Booking Holdings reported a 10% reduction in customer service costs year-over-year, even although handling a 10% increase in bookings, according to remarks made by Chief Financial Officer Ewout Steenbergen during the company’s quarterly earnings call on Wednesday.
Steenbergen attributed the cost reduction to the implementation of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools, stating that the company is now able to demonstrate “meaningful results on the efficiency basis” in its profit and loss statement. “I think a colleague CFO said during a call last quarter, I’ve forgotten who it was, ‘Gen AI is everywhere except for in the P&L,’” Steenbergen said. “I’m remarkably proud that we can point to a line item in the P&L where we actually do have meaningful results on the efficiency basis.”
The online travel company, which operates platforms including Booking.com, Priceline, Agoda, Kayak, and OpenTable, has been actively integrating AI into its operations. According to President and CEO Glenn Fogel, Booking Holdings rolled out several GenAI and agentic AI tools throughout 2025 and continues to deploy them in 2026. These tools include features designed to assist both customers and partners.
Fogel detailed some of the AI-powered capabilities introduced in 2025, citing natural language search to aid trip discovery and planning, smart filters and summaries to improve booking decisions, and AI agents to provide faster and more effective customer support. “Based on our learnings, in 2026 we will focus on further connecting these agentic capabilities to offer a more unified and personalized experience, deploying the technology in the places where it can have meaningful impact for customers and partners,” Fogel said.
Beyond cost savings, Booking Holdings is also seeing positive indicators from its early adoption of agentic AI, Steenbergen noted. While acknowledging that the current data is limited, he reported “more engagement from our traveler customers, faster search, better conversion, lower cancellation rates and positive customer satisfaction.”
Booking Holdings is also proactively positioning itself to benefit from potential shifts in customer demand driven by the increasing prevalence of large language models (LLMs). The company has established partnerships with leading AI firms, including OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Salesforce, to ensure it can capitalize on new entry points for travel created by GenAI and LLMs, according to Fogel. “As general-purpose LLMs increasingly create new top-of-funnel entry points for travel, and generative AI drives increased global online participation and spend, our proactive engagement with major technology and AI players is positioning us to meet whatever level of demand ultimately migrates from traditional search firms to horizontal LLMs,” Fogel said.
The company announced a major transformation program in November, aiming to realize $450 million in savings by the conclude of 2027 through job cuts and other cost-reduction measures, with plans to reinvest the resulting capital into AI projects and other initiatives. Booking estimates achieving $150 million in savings this year alone.
