AI Will Revolutionise How You Travel, Priceline CEO Says

With its 1997 launch as a name-your-own-price site, Priceline helped usher in the era of online travel booking―and the growth of a trillion-dollar category. Priceline itself has mushroomed into a global business with 1,500 full-time employees; along with global airline bookings, the site claims to offer 1.2 million accommodations in 116 countries.

Now, the Connecticut-based company is focusing on generative AI, and CEO Brett Keller is behind the leap. It’s just the latest technology push from Keller, a 25-year veteran of the company who has also served as CMO and COO. Under Keller, Priceline launched the travel industry’s first full-service mobile app in 2009; he also helped conceive the hugely popular William Shatner-fronted “Negotiator” ad campaign.

Keller, 56, talked to Penta about how AI is changing travel planning, what luxury travellers do to save money, and why Japan blows his mind.

Penta: Much of Priceline’s marketing is about value. Do you see luxury travellers in your customer mix along with budget-conscious travellers?

Brett Keller: High-net-worth consumers take a significantly higher number of trips than the average leisure traveller. For a high-end vacation like a safari in Tanzania, they’ll work with experts. But for the other 30 trips they book that year, either for themselves or family members, they don’t always reach for the stars. They want to manage money effectively. And as they’re moving around the country and the world, they need a fast, easy way to book travel that accommodates their needs. Priceline is a great platform for that kind of trip. And if you’re taking a quick weekend trip to Miami, and want to stay in the Four Seasons, we’ve negotiated with them. Even high-net-worth individuals seek value.

Priceline made headlines last year for partnering with both Google and OpenAI on Penny, your AI assistant. How has Penny evolved?

She’s gone from, “I can answer questions about the hotel you’re looking at” to actually servicing the customer through more complicated scenarios. If you need to cancel a hotel that’s fully refundable, you can do it with one click. But if there are issues, like a reservation that’s not fully cancelable, Penny can walk through those steps for you.

Penny’s also helping people find, search, and book properties. For example, if the customer tells her, “I’m looking for a great resort with these features, anywhere warm”—she’ll present recommended properties that meet those requirements. You can continue with Penny on the site, or go with the traditional experience.

Has there been any pushback from consumers about Penny and generative AI?

There has been none. Customers still have access to phone agents. Anyway, the younger generation doesn’t want to talk to anyone. And with traditional chat agents, live agents, or even messaging apps, there’s typically a delay. Penny answers immediately and in real time.

What’s the future of generative AI and online travel booking?

The future is a highly personalised shopping experience. It’s hard to achieve, because we don’t know about the consumer when they come in. But generative AI lets us dramatically improve personalisation. As you work with Penny, and tell us your preferences, the way you interact lets us find and book the best products and services every time you return. The ability to customise and personalise increases exponentially.

Is the travel experience even more bifurcated between elite, ultra-high-net-worth travellers and everyone else?

Consumers seem to be a little less sensitive in some areas. On planes, first-class and comfort-plus seats are the first to go, most of the time, and people are burning through points to sit in the front because they’re tired of not having legroom. But seats are packed in economy, too, so people are flying.

Hotel bookings are more economically driven in the U.S. Higher-income people are not as affected by interest rates or the cost of living, so they spend more freely than economy-minded consumers. There is a bit of bifurcation there. The low end is not filling, but the high end is.

It’s been reported Europe’s going to get even more crowded this summer. Does Priceline ever suggest alternatives to over-touristed or overpriced destinations?

We’re not in the business of telling you where you shouldn’t travel. We market popular destinations because that’s where people want to go. As much as we could tell people, “Las Vegas is overcrowded, don’t go,” people will want to go.

Social media is highlighting some overpopulated destinations and suggesting alternatives, so that comes back to us. But price is the No. 1 motivator. Vegas is a great value. There are so many hotel rooms available that you can go in a non-peak period and get a room in a four-star hotel for US$120. Try doing that in New York City.

What destinations are going to pop over the next year or two?

Asia will continue to be exciting and interesting to people. Bangkok is a great place to move in, then travel throughout Southeast Asia. As the region gets more popular, people will keep trying to find more remote and more unique destinations. People love Europe, but it was the hot spot in 2022 and ’23. Some travellers are saying, “I’ve had enough, and I’m moving on.” Japan is also amazing, for so many reasons. It’s easy to navigate. English is not a challenge. It’s safe. It feels like a different world, but completely first-world. The strength of the dollar is also driving some of that―again, price plays a role.

Beyond that, Mexico and the Caribbean took a real hit in 2022 and ’23 after a boom in 2021. They’re coming back now. A lot of people don’t want to travel far—“I just want to go to a beach and not think of anything.” And because not everyone wants to travel overseas, unique and relaxing cities like Nashville, Tennessee; Houston; and Austin, Texas, will be popular, especially into the fall.

Every day brings more headlines about airline woes. Who gets blamed if a Priceline customer has a bad flying experience, you or the airline?

When you have a bad experience traveling, you want to blame everybody. No matter what happened, the online travel agency takes blame and the airline takes the blame. It could be your seat, the person sitting next to you, whatever. We get the complaint, and we take on that responsibility and that role. We have leverage because of the amount of business we drive to partners. They want to work with us to make sure the customer has the best experience. Something goes wrong almost every time you take a trip. That’s just the reality.

