Good afternoon, everyone. What a trip down memory lane, and a great way to kick off our celebration of 30 years of Expedia. Think about it. Bravo. Think about it. Where were you 30 years ago? I was 21, I was just out of college, and I was traveling around Italy with my best friend. We were eating lots of gelato and biscotti, and figuring out what would come next in life. It's one of my fondest memories from my 20s, and I certainly didn't imagine back then that I'd be here 30 years later. Much has changed from the earliest days of the internet, to mobile, to where we are today. What hasn't changed is people's desire to explore, to connect, and to experience something new. At Expedia Group, our purpose is simple: to help travelers explore the world one journey at a time.
That's what's inspired us for 30 years, and it's what will drive all of us into the future. Over the next couple of days, you're gonna hear about our products, about how we're bringing you more travelers through our consumer and our B2B businesses. Yes, of course, about AI. You're also gonna hear from leaders who have built our industry and who continue to shape what's next. You'll hear from Rich Barton, who invented Expedia as a scrappy startup inside of Microsoft. He believed that technology could revolutionize travel and that exploration should be part of everyone's life, not a luxury for the few. You'll hear from our Chairman and Senior Executive, Barry Diller. He saw that potential, he invested in it, and he scaled it to a global business.
You'll hear from Dara Khosrowshahi, who led Expedia through the mobile era and is now leading Uber through its expansion into autonomous vehicles, travel, and AI. All of their work is what brings us to today and to Expedia Group's next chapter. I want to acknowledge our industry is certainly facing some pressures. Rising fuel costs, conflicts around the world, Hantavirus. The fact that we're here celebrating 30 years reminds us of the resilience of our industry. With all of you here, we've built one of the most complete and trusted travel marketplaces. We connect millions of travelers to you, our partners. With our connection points, you automatically tap into demand from our consumer brands, our B2B network, and increasingly from emerging AI and media experiences. Travel is exciting, but it's also complex. It cuts across languages, currencies, and so much more.
Our role at Expedia Group is to take on that complexity, to make it simple, intuitive, and reliable for travelers and for you, so that you can focus on delivering unforgettable experiences. Trust is at the center of the marketplace. Travelers rely on us for accuracy, for choice, and for support when things go wrong. Today, trust is being tested not by fewer choices, but by an overwhelming amount of information. We've all experienced that information can sound right without being right. Models can hallucinate, fraud is becoming so much more sophisticated. That's what makes this moment so important. We're not using AI for the sake of AI. It's about creating a world where every traveler has a smart, trusted guide in their pocket. As we engage more and more with our travelers, it allows us to bring you, our partners, even more.
Better insights, better products, better demand. Connecting all of you with the right traveler at the right time. Every year, we spend billions of dollars in marketing to find new travelers to bring to you. We recently partnered with IShowSpeed, who's one of the world's most popular creators. If you don't know who he is, trust me, most of your kids will. My kids and my nephews definitely knew who he was. He recently live streamed his record-breaking trip. He visited five countries in one day, and our campaign for it has already reached nearly 400 million people. It's such a powerful example of how travel inspiration is evolving, and how Gen Z is discovering and increasingly booking where they wanna go next. Some of you may also have seen our recent partnership with Uber, connecting our marketplaces, powering hotels on Uber, and bringing rides directly into our app.
It's a simpler journey for travelers, and it's more demand for all of you. Building on that, I'm excited to announce another partnership, one that makes the journey even smoother. Today, we're bringing CLEAR and CLEAR+ into the Expedia app for Expedia travelers and One Key members, extending our seamless travel experience beyond booking and into the airport. It gets better. To celebrate, we're giving all of you in the room the gift of CLEAR Concierge Express, so you can all enjoy a smoother airport experience. Now you can. These partnerships from Uber to CLEAR and more ladder up to one idea: seamless travel from inspiration to arrival. To me, the most special thing we do is to help people create memories.
That trip to Italy I talked about from 30 years ago, I can still feel what it was like to hike the Cinque Terre under the pouring rain. It's really stayed with me because the places we travel to, they aren't just destinations. The trails, the coastlines, the parks, they're where we make memories. Think about the places where you've created your most cherished memories. As we look to the next 30 years, how do we make sure that people can keep enjoying those places? Well, today we're launching the Expedia Trails Fund. We're funding on-the-ground work, rebuilding trails, and improving access to protected landscapes, starting in the U.S., so people can keep creating memories for decades to come. It's not just about the land, it's about the communities who depend on it.
It brings me such joy to get to share this with you because it's our commitment to the future. Beyond our own fund, we're also matching AllTrails Stewards Fund, supporting additional community-led trail projects. For those of you who are avid hikers, I'm sure you already know AllTrails, but for the rest of you, it's an app you can use to discover and customize your routes. For everyone here today, you're all gonna receive an AllTrails premium membership so you can get outside and create your own memories. Renee Roaming, one of our amazing creators, has visited all 63 U.S. national parks, so if you want a little inspiration to plan your next outdoor adventure, here you go.
The future of travel depends on protecting the places we explore. On my journey to visit every U.S. national park, I had the privilege of seeing firsthand the incredible diversity of our outdoor spaces. From breathtaking coastlines to stunning mountain peaks and all the incredible wildlife that call these parks home, it's abundantly clear that we have a duty of care to protect nature for future generations. That's why Expedia just launched the Expedia Trails Fund, starting with over $4 million in grants to help improve the trails we hike on and protect ecosystems in the parks we love so much. On top of that, Expedia is matching the AllTrails Stewards Fund, a grassroots initiative supporting trail building and restoration projects, so hopefully our future can continue to look as beautiful as this.
When I think about this moment, 30 years in at another inflection point, I feel such optimism about what we're creating together. Over the next two days, I hope you feel inspired. I hope you connect with one another because travel at its core is about shared experiences. We have the best jobs in the world because we get to help people create those experiences. Before I close, I have a special message for all of us from IShowSpeed.
