EXPEDIA GROUP — INNOVATION
Traveling Just Got a Lot Smarter with Romie
Expedia Group unveils Romie™ — an AI assistant designed to ‘roam’ the world with you, alongside 40+ new features in its 2024 Spring Release
Talking about AI these days is like dissecting Taylor Swift’s latest album — everyone has an opinion. But love it or hate it, one thing is true: AI isn’t disappearing anytime soon, especially as more companies are starting to see it unlock real value for their business.
While there is a lot of good in the AI space, it’s important to remember that it’s not a silver bullet. AI, fundamentally, is a learning journey. It has the power to drive real results, but its effectiveness depends on how it’s used. At Expedia Group™️, we believe in starting with the traveler experience, and then using technology to bring it to life.
Introducing Romie — Your ‘Roaming’ AI Buddy
Have you ever tried to plan a trip with friends? It’s never as simple as you want it to be. Even if you pick a destination, someone wants to stay in a boutique hotel, another wants a resort, or to do an entirely different weekend. Now imagine how much easier it would be if you had a travel expert on call who could understand what everyone in the group wanted and could help you plan a trip based on that.
That’s why we built Romie — the travel industry’s first progressively intelligent assistant — that’s a travel agent, concierge and personal assistant all in one. Romie is there to help you throughout your trip — from planning on where to go, to personalizing your shopping experience and helping you out if something goes wrong:
- Group Chat Trip Planning: Invite Romie to join your SMS group chat and listen to your vacation plans. When you’re ready for advice, @Romie to get suggestions on where to go or what to do, like you would a travel agent.
- Smart Search: Ask Romie to summarize your group chat and bring what they learned straight into your Expedia shopping experience so you can start building out and booking your trip. You can personalize your search even more by adding your own filters, like hotels with rooftop views and early check-in.
- Building Your Itinerary: Connect Romie to your email to have them pull in bookings you made elsewhere and suggest restaurants and activities near your hotel like a good concierge.
- Dynamic Service: Flight delayed? Walking tour rained out? Like the perfect personal assistant, Romie keeps an eye on the weather and looks out for last-minute disruptions that could impact your plans and has alternative suggestions ready.
- Intelligent Assistance: Romie is constantly updating your itinerary in real time so anyone in the group chat with FOMO can see what you’re up to, and anyone who’s picking you up from the airport can simply @Romie to check what time you land.
We built Romie with three key principles in mind:
- Romie is assistive, not intrusive: Always there, at the ready, waiting to jump in like the perfect waiter.
- Romie meets you where you are: Whether that’s in our app, on iMessage, WhatsApp… wherever…
- Romie gets progressively intelligent: Building memories as you interact, such as your love of boutique hotels, Italian food, and traveling with your dog.
An alpha version of Romie is live today, in EG Labs, ready for you to play with so we can learn fast, mature it quickly and build new experiences. The full Romie experience will include more magical moments, and many unique travel experiences.
2024 Spring Product Announcements
We’re launching a ton of new experiences that assist travelers across their journey — discovery, planning, shopping, booking and service — powered by AI.
- Destination Comparison: Choosing your next vacation spot can take up a lot of time. You might want to visit Mexico, but finding the exact place in Mexico that has everything you want can mean a lot of research. We’re using GenAI to help you discover and compare destinations based on themes like beach, family, nature — and average price per night, so you land on your ideal place much faster.
- Air Price Comparison: We all know finding the best value flights is far from easy, so we’ve built Price Tracking to help you understand the best time to book a flight. Now we’re launching Air Price Comparison to help you compare flight prices across different dates and combining this with machine learning-driven price insights, so you understand the best time to travel.
- Guest Review Summary: Most of us read through dozens of hotel reviews before we book. Last year, we made this smarter by using GenAI to summarize guests’ reviews of key amenities and services at a property, like the coffee machine in the room or the pool. This year, we’re taking it a step further by summarizing what guests liked and didn’t like about a property right up front, so you can make a decision much faster.
- Help Center: Often we want to make a change to our booking, but don’t always know where to start. By bringing GenAI into the Help Center, it’s really easy to get a summarized answer to your question, saving you a ton of time reading through articles.
At Expedia Group, our goal is to deliver the best travel experiences possible, and artificial intelligence is how we are doing this. With these new features, you’ll be spending less time planning your trip and more time creating memories that last long after you’re back at home.
