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Booking Holdings reported a 10% year-over-year decrease in customer service costs, even even as handling a 10% increase in bookings, Chief Financial Officer Ewout Steenbergen said Wednesday (Feb. 18).

Steenbergen attributed the efficiency gains to the implementation of generative artificial intelligence (gen AI) tools across the company’s platforms, which include Booking.com, Priceline, Agoda, Kayak, and OpenTable. “I believe 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 [profit and loss statement],’” Steenbergen said during the company’s quarterly earnings call. “I’m very 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 company has similarly observed positive early indicators from its initial deployment of “agentic AI,” a more advanced form of AI designed to act independently to assist customers, Steenbergen added. While the scale of these results remains modest, he described them as “promising.”

Specifically, Booking Holdings is seeing increased engagement from travelers, faster search speeds, improved booking conversion rates, lower cancellation rates, and higher customer satisfaction scores, according to Steenbergen. These metrics align with observations from late 2025, when the company first noted that gen AI tools were increasing conversions and reducing cancellations, according to a report from PYMNTS.

Booking Holdings began rolling out gen AI and agentic AI tools throughout 2025 and continues to expand their employ in 2026, CEO and President Glenn Fogel said during the call. Recent additions include tools designed to assist both customers, and partners. The 2025 rollout included natural language search capabilities, designed to help customers discover and plan trips, as well as smart filters and summaries to aid in informed booking decisions. AI agents were also introduced 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.

Booking Holdings has proactively partnered with leading AI companies, including OpenAI, to prepare for potential shifts in customer demand driven by the increasing use of large language models (LLMs). The company’s collaboration with OpenAI made Booking one of the first travel platforms accessible through the ChatGPT platform, according to AltexSoft. Fogel stated that the firm is positioning itself to accommodate demand regardless of whether it originates from traditional search engines or horizontal LLMs.

Steenbergen, speaking at a financial conference in December 2025, argued that AI would strengthen online travel agencies (OTAs) rather than replace them, according to Skift. He emphasized AI’s potential to accelerate the shift from offline to online travel booking, expanding the total addressable market for OTAs.