Yo, what's up everybody? It's Speed here. First, I wanna thank Ariane for believing in this and for making this happen because this only exists because of her. I don't take that lightly. I just did five countries in 16 hours live. Dominica, Guadeloupe, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Sint Maarten, and St. Martin. We planned four, but I added one last minute. That's actually what I wanna talk about because travel isn't just content for me, it's everything. Every place I go, I meet real people. I eat their food. I learn their history. I experience their culture firsthand, and I bring my fans along all for it, and something shifts in them like, "Wait, I could actually go there", for the people who's watching. That's what gets me. Travel opens something up in people. It connects the world. It brings us together.
When it came to find a travel partner, I needed something. I knew I needed something that could match my energy. Guess what? Expedia stood out. They didn't come with restrictions or scripts. They said, "We know who you are. Just be you." I'm like, "Okay, we're on the same page." They wanted the real moments. They wanted the fifth country I added last minute. That trust meant everything for me because it kept the whole thing authentic. My fans can feel when something is real and when it isn't. Again, I'm always real. Expedia has spent 30 years making travel accessible for regular people. That lines up with everything I believe. I'm not just trying to inspire my fans to wanna travel, I want them to actually go. Let's go. Speed. Purr.
As Speed said, let's get some business done, let's have some fun, and let's make some memories. Thank you.
Please welcome President B2B & Chief Commercial Officer, Expedia Group, Alfonso Paredes, and Chief Executive Officer at Uber, Dara Khosrowshahi.
Welcome to the stage.
Thank you so much. Oh my God.
Wow.
How are you, Dara?
Now I'm doing pretty well.
You're-
Awesome
You, Ariane? Are you not excited?
I'm great. I'm full of energy.
I have to tell you, I'm kind of nervous. It's like I feel like I'm interviewing here for a job.
You think you're interviewing us, we're actually interviewing you.
He should be nervous.
Okay. Be careful, I have some questions.
All right.
feel a little bit weird.
All right, cool.
We'll make it easy, we're gonna start soft and then we'll have some fun at the end, okay? We can go for it. The first question is for you, Dara, and it's related to all this experience. I'm not saying old, I'm saying experience. You went from Internet, beginning of the Internet, mobile, now AI. This woman here, she has also the job that you had before.
Yes.
What type of advice.
Thank God.
Thanks God, yeah.
Yeah.
What type of advice do you give her?
Well, first of all, Ariane I don't think needs any advice. She's a wildly better executive.
I know.
than I ever was, when I was at Expedia. I think if there's one piece of advice that I give her, it's that change is constant, right? In our industry, we went through obviously the mobile revolution, et cetera. When you have a company with a history of Expedia, with the success of Expedia, there's always a temptation to want to hold on to the present state and the past, right? I remember in the early days, mobile bookings, conversion was much worse, et cetera. Like, mobile early on for the first couple of years was actually a headwind for the company. We went through meta search, et cetera, now obviously we're going through the unbelievable shifts in AI.
Yep.
Just the one piece of advice that I would give, and, by the way, it is also relevant to Uber because we are having to deal with these changes, is not to be tempted to try to hold on to the past or the present. Like, you have to run to these changes and experiment aggressively, you know, even though there is a lot to defend.
because this is an extraordinary company and, you know, I'm lucky enough to be on the board. Don't give in to the temptation to play defense because the minute you play defense, you lose.
We love attacks.
Yeah, yeah.
We love attacks.
You gotta keep attacking.
Well, no, it's great because it's exactly what we were talking about yesterday, saying you gotta be on offense all the time.
Yeah, yeah.
All the time.
On offense, offense.
All the time.
Wait a minute, can I say, Dara has given me a lot of great advice over the years, and one of the best pieces of advice, it was when you were still CEO of Expedia, and I had this career decision within the company to make. You said, "Ariane, if your head and your heart don't align on a decision, you're not ready to make it." It is such a good piece of advice, and it's not just a career advice, it's anything in life. You need your head and heart to align, otherwise you're not ready.
Always the heart.
Always. Well, the reason why I give that advice, like, head is obviously logic.
Yeah.
In my career, whenever I've made choices that just I didn't feel good about in my heart, there was actually something that I was missing. There was a piece of logic that I was missing. I think human instincts is quite powerful.
When those two align, I go. Obviously, if the heart wants to do and the head says no, that's just gambling, which is something that's great here, but not great in business.
Good.
There you go, head and heart.
Head and heart.
Question for you, Ariane. Tell us a little bit about that wonderful deal that Expedia signed with this great company called Uber. Walk us through that a little bit.
I think I should ask the two of you to tell us about the Uber deal.
No, no, I'm the one asking questions. No.
That's okay. Alfonso, you were at the heart of it.
No, no.
As I just said a few minutes ago, we just signed a great deal with Uber. It's a two-way partnership, so we're powering Uber's hotels, and we're bringing Uber into the Expedia app. For all of you who are in the hotel, who have hotels who are in this room, it means that we're bringing you demand through Uber that you wouldn't have had otherwise, which is awesome. I know everybody always wants more travelers. As I said, it's a two-way deal, so it's great for, you know, travelers if they're in the Expedia app or they're in Uber. Those of us in the industry, we all know that people book in a lot of different ways.
They might book with their corporate travel, company, they might book with their retailer, they might book with their, you know, airline and use loyalty points for a hotel. There are so many different ways people book, and so the ability to create better traveler experiences in at least two of them was a great deal for us.
I think for us, too, it is going to be interesting how we develop this. We were debating early on, you know, Uber is synonymous with on-demand, you know, push a button, get a ride, push a button, get your food delivered, et cetera. For us strategically, we had a question as to whether we could get into planning, right?
Because hotels on Uber isn't just about last minute, although last minute's nice as well. With our Reserve product, we proved to ourselves that actually people can come to Uber and plan for their next trip. At the same time, we are a huge presence in travel, right? Usually Uber is the first app that you open when you get off your flight. We've got over 100 million trips to and from airports.
Yeah.
Even just last year, we had 1.5 billion transactions happening outside of your home city.
Yeah.
Right? We know what your home city is.
