine learning algorithms, and proactive investments in computing infrastructure, Naidu seems confident that AI will soon power every step of Expedia’s customer experiences — from inspiration to booking and beyond.