What are your favourite places to travel?

My favourite destination, and a place where I spend a lot of time every summer, is [resort town] McCall, Idaho, one of the most beautiful towns in the West, with hiking, trails, and mountain biking. Outside of the country, it’s Japan, absolutely. Tokyo is the most exciting city in the world. It’s mind-blowing.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

A wave of corporate warnings and technical disclosures has flooded the media, with headlines worrying over “swarms” of rogue artificial-intelligence agents launching “unprecedented” cyberattacks, outsmarting their makers, and inching toward a terrifying autonomy. The most revealing part of this narrative isn’t what the software did. It’s who is telling the story—and why. When corporate leaders publicly insist that the systems they financed, engineered and deployed are suddenly beyond their power to contain, skepticism isn’t only healthy; it is essential.

For years, Silicon Valley has drawn scrutiny from civil society and global regulators over tangible harms such as youth mental health deterioration and systematic privacy violations. Today, industry figures seem to be trying to change that public image. Loudly blowing the whistle on their own systems—just as two of the leading companies were preparing for massive initial public offerings—lets AI executives position themselves as a new generation of leaders who have come to terms with their societal responsibilities. They seem to want us to believe that they no longer want to “move fast and break things” but will instead stand as vigilant guardians between humanity and a technological apocalypse.

There is one glaring problem: Software doesn’t rebel. A mathematical model possesses neither intent, malice nor the will to defy its creators, let alone extinguish our species. AI is a human artifact, engineered for profit.

When an agentic model in an evaluation sandbox connects to an unauthorized server or executes an exploit, it hasn’t staged a coup. It has tried to meet the human-defined objectives set out before it through a path its designers failed to constrain. It’s the digital equivalent of the King Midas myth, in which the king’s ill-defined wish turns even his food and drink into gold.

That powerful experimental models were able to discover novel vulnerabilities and breach external systems isn’t a sign of a dangerous superintelligence but of human error or negligence. There is no sentient actor lurking in the weights to be reasoned with, feared or pacified. There are only human software engineers, product managers and corporate boards deciding which guardrails are worth the latency cost and which permissions can be skipped in the race to market.

Policymakers and voters need to resist AI exceptionalism. In any other discipline—from civil engineering to pharmaceuticals—courts and regulators treat a system failure as evidence of bad product design and inadequate safety testing. If an aircraft crashes, we focus on finding the engineering defect, correcting it, and enforcing established liability standards for the damage created.

By leaning on an anthropomorphic narrative, Silicon Valley attempts to repackage its specific human choices that led to experimental, powerful models behaving unexpectedly during tests as an existential peril. Elevating the issue to a cosmic scale leaves the public paralyzed and takes ordinary product accountability off the table.

In the cutthroat race for venture capital and market dominance, building guardrails slows down deployment. Grandstanding about uncontrollable power costs nothing and generates billions of dollars in free publicity, justifying stock prices, all while cultivating an aura of technological capability not only to build the frontier but also ultimately to rein it in.

Governments need to recognize regulatory capture when it stares them in the face. Tech leaders’ strategy looks transparent: Alarm Washington and Brussels into creating a regime in which only trillion-dollar incumbents with fully staffed compliance and safety departments can legally operate. By sitting at the policymakers’ tables before anyone else, these companies can help draft rules digging an impassable moat protecting them from open-source developers and upstart competitors, domestic or international. The real danger is in further concentrating the tech industry into the hands of only a few companies with deep pockets.

Beijing and Washington have brushed off those tech leaders’ calls, albeit for very different reasons. Chinese state media dismissed them as part of the “Cold War playbook” and intended to preserve U.S. dominance. Xi Jinping argued for exactly the opposite at the Brics Summit on Sept. 12, calling on Brics countries to “strengthen cooperation in the field of AI, encourage open source, openness, collaboration and sharing, and break new grounds and scale new heights.” President Trump, steeped in a doctrine of unfettered capitalism and technological supremacy, called fears that AI could destroy humanity a “hoax.” Vice President JD Vance warned that AI companies “begging the government to regulate them” looked like a “Trojan Horse.”

Striving to pursue its “European way” on AI and assert regulatory leadership, Europe, by contrast, welcomed the call. European Union President Ursula von der Leyen made this clear at the State of the EU speech last Wednesday and announced that the EU will invite “the main frontier labs for a discussion on how we can support ongoing industry efforts to pace the frontier.”

Europe has been here before. In an effort to lead global regulation and react to fears borne from ChatGPT, Europe rushed its landmark AI Act into law in 2024. Already the world’s most restrictive rulebook, the framework quickly proved too broad and complex to enforce. Stalled by implementation delays and concerns about European competitiveness, the EU postponed the law’s full rollout, leaving regulations uncertain.

AI should be regulated—risks exist and should be taken seriously. But governments need to act based on available evidence and verified facts, not corporate PR panic, the views of industry insiders, or the desire for quick political wins. The greatest danger facing society isn’t that software will awaken and overthrow its human masters. It is that we will allow the creators of the software to abdicate human responsibility for the systems they choose to build and help them pull up the ladder to market access behind them.

AI Will Revolutionise How You Travel, Priceline CEO Says

AI doesn’t rebel—people design, deploy and profit from it. The real danger lies in allowing tech companies to escape accountability while shaping regulations that protect their dominance.