Yeah
Many people are using Uber outside of their home city. There are a ton of travelers interacting with our app, to the extent that we can use that in interaction in our partnership and to bring the folks here some more business, incremental demand, that'd be a win-win.
Should we do more? Let's do more.
I think so. Yeah.
No, we're ramping up. That's good. The next question is, let me just tell you, there is a few quotes from our chairman, from Barry that he says. The one that I love most is when he says, "There is When there is life, there is travel." There is one that you repeat quite a lot, is, "They won, we lost. Next." Which kind of is a good way to say like, I know you have this, the executive loneliness when you are at night, 2:00 A.M., thinking about something, you have a deal that you have lost or something, and then at 9:00 A.M. you need to go back to the office and put the smile and make sure they are ready for the next one. How do you handle that, Dara?
Just the context for that quote was, I was a banker for Barry. This is.
Ooh
In the olden, olden days, and Barry had lost a hostile tender offer for Viacom and, you know, we had like 118 lawyers and publicists planning, like, the PR thing. Barry comes in, you know, "They won- we lost. Next." It was then that I kind of thought to myself, "I have to work for that man," right? I think how you respond to difficult times, like, that's the true test of an executive. I love sports, the best athletes, like, it's very easy to have a great day and just, you know, have an amazing round.
Yeah
You can't miss a shot. It's how do you perform during your worst days? That is the true test of a great athlete, great executive, et cetera. At Uber we have had many terrible days. One time that was obviously familiar with the folks here was actually COVID, right?
Yeah
The toughest time for travel, it was the toughest of times for Uber. Mobility was 85% of our business, gone overnight. We went from losing $2 billion a year to losing $5 billion a year. It was a disaster. You know, to your point of like how'd I feel and then what did I communicate to the company, I've always believed in being completely transparent as an executive. Like, one of the failings of executives, and I'm sure there are a lot in the crowd, is the higher up you go in an organization, the less you actually know what the hell's going on. Right? People talk to you in paragraphs. It's like every meeting has a PowerPoint, et cetera. They give you a sanitized version of the truth.
I found that the only way to get around your receiving the sanitized version of the truth is for you to be absolutely transparent to your team. 'Cause if you as an executive are BS'ing your team, they're just gonna BS you right back. While it was very tempting during COVID to go to the company and say, "We're gonna be fine," et cetera, actually right after it happened, what I said was, "I don't exactly know what we're gonna do, where we're gonna go, but we're gonna move very quickly as an executive team. We're gonna make a decision." I gave us 10 days. "We're gonna come back to you in 10 days. Right now, I don't know." We made the decision, you know, and totally by chance and by luck the Uber Eats business completely exploded and did incredibly well.
Uber Eats is now as big as our Uber Mobility business. I think, you know, during those very, very bad days in hindsight the company performed well, but I would never, ever wanna go through that again.
Well, hopefully, I mean, you see now everything is thriving. Your business is thriving.
Yeah. I mean,
Travel is-
You two went through it. I'm curious as to.
Oh, my God. Well, I mean.
Yeah
most people in this room went through it.
Yeah.
I thought that was the, like, one of the most emotional parts of the vid.
Yeah
we had, was when it all went silent, and you can all remember what that felt like.
Yeah.
Feel like we were taking something that went in forward gear and putting it 5x faster in reverse and wondering, "Is this going to end?" I just wanna build on what Dara was saying about being ultra-transparent with your team. What I've found is not just transparent, it's also being simple, like being clear in what you're saying.
Yeah
simple, and explaining the why of the decisions you're making. Sometimes they will be looking for the, "Wait. Okay, I get the decision, but why?" Being clear on your why so that then people can understand if they have some information that will allow them to use the why to then make a different decision, they don't have to come back to you for it. Transparent, simple, and the why.
Is that, for you, Ariane, one big bet? Is this a bet that you are actually think is one of your big? I'm going to ask you the question. Dara has a test, and the test is: You know what the test is, Dara, you look at 10 years from now, is the company that you're managing better or worse? What is the big bet that we will see in nine, 10 years? Dara was at Mars. He move out of Expedia after nine, he didn't have to talk about the 10 view.
12 years.
You know, but what I-
It's 12? I thought it was nine.
12 years.
No, nine is too long.
Nine years at Uber.
Okay.
But what I will say is-
Come on, man, give me some credit.
What do you think? You did it.
Oh, you're gonna ask him if he left the company?
No, no, I know he did great.
No, I First of all, I, you know, it is, it's very emotional to me that we're at our 30-year anniversary because it makes me think about, you know, how do I and the leadership team we have in place now leave the company in a good spot for whatever team is gonna be here in 30 years. To your question.
Ariane, you're never leaving, so.
Well, maybe in 30 years. God.
30 years more? No.
Yeah.
That's-
In 10 years, I think the bet is really it's all about AI, and it's what, Dara, you said at the beginning, which is you can't just try to protect the existing.
We're doing a lot of things in AI, whether it's, you know, about a year ago structuring, building a team that was all just about relationships with these big AI companies that we didn't really have relationships with before. Say we wanna stay close to them. Tech teams that are just developing solutions that are integrating into them. We were very early in thinking about Answer Engine Optimization and what integrations can we do. In the product, you know, someone asked me this morning about Romie, which we launched two years ago, and why isn't that here any longer? Well, it's because we're testing new things. We're figuring out how is it that travelers wanna react. It's not an end-to-end AI experience, it's sort of point experiences, and Shilpa will talk about that later. It's also in how we're adopting AI internally. How are our developers using it?
How are our sales teams using it? It's a lot of experimentation, and it's a lot of effort, probably even more effort than what we're actually yet seeing in the business results. You know, I've shared that the traffic from these new AI experiences is less than 1.5% of our total traffic. It's growing fast, but it's small. It's important to, I would say, over invest, or maybe you can't over invest because we don't know how it's gonna play out. What we know is we need to experiment. It will change the way travelers interact, it will change the way the company is run, and we need to be on the forefront of that.
