Dive Brief:
- Priceline updated Penny, its AI-powered travel assistant, with an agentic capabilities to help customers go from an idea to booking travel, the company said Wednesday. Penny is powered by Anthropic's Claude and runs on Priceline’s proprietary AI stack and data.
- Following the update, Penny can take complex questions about travel, evaluate real-time pricing and availability, and provide tradeoffs between options. Customers can purchase flights without having to leave the Priceline platform.
- Penny makes travel planning feel less fragmented, according to Cobus Kok, VP of AI experiences at Priceline. “Instead of opening multiple tabs, changing filters and trying to compare hotel options on their own, travelers can describe what they want in natural language and let Penny help them narrow the choices."
Dive Insight:
Online travel companies are racing to go agentic. While some brands, like Airbnb, are focusing on customer support, others are focusing on search discovery.
Priceline is looking to do it all. Penny can aid with destination planning, searching and selecting flights, hotels and car rental, and customer support for existing reservations, operating over 10 specialized agents as a coordinated system.
“Many AI tools focus on the inspiration stage,” Kok said in an email to CX Dive. “Penny is designed to go further. It can help a traveler think through the trip, compare choices and move toward a booking in the same experience.”
That matters because making such travel decisions is rarely just about price or star rating, especially for hotels.
“Travelers are weighing location, flexibility, loyalty, amenities, trip purpose and value,” Kok said. “Penny is designed to understand those signals and make the hotel decision easier.”
When a customer asks a question, the travel assistant provides Penny’s Picks, its top recommendations that weigh the traveler’s stated preferences, overall value, and the context of the conversation thus far. Penny’s Take, currently in beta for hotels, then provides a candid take on a single property and why it may be the best fit.
Priceline plans on expanding Penny’s Take across the platform over time. That feature may help with choice overload and decision fatigue, which often leads customers to leave a platform without a purchase.
Preference is another important layer.
“Penny can combine what a traveler has done before with what they tell us matters for this trip,” Kok said. “That helps the experience become more personal and more relevant over time, while giving travelers visibility and control over the data Penny can access.”
Early tests show that customers who engage with Penny show stronger engagement, higher conversion, and reduced customer support contacts, according to Priceline.
“Priceline also estimates that travelers who used Penny saved an average of nearly 10 minutes per trip compared with those who called customer support,” Kok said. “That is a meaningful customer experience benefit, not just an operational one.”
