Today in a crowded session at ITB Berlin 2025, Booking’s Matthias Schmid outlined how the company was implementing AI into its platform.
Schmid, who serves as the firm’s senior vice president for accommodations, remarked on the speed of development within AI and of how it was already impacting Booking.com’s business.
He said: “This is not an evolution, but a revolution. What is important to understand is that this is not something that’s new for us—we’ve been thinking about it for at least the last two-and-a-half years.”
At home at Booking.com, Schmid outlined how the firm had long been using such AI concepts as machine learning for both the backend functions of its site and for the translation. Recently, he said that the technology has also been used to take additional information for listing from items such as photographs and reviews.
There has also been greater uptake amongst the public.
The firm, he said, had recently conducted a survey of 27,000 customers across 33 countries, finding that nearly half (48%) said that they would trust AI to help them plan their travels, with two-thirds saying that they had already used technology to find less-visited destinations.
In 2025, Schmid said that Booking.com looked at its AI capabilities across three buckets: internal productivity, improving its own machine learning models and increasing their agility, and understanding its customers better so that they can be presented with better offers.
The three key impacts so far, he added, were that AI was helping the firm to understand the intentions of travellers better, making the planning phases of the customer journey more relevant. On top of this, he said that online travel agents have so far proven to be very good when it comes to helping customers search, book, and pay for their trips and activities.
As to what the future holds, Schmid raised his hands.
“It’s difficult to say,” he explained, “what’s going to happen in the next three-to-five years. And that’s because the progress so far has been so fast! But what we do know and understand is that this technology is going to help better understand the intentions of our customers.”