Good. Now I'm gonna change topic. I'm gonna go to this word that we never use here, which is AI. We're gonna go into that area. You know, in both industries, in your industry, Dara, and travel of course, there is this fear of AI, and what is AI, what it's gonna do with our jobs, with the work, with the drivers, with the riders, with everything else, and also for the travel industry, the fulfillment of the rooms, et cetera, et cetera, and all of this. The question is related to what do you think in your respective industry we are underestimating on the AI?
Underestimating-
Yeah
i- i-
Overhype as well.
What?
Both, the opposite, overhyping.
I'll start with the overhyping, which is for all of the promise of AI, I actually think that the consumer experience, other than when you go to a ChatGPT or a Claude, whatever your favorite foundation model company is, there isn't that much that's great, right? It's the how AI has fundamentally changed the consumer experience of booking travel or booking an Uber, we haven't had that magic yet. We, for example, have introduced voice booking on Uber. You know, I wanna go to work, you know, take me back to the airport, et cetera. That will be cool. We'll see what the usage is.
We've got some cool stuff which is like, you can take a picture of a dish that you love and the AI will figure out the ingredients and put a shopping list together and, you know, deliver it to you, but like eight people are using that stuff, right? It's just not big yet. For all of the power of AI, our experience and the interaction with our services through AI, it's pretty thin now.
Yep.
I think from that standpoint, I wanna see more. It will come, it will absolutely come, but it's not there. A lot of the AI foundation companies are all now investing in the enterprise 'cause that's where the money is. To some extent, a lot of the early innovation that you thought was gonna be consumer, that's not the focus of these companies right now. It'll be up to companies like us to innovate on the consumer 'cause that's our business, right? I just wanna see more. I'm a little frustrated with how slowly things are going. Sorry to be bearer of bad news.
Then internally as it goes through the enterprise, how we are working, changing the nature of work, not just in terms of saving on cost, but actually doing things fundamentally better. The power of AI is extraordinary. I'll give you, like, one little example, which is for customer service. We obviously as many of you have been testing out AI, you know, AI-powered customer service. If you think about the customer service agent for Uber, you know, they are We have a bunch of policies, and when someone calls, they try to help the person based on these policies.
Yeah.
Right? These policies we put in place for years and years and years. Couple of things, we then had AI agents follow the policies, right? Couple of things, we observed a couple things. One is our policies are, like, terrible in terms of, you know, they're just a complete mess. Humans can deal with that, which is, A, if there's a Uber Eats order that's late, what exactly is the policy? I can just ask you tell me.
I'll deal with the policy. These AI agents didn't have that context. When we had AI agents trying to follow our policies, the results were meh. We completely changed our approach. One of our engineers was like, "Let's just, like, tell the AI agent we have policies in place 'cause we're trying to accomplish something. They're general rules to treat your customers better, et cetera." We now have given these AI agents direction to treat Ariane well, and here are some guidelines to treating Ariane well, and, like, kind of use your judgment, the early results have been extraordinary.
Have been really, really cool. These agents just figure out context, et cetera, how good a customer is Ariane, et cetera, and so the results have been really, really promising, and it required us to kind of throw away a bunch of stuff that we did.
In the, in the olden days and completely rethink these processes. I do think that the power of AI to change how enterprises work, how companies work, is probably long-term underhyped, but it does require. There's this temptation to, like, automate 10% of what you do, automate 15% of what you do, and I think what's gonna work better is just to throw everything that you've done away and start from the ground up. We'll see.
Well, to the customer service point, you know, we're working on obviously similar things, which is how do you make travelers' experience better using agents? What excites me a lot is working with many of you in this room because if you're a hotel partner or if you are an airline, you're trying to figure out the same thing. You're doing that, we're doing that, and often it's the same traveler. As we're each working on our own, how do we then figure out together how to get to better traveler outcomes, which will also, I think for us, help all of us because there'll be less manual people on the phone. First we've got to figure out our own stacks, and then it's how does that work together to get to better outcomes.
I mean, the other good news is Google is no longer gonna be the gatekeeper, right?
I don't know who they are, so who? Okay. Ariane, I'm back a little bit to the same topic. There is all these rumors. Okay, AI is going to end up with the online travel agencies, et cetera, which we all know that is not true. What is one of the concrete decisions that you are taking to make sure that customers continue coming to our brands, to Hotels.com, Expedia, Vrbo, et cetera?
I think there are a couple of things. One, I spoke about it earlier, is this concept of trust. You know, we are not in the business of selling T-shirts for $10, where if someone gets the wrong T-shirt, they can send it back or they can just order another one. When something goes wrong in travel and in a trip, you never get that time back, which means there's a higher bar for people when they're booking and planning their travel to do it with a company that they trust. We're spending a lot of effort in making sure that our content is up to date and making sure that our rates and availability and assortment is all in a really strong place. Making sure that like we talked about, our service is great.
Not only the sort of self-service you can do in the apps, but also that if you call someone, they'll take care of it. You know, probably in past Explore, we would've talked about great traveler experiences and a bit about trust. I think in this moment, trust is what's even more important. Obviously, there's also the loyalty program. There's our ability to Bundle & Save. You know, when you start to have multiple trip elements and you can put them all together and get great deals when you put them together, that's something that, you know, I think it's gonna be a long ways away before, you know, an LLM can do that. Finally, I would say, I think what people underestimate is that people are happiest when they're planning their trips. In fact, sometimes they're happier planning their trips.
Than doing the trip.
than in the trip.
True.
You know, but, no, but so the idea that you're gonna just delegate it. Maybe by the way, there can be some business trips where I go to the same place every two weeks and that I want it just sort of done for me. Often when you're planning a trip, you're going with someone else. You're, you know, collaborating with them. To me, it's how do you use the new technology to make that simpler and easier, but still empower the traveler themselves to get to plan?
Speaking about trust, Dara. I was reading an article on the whole car driverless and robotaxis.
Yeah
going on around the world, and it was saying that in San Francisco already 20% of the taxis are robo-taxis. I don't know if that's true, if it's-
Less than that, but yeah, it's.
They are saying, like, in the next 12 months to 15 months, it could be 50% of the taxis. I don't know if that's true or not, but that's what they're saying. That's what they're aiming. You have the drivers, the riders, the cities, and then a lot of people that have never tried that before. How do you build trust?
