Expedia Isn’t Losing Sleep Over Google’s AI Push

Expedia is doubling down on AI-powered travel, and CTO Ramana Thumu says the timing couldn’t be better. After stints at Fanatics and eBay, he joined the company to tap what he calls a rare intersection of technology, data, commerce and global-scale travel. 

In an exclusive interview with AIM, he said, “There are very few global-scale companies with this depth of data.”

Expedia Group, an online travel agency (OTA), which operates major brands such as Expedia, Hotels.com, Vrbo, Orbitz, Travelocity and Hotwire, reported a 9% YoY revenue increase in Q3 2025. Thumu said the priority now was using AI to elevate customer experience across its massive marketplace of airlines, hotels and car rentals—a moat powered by a unified data platform. 

3-Bucket AI strategy 

The company has a three-part AI strategy. First is traveller-facing innovation like Trip Matching—a feature that allows users to turn Instagram Reels into real, bookable travel itineraries, along with a conversational booking feature in Hotels.com. Next comes powering hotel and advertiser partners with smarter insights, followed by boosting internal productivity through a GenAI playground used by 6,000 employees who have built 1,500 agents. 

Expedia uses models from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google and is also integrated with ChatGPT, allowing users to discover trip options and refine preferences.

According to Thumu, coding assistants are translating into real productivity gains across teams. “85-88%  of engineers use coding assistants. We are seeing 15-30% improvement in cycle time. That’s a real unlock,” he added.

Thumu mentioned that roughly 100 engineers across Expedia Group contributed to agentic AI initiatives worldwide, working with global product leads. Expedia also has AI squads inside departments like finance, legal and market management to automate routine tasks and make everyday work easier and faster for teams.

In customer support, more than half the issues are handled by Expedia Group’s virtual agents, CFO Scott Schenkel had said previously. The company is also using AI to generate quick summaries for human agents, helping lower the cost of each service interaction.

Not Afraid of Google 

Google is introducing new agentic features in its AI Search mode, allowing it to book restaurants, events, etc., which sent Expedia’s shares down. Users simply have to state their preferences, and the AI scans multiple reservation platforms to present real-time options. 

Thumu, however, remains unaffected. “Inspiration can happen anywhere,” he said. “Our job is to be at the forefront of integration. And once travellers come to us, loyalty and personalisation keep them in our ecosystem.”

He explained that Expedia’s approach is to deliver shared platform capabilities for both B2C and B2B, and then add partner-specific integrations wherever required. “We have different offerings for our B2B players—white-label, templates, Rapid API and various products,” he said. 

“The beauty is that the same platform that powers B2C also powers B2B for the large part, and then we build specialised integrations so business development can move much faster and independently.”

Expedia Group competes with a wide range of major online travel platforms, including Booking.com under Booking Holdings, Airbnb, Tripadvisor, Priceline, Kayak, Trivago, Hotels.com, Skyscanner and Travelocity, among others. Many of them are already adopting AI to improve user experiences and smoothen operations.

When asked what differentiates Expedia from the others, Thumu said it was the travel data. “We flow all the data of different brands into the same data lake.”

Expedia’s Bengaluru and Gurugram hubs house 1,800 engineers and scientists driving its insurance tech, ad tech and AI platforms, with active hiring across IITs and NITs. 

On skills, Thumu said, Expedia is hiring aggressively in India for mobile engineering, cloud engineering and, most importantly, deep AI skills. “AI, mobile engineering, cloud and core platform application engineering is always going to be there, but we are doubling down on AI machine learning footprint,” he said.

Expedia runs its entire insurance technology operation, including product engineering, AI and machine learning, out of its Indian offices. A large share of the company’s multibillion-dollar advertising technology stack is also developed in the country.

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