Barry Diller says Google's grip on travel is breaking. Here's what that actually means for advisors and consumers.
In a 28-minute talk at Phocuswright, the Expedia/MGM chairman dropped this: Expedia and Booking spend over $10 billion a year on Google search ads. That's the tax the travel industry has been paying to the Google monopoly.
Dillers says AI search is ending that. "For all of us who've been serfs on the land of Google... this is ending and it is all of our opportunity."
I'm not convinced this is good news for everyone. It's just a transition — the money will shift to whoever controls the AI. And that's probably not us. In another talk I just heard from the Cloudflare CEO, he says google sees 3x more of the internet than his company or Openai, so it has an unfair advantage to have a better AI.
He also made this point about "agentic AI" — everyone's worried AI agents will replace travel agents. His response: "What are online travel people? They are agents." The whole industry is built on being intermediaries. Use the AI tools to be better ones.
His friend Sam Altman (a gay dad, for what it's worth) told him AGI was 30-40 years away a decade ago. Now Altman says 1-2 years. Diller is modernizing Expedia with AI faster than ever now.
Diller is 82 and runs a holding company. His "AI insight" is basically "my friend Sam tells me things." He's not in the trenches.
AI works with averages. It crawls databases to find what's statistically on target for your prompt. What's efficient — even accurate — might not be precise for any individual traveler.
The data backs this up: Research shows AI-generated travel itineraries contain at least one error. OpenAI's most advanced model has only a 10% success rate on complex travel planning. AI confidently recommends closed restaurants, fabricates hotel names, miscalculates distances, and ignores real-world logistics like transit availability or seasonal closures.
A lot of travelers will still choose AI out of convenience. It's always there, always ready — even if it's wrong more than half the time. For simple trips, that's fine. It's safe to say most people in the coming year will turn to AI as often as you go to webmd when you're at the doctors office.
For LGBT.
We've always been early adopters. Interestingly, LGBTQ+ travelers are leading AI adoption — 62% are open to using AI for trip planning, and we're 25% more likely than other travelers to have already used it. AI feels and fro the most part is like a judgment-free zone, especially for trans travelers or anyone tired of explaining their needs to strangers. Oddly, OpenAI is perhaps the most judgy AI while Grok (don't punch me) is the most gay friendly. It's a critique worth repeating and certainly isn't praise for the leadership of Grok. This will evolve quickly.
But AI doesn't know that the "charming boutique hotel" it recommended has staff who'll misgender your client. It doesn't know which neighborhoods are actually safe for a same-sex couple to hold hands. It can't read between the lines when someone says "we want somewhere welcoming" and understand what that really means. AI optimizes for the average traveler which is no one, we often are a combination of contradicting ideas and thoughts (much like Diller's talk)
0