It, it's actually gonna take a much longer time there because right now, first of all, autonomous vehicles work. It's a spectacular product. These robot drivers are ultimately going to be safer than human drivers. They don't text, they don't get distracted, and they're continuously learning, right? They are, all of them are driving multiple lifetimes of driving experience.
Crazy
than human beings would. It's a great product. The cars are unbelievably expensive. You need compute, you need sensors, et cetera. These cars cost $200,000 +. It's going to take probably two generations to get these autonomous vehicles down to prices where they will be a significant percentage of trips. Right now, they're like less than 0.5% of trips. In the U.S. they're probably going to double, so in five years you may get to like, maybe get to 10%. It will take time, but it's worth the wait. Like, it totally is worth the wait. The way that we look at it is that just like I want every qualified, high, qualified, safe human driver on the platform, I want every qualified, safe robot driver on the platform.
We're working with Waymo and a number of other companies, Wayve, WeRide, Avride. There are probably 10 or so companies that are working in the mobility autonomous space. You can get an autonomous vehicle in Atlanta and Austin in the U.S., for example, in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, for example. There's this funny thing about technology, which is an experience that seems magical to begin with, gets rote really quickly. You know, I remember when I was at Expedia, I first used Uber and like, push a button, and it's like it was magical. Now it's like FNA. The ETA said four minutes and it's six minutes. You know, like how could that happen, right? It's the same with these.
We, don't worry. We cancel it. That thing.
Yeah, exactly. What's going on? It's the same with these AVs. Like you get in the AV and at first you're wide-eyed, like this is so cool. Two minutes later, you're texting, right? It is, once you get in these things, you trust it because they're phenomenal drivers. I do think that there is a problem that we are going to have to face as it relates to greater kind of AI and autonomous generally, is to your point, it's a lack of trust. But it's, you know, we talk about how awesome AI is as companies, et cetera. I don't know if it's making the lives of regular people better. I think that there's this disconnect with society in general as to, well, what's AI going to do for me? Not the company, et cetera.
Like there was this, Eric Schmidt was giving this graduation speech.
Yeah.
Mentioned AI. Chorus of boos from the kids.
Yeah.
I do think there's a greater trust problem as it relates to AI in society.
I agree.
I don't know what the solution is.
There was another commencement speaker who had the same thing happen.
Yeah.
It was two times in a week. I think there's a real, between that, the distrust of that, the questions on data centers. It's a real societal question about where it's going.
Yeah. Okay, one last question for you, and then we go to the fun facts and questions.
Yes.
Oh.
Ariane, you step in this CEO role in a special moment, in a demanding moment. What is the one leadership muscle that you have to build fast that you were not expecting?
I think it's the ability to go in, identify where there are problems and something's getting blocked, and to help the team unblock it. It sounds funny because you would think, okay, you know, you're stepping into a role that's got a big scale. Isn't this about leading at scale? What I realized is that, you can have a great strategy and set the culture and do all of that, but there can be blockages in a lot of different places in the organization. For me, it's role model, get in, figure it out. Is something blocking and keeping us from moving fast because there's an organizational issue, there's a cultural issue? Like, what is it? Then role modeling for others to say, "I expect all of you to go in. Is there a blockage?
Fix it, because the company needs to move fast. It's the ability to sort of look at the high-level strategy and where were we going, and also stay very grounded in how is the company operating and how do I make it better every day.
Good. Now you can relax. This is the fun part is starting now. Few questions. Try to answer quick, especially you, Ariane. What's the best piece of advice you ever receive about handling pressure? How do you handle pressure? One advice, each of you.
Actually, it came from a previous Explore, Billie Jean King. Pressure is a privilege. Don't see it as a negative. If you have pressure, it's a privilege.
I just drink.
They told me I couldn't say that type of thing.
It's amazing.
You are in Vegas. I know, I know, I know.
Wait a minute. There's some sexism in there because for a woman at a certain age, drinking has other effects.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's it. That's it. I don't wanna continue talking about that.
Please don't quote me on that.
For, for, for, for, let's, let's, let's-
You said fun.
let's be serious, please. let's next. Sorry.
You should just cut it off.
No.
I'm absolutely good.
No, no. This is not over. You cannot say Expedia, you cannot say Uber. First app you open in the morning, Dara?
Well, Uber. No?
No, you can't say Uber. Don't say anything.
I just, this is boring. Email. I instantly get on email, see what's going on.
Oh, podcast. I listen to podcasts on the way into the office.
Best AI prompt for personal use? Ariane?
Best what?
AI prompt for personal use, Ariane?
Tell me about the travel news of the day?
Every day you ask them, tell me about the travel industry?
Yeah.
Every day?
Yeah.
Okay. Well, they will tell you the same, no?
For me, it's actually not an AI prompt. I've started vibe coding and it's really cool. I've built my own to-do app and it's perfect for me. Like, it's been really fun. Takes time, but it's been really cool.
Very nice. In this last question, you cannot say the words, the answer cannot be France or Spain. Here is the question. Ariane, World Cup is coming. Who is going to win the next World Cup?
[Non-English content ]
You can't say France. You can't say France or Spain. Do you know there is a World Cup coming up next that soccer, football?
You, you-
Yes
I should refuse to answer that question.
I can't. My family will kill me if I say anything other than France.
Okay, that's it. You don't answer. Dara. By the way, Dara is.
Well, Iran is definitely not gonna win the World Cup, I can tell you that.
Yeah, we can talk about that. Dara, just for everybody, he was very happy. He was listening to me a few minutes ago. At the same time he was watching Arsenal playing, well.
Man City.
everybody on Arsenal. Yeah, everybody happy.
Yeah.
That's how much he care about the questions I was asking him. You cannot say Spain, you cannot say France.
I want England to win. I'm a big English Premier fan, and it's about time. They've got the talent. I think this is their year.
You can ask the question to me.
Yeah, what about you, if you can't choose Spain?
It's Spain.
You can't choose Spain.
