Expedia CEO Ariane Gorin on 14% revenue growth, AI-powered travel search, and the Layla acquisition

Expedia posted 14% revenue growth in its most recent quarter, and CEO Ariane Gorin says the underlying demand picture is straightforward: people are still prioritizing travel even as air and hotel prices rise. US consumers are particularly strong, with domestic and outbound bookings both up. A 200% surge in Edinburgh searches from Spain — people fleeing summer heat — captures the kind of intent-driven, real-time demand Expedia is now trying to catch earlier in the planning cycle.

AI in the product

Gorin frames AI as an accelerator across three areas: better traveler experiences inside the product, net-new growth from trip planning starting in ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini, and internal throughput. On that last point, the tech team is seeing up to 40% improvement in cycle time.

The more interesting story is what's happening on the consumer side. Expedia has deployed natural language search across its brands — on Vrbo, travelers can type a destination description, group size, dates, and amenities in plain English instead of using structured filters. Conversion is lower than the traditional path, but Gorin says that's expected when introducing new interaction models. The signal she's watching is intent data: the natural language interface is surfacing over 60% more information per traveler, which means richer data to optimize against over time.

One specific finding: the natural language path is over-filtering results, cutting off listings that travelers might have wanted. That's a tuning problem, not a structural one, but it illustrates why Gorin describes AI deployment as an "experimentation budget" — you accept some near-term conversion drag in exchange for learning that compounds.

“We just reported earnings yesterday. We had really strong revenue growth at 14%... in our tech team alone, we're getting up to 40% more cycling and better cycle time... We've got a connector app with Claude and when we can actually control to a certain extent the interface, we're able to convert that a lot better.”

Agent traffic and channel diversification

On agentic browsers and third-party AI interfaces, Expedia already has a connector app with Claude. Gorin says when Expedia controls the interface inside that connector — richer images, structured content — and links out to a booking page, conversion improves materially. Her read on the broader monetization question: third-party platforms are increasingly looking to be paid in ad revenue by sending traffic, rather than building competing transaction layers. She expects this resolves more like paid search than like a structural threat, and frames agentic traffic as a welcome opportunity to reduce dependence on Google at the top of the funnel.

About two-thirds of Expedia Group's bookings already come direct, so the channel diversification question is largely about the remaining third.

The Layla acquisition and the B2B layer

Roughly a third of Expedia Group's business is B2B — powering hotel bookings inside credit card portals, airline loyalty programs, and third-party apps using Expedia's technology and supply. The acquisition of Layla, an AI-powered travel planning startup, fits squarely into that layer. Layla builds consumer-facing travel interfaces on top of partner infrastructure rather than building its own supply. Gorin's logic is that the B2B ecosystem lets startups experiment with new interfaces faster than Expedia's own brands can, so bringing Layla in-house accelerates interface innovation for the broader platform. No acquisition price was disclosed.

AEO

Expedia combined its AEO and SEO teams last year under a single "organic" function. Gorin says AEO is now one of the company's fastest-growing acquisition channels. The structural insight she draws is that strong performance in AI-generated answers correlates with brand reputation and content quality — the same fundamentals that drive organic search — rather than requiring a separate technical playbook. The secondary benefit: building the AEO capability forced Expedia to audit where AI models were drawing information about its brands, surfacing reputation gaps the company hadn't been paying close attention to.

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Expedia's position heading into the back half of 2026 is that strong travel demand gives it room to absorb the conversion friction that comes with deploying AI at scale across its products. The 14% revenue growth is the headline, but the more consequential number may be the 40% internal cycle-time improvement — that's the compounding advantage if it holds.