I can. I'm asking the questions.
You're asking the questions.
I can. Of course I can.
Yeah.
Okay. Well, that's all. Thank you so much, everybody. More fun coming up. Thank you so much.
Please welcome Chief Product Officer Expedia Group, Shilpa Ranganathan.
Good afternoon. It's so great to be here today. How inspiring was it to hear from Ariane and Dara talking about how they're leading through the most pivotal moments in technology and travel? Now earlier, Ariane shared where travel is headed. What I want to show you today is how we are building for that future, creating seamless and personalized journeys for travelers and turning that into real measurable growth for you. Because for more than three decades, we've learned from billions of traveler interactions across our marketplace. Every single search, every booking, every itinerary change, and every in-trip moment. All of this gives us something incredibly powerful, a really deep understanding of traveler intent, behavior, and rapidly changing expectations. Now, the real question is: how do we turn that into an advantage for you? First, we're gonna help you win the right travelers.
Not just more demand, but demand that is valuable to your business. Second, we reduce friction for your teams with platform investments, simpler servicing, fraud prevention, and tools that just work. Third, we help you grow faster with new intelligent products and capabilities to help you move quickly and capture more of that opportunity. All of this comes together in how we use insights and technology to help you grow your business on our trusted platform. In this next era of travel, winning will not just come from having the inventory. It will come from the intelligence that is used to connect the right traveler to the right experience at the right moment. All bookings begin with the understanding of the traveler, and this starts with knowing what travelers value most at every step of the journey.
Today's travelers expect every part of the trip to feel easy, from discovery to booking to support. This is why we're weaving complete end-to-end experiences directly into our brands. Across our consumer brands and our B2B network, we reach travelers in more than 170 countries, and our sites and apps have more than 1 billion average monthly searches. When traveler behavior changes, we see it early, and we help you respond faster with the right pricing, right targeting, right content, and the right offers to capture that demand. Here's how we're gonna bring that to life. We know every trip is as unique as the traveler behind it. What I want to do today is share a couple of examples of how we create personalized experiences for two key audience segments, families and business travelers, and what does this mean for you.
Let's start with families. It's one of the most valuable audience segments in travel. On Expedia, families make up nearly 40% of leisure travel in the U.S., and they book about 40% more trips than non-family travelers. These folks plan early, they value convenience, and they compare extensively. Let's look at some of the features we're investing in for them. I'm going to start with family highlights. It really helps show your property up in more relevant searches. Properties that keep family-friendly amenities current in Partner Central see over a 20% boost in bookings. Now let's talk Bundle and Save. We spotlight smart package deals that make it really easy for families to book more of that trip. We can combine stays, cars, and more into a single better value experience.
When you load package rates, we can show families clearer savings and help them drive higher value multi-item trips. We're actively promoting these deals through our Bundle and Save advertising campaigns to increase their visibility and expand your reach and exposure. We know family trips can be a big expense, so travelers want payment options that feel easy and familiar, whether that's paying in their own currency, using payment methods that they already trust, or distributing their costs with Buy Now, Pay Later. We have support for over 40+ currencies and a 100+ payment types. We remove all of the friction at checkout so more trips get completed and partners like you benefit from bigger trips, more bookings, and more simpler, transparent payouts. Families also book more complete trips. They value the convenience of doing all of this in one single place.
Multi-item trips now represent over 25% of bookings on Expedia, and we are uniquely positioned to win that segment. Last quarter alone, we saw more than 3 million multi-item trips booked, and travelers who book multiple components deliver over 35% more value than single item bookers. These folks have more than double the repeat rate. What this means is we're not just helping you win one booking, we're helping you win more of that trip. Now let's look at business travelers. Many of us are business travelers too. We want efficiency, we want flexibility, we want a consistent experience. Business travelers now represent more than a third of Hotels.com's demand and convert at roughly three times the rate of leisure travelers. They book over five trips per year and are less price sensitive. Better yet, over 80% of their check-ins happen Sunday through Wednesday.
These are the nights that are the hardest to fill, and this is premium and consistent demand. That's why, coming soon to Hotels.com, we're announcing a dedicated end-to-end business travel experience. Here's how it's gonna help you win. Business profiles will make it easier for travelers to set up work trip preferences upfront, so they can find the right stay and rates, helping your business-ready hotels get in front of the right guests and drive more bookings. Quick rebook turns a great stay into the default choice. It makes repeat bookings almost effortless. Lastly, a personalized shopping experience that gives you access to what really matters for business travel, ease of getting to the office, reliable Wi-Fi, free breakfast, and a workspace. If you want to show up well for this segment, the simplest step is really the most important.
Make sure your property details are accurate and kept up to date because when you do, you're not just getting one booking, you're building a repeat business with travelers who tend to come back again and again. When you offer business rates, we can surface your property to help turn the short-term, short-booking window travelers into loyal guests. Now, it doesn't stop with family or business traveler segments. We're applying the exact same playbook across many other high-value segments, so we can match you with the right travelers who are the perfect fit, all of this through a single connection to our marketplace. Now let's talk about one of the fastest ways to accelerate your growth on our platform, advertising. Now, many of you here are already using our advertising solutions, including on-site and off-platform display ads, visibility boosters like Accelerator, TravelAds, and flight sponsored listings.
We're continuing to make these tools more powerful and easier to use. With our new audience targeting bid modifier inside TravelAds, you can now put budget directly behind the audiences that matter the most to your business. This isn't just about more visibility, but it's really visibility with the right set of travelers, and we're seeing really strong results. TravelAds deliver up to 9.8 x incremental return on ad spend. This is one of your fastest levers that you can pull to reach more of your highest value travelers. Behind all of this is a powerful platform for both travelers and for your teams. We operate one of the most complete travel marketplaces in the world, spanning nearly 3.7 million properties.
With a single connection, you can tap into our trusted infrastructure and diversified global demand across all of our brands, Expedia, Hotels.com, Vrbo, and our B2B network. I want to talk to you about two key pillars in our trusted platform, servicing and fraud protection. Our platform is designed not just to drive demand, but also to make your day-to-day operations easier. We've heard you, when something goes wrong in travel, it creates real pressure on your teams. We're investing in better servicing that catches issues earlier, enables travelers to self-serve, and reduces manual effort. In just one month, we proactively flagged more than 40,000 issues before they became problems, and today, nearly half our traveler issues are resolved through self-service. When you do need us, partner satisfaction is above 90%.
What this means is fewer calls to your front desk, fewer escalations to your teams, and more time to focus on your guests and your strategy. Just this past March, we launched our first voice agentic experience for vacation rental partners, with lodging partners coming later this year. We're not trying to automate away the human side of travel. What we're really doing is using a hybrid model where technology handles the repeatable work so that your teams can focus on where they can add the most value. This exact same principle applies to fraud and payments as well. When they work well, we don't notice them, and that's exactly the point.
Last year, we prevented over $2.6 billion in fraud attempts across our platform. More than $500 million in booking fraud attempts were blocked in a recent quarter, and 94% of those were auto-prevented. When we act as merchant of record, we do the heavy lifting. We handle refunds, chargebacks, and payment servicing. Your teams have reduced administrative costs and your brand reputation is protected. That's what we mean by trusted platform. More protection, less friction, and fewer headaches for your teams. You may have noticed something. We've spent the last several minutes talking about personalization, smarter matching, better servicing, and I haven't said the word. What's the word?
AI.
Yes, AI. Oh, that was timed perfectly. Thank you, team. The reality is AI is already powering many of the experiences that I've shared so far. For us, AI isn't really just a feature, it's how we help travelers make better decisions and how we help you run your businesses more efficiently. Now, what we've learned is simple. Travelers don't want AI for the sake of AI. They want it to meet them where they are with experiences that feel personal, relevant, and trustworthy. That's exactly how we're building it. We're taking a human first mindset, focusing the real needs of both our partners and our travelers because we see both sides of the marketplace. Ariane and Dara both referred to this, none of this works without trust. In the age of AI, trust comes down to one singular thing, and that is data quality.
We ground our AI in verified data from trusted sources, including the content and data you provide us, verified reviews, your real inventory, and policies. This allows us to reduce the risk of hallucination and deliver accurate answers. We've always said that content matters. Inaccurate content is the number one detractor for travelers, and we actually see this. We see significant drop-offs in customer repeat when we don't get it right. In an AI-powered world, this matters even more because content quality becomes match quality. The partners who win will be the ones whose content clearly answers who their property is right for, what makes the property special, and why. Please keep your content up to date, and once we open up AI tools for dynamic content, the action for your teams is to inundate us with it.
This is what AI uses to match your inventory to the right guest. When you invest in high quality, up-to-date content, our AI and your guests will both reward you for it. Our AI platform also unlocks what's next. I think Ariane alluded to this. It's not a single chatbot. It's a connected system of specialized agents that will eventually work together as one unified agent that moves seamlessly across both the partner and the traveler journey. Let's look at what this means for you. For the hotel partners in the room, we know Partner Central is powerful, but it can feel complex, and so we're making it easier to use and way more intelligent. Today, we're announcing three partner agents. First, we're announcing a new AI assistant in Partner Central.
It helps you identify performance issues, surface opportunities, and take actions faster, like fixing issues that impact your visibility or intelligently recommending promotions that capitalize on demand all within your defined parameters. Later this year, we will introduce two more agents: content agent that scans traveler questions and reviews to identify missing or unclear information and lets you fix it from one place, and an autonomous distribution agent that speeds up onboarding by pre-filling listings from trusted sources. When we onboard your newest properties, they can go live faster. There's three agents, but they share goals. More time saved and faster action inside Partner Central to help you grow your business. AI also helps with commercial recommendations. Last year, partners executed more than 1.4 million AI-powered recommendations, driving roughly 9% more transactions and about $6.5 billion dollars in incremental revenue.
Remember we talked about those family package rates? Hotels that followed our suggestions and loaded package rates saw 30% higher booking value, longer booking windows, and longer stays. We're using AI to help you make smarter commercial decisions every day, deciding which rates and offers to show and where to invest your next marketing dollar. Now, just like we have these agents for partners, we're also launching agents for our travelers. We're bringing AI into every stage of the trip to help with finding the right property, helping customers have the confidence that their choice is right, and servicing to make sure it all goes as smoothly as possible. Let's start with finding. This is all about AI filters, natural language search, and activity planning. Let's start with AI filters. This is already live on Hotels.com.
Travelers are nearly 50% more likely to book because we're able to help them connect with the right properties faster. We're also introducing natural language tools to make search easier and more human. On Vrbo, we're announcing a feature where travelers can now search for a pet-friendly lake house with a dock near Austin to find a property with their exact preferences. In the coming months, we're also gonna launch natural language search on Hotels.com and on Expedia. Lastly, coming soon to Expedia, we're introducing our AI activity planner, where travelers can describe the trip they want, and it instantly turns open-ended ideas into a personalized bookable itinerary. There's more opportunities for you to reach travelers with the right information when they're seeking the right property for their trip. Let's now talk about how these agents are helping travelers book with more confidence.
Our Hotels.com confidence agents, like our newly enhanced Property Expert and soon-to-launch AI compare agents, let travelers ask human language questions, "Is the pool kid-friendly?" "Is the Wi-Fi good enough for video calls?" Get real cited answers pulled from your property details and reviews. Travelers who used an early version of Property Expert came back almost three times more often and converted at more than twice the rate of non-users. What this means is fewer pre-stay questions to your teams and more guests arriving with the right expectations. For servicing, we are launching an enhanced AI help center later this year. This will help travelers manage unexpected challenges before and during the trip. Adding AI to our in-trip support tools drove a 30% increase in self-service use and an 18% lift in 90-day repeat rates. Across all these experiences, the pattern is the same.
Better information leads to better outcomes and stronger repeat demand back to you. The result is happier travelers, stronger engagement, better reviews, and more repeat business. So far, everything I've shown you is in the product or coming in the next couple of months. I'd like you to imagine a future where a travel companion is with you throughout your trip, powered by trusted AI, maybe in your pocket, maybe on your phone, even in your glasses, providing always-on assistance. Let's bring this to life. Imagine a traveler, let's call him Aaron, on his trip in Las Vegas.
Hey, Expedia. What should I do today?
Hey, Aaron. You had an early flight. How about a cup of coffee and stroll around the fountain?
Perfect. That's exactly what I need.
Aria Patisserie is nearby. I'll guide you there.
What shows are happening near me tonight?
Cirque du Soleil's O has a show this evening and is highly recommended by Expedia travelers.
That sounds perfect. Book it.
You're all set. Your ticket to O tonight is booked and added to your Expedia itinerary. You have about an hour before your show. It's time to get ready. Head up the Strip and take a left once you reach the giant O sign. Head into the Bellagio and follow signs for O. Let me know how it goes. How was O? Wanna leave a review?
Yeah, that was incredible. Five stars. What should we do tomorrow, Expedia?
Aaron's on our team. I told him he'll be a celebrity after this. You should try to find him. With Expedia by his side throughout the trip, Aaron arrives at your property prepared with all of his questions already answered. He's prompted to book experiences, gets timely reminders, and continues engaging throughout his stay. What you may have noticed was that he interacts with your property and experiences throughout the trip, not just at the moment of booking. Whether it's in their pocket or through new interfaces, our goal is to be there for our customers in moments that matter. By the way, this isn't a distant vision. It's already starting to come to life, and you can experience it today in our global travel marketplace across the hall.
I would love for you to try it for yourself and help us shape what comes next. Our North Star is simple, an always-on intelligent companion for travelers and a smarter revenue engine for you. AI has re-energized Expedia Group and unlocked entirely new ways for us to connect you with the right traveler at the right moment. In this time of rapid change, our role is simple, to be your safe harbor, helping you navigate complexity, reduce friction, and get more value from our marketplace. Travelers trust us with their most meaningful memories, and you trust us with your business. We take this responsibility very seriously, thank you for your partnership, for your trust, and for building the future of travel with us. Thank you.
Please welcome Founder, Expedia, Co-founder and Co-Executive Chairman, Zillow Group, Rich Barton and Chairman, Expedia Group, Barry Diller.
Oh, this is, I think this chair is probably too comfortable, so I'm throwing this out.
We will not be falling asleep, Barry.
No chance. Rich.
Yes.
It was more than 30 years ago. There you are, a little young snapper at Microsoft. Where did you come up with this thing?
Kinda like you were young when you were at ABC doing Movie of the Week.
Yeah.
I was young at Microsoft, and the internet was sort of happening or beginning to happen, and I don't see as far into the future as you do, Barry, but it seemed obvious to me, that the internet was going to accelerate, reconfigure, disrupt many industries. I was a frequent business traveler, and I remember calling the Microsoft travel desk and chatting with usually the woman on the other end of the phone, and I said, "Okay, I need to go to Chicago, then New York, then Atlanta, then back to Seattle." I hear the click, clicking of the keys on the keyboard, and all I wanted to do personally was kinda jump through the phone. I knew she had a computer. I wanted to look at the computer and do it myself, and this notion of giving we, the people, control.
Don't so early be against women.
I'm really, I'm very pro-woman.
I know, I know.
Anyway, the idea that I had was give power to the people. Expedia was born of basically that story inside of Microsoft. It ended at Microsoft, interestingly, with an IATA card. Do you guys, do we still have IATA cards in the industry?
Well, what is it?
It's a little driver's license looking thing that travel agents and people in the industry used to carry back in the 1990s. Maybe they still do today.
What did it do for them?
Discounts.
Oh, ah.
FAM, FAM discounts. Are there still FAM trips? We still have those in the industry?
Yes.
All right, all right. This is why people are in the industry. Steve Ballmer, do you guys know Steve Ballmer? The Microsoft, one of the early Microsoft guys, he's now the owner of the Clippers, didn't have any hair. He was my boss, I was trying to convince him.
What has hair got to do with it?
Nothing. Nothing, Barry, nothing. Steve, I said to Steve, "Steve, you need to spin Expedia out and let me go on my own. We can be the largest seller of travel in the world, we can give power to the people. You don't wanna be a travel agent anyway, do you?" I had pasted his picture over my face on the IATA card, and I handed it to him. I said, "Do you wanna be a travel agent?" He said, "No, no," as only Steve can do. He's like, "Go, be free, spin out." However, he said, "Can I keep the IATA card? Because a little bit of your hair is peeking out over the top." Anyway, we spun out.
Yes, you know, you know, for years afterwards, every time I would see Bill Gates, he would, like, say, "You stole my company." "How could you take Expedia away from Microsoft?
Well, you did the deal. How did you do that deal? It was over my head.
I went to Steve Ballmer. I said the same thing. I said, "You don't wanna be in this business. You got all these other things that scale, et cetera. This is, like, this little tiny thing. You don't want that." I couldn't believe it, 'cause usually if you do that, you go after something for somebody, they say, "Well, thank you very much, go home, leave me alone." Instead, he said, "You're totally right." We made the deal in, like, honestly, three minutes.
Yeah, I found out later, it was so funny.
Here we are.
Here we are. We're in the midst of the negotiation. This is very early in Expedia's life. You know, we're looking at Expedia now, and all of you, and these products.
Yeah, Expedia was losing money at that stage.
It was losing money. We were public, but losing a little bit of money.
Yeah.
Do, yeah, doing okay. I remember calling Ballmer in the, at the end stages of the deal, which we should talk about the deal, and saying, "Steve, we don't wanna do this. We wanna stay independent. It's great." I was, it was late at night, I was in some hotel room somewhere, and Steve was like, "You made your bed, Rich.
Sounds like Ballmer.
I do wanna bring one thing up in the early formation story. We launched in 1996, 30 years ago. Happy birthday, Expedia, and thank you all of you for your partnership. Do you remember the period of time when that I know you do. We're in the middle of negotiations, we've negotiated price, we have contract, and 9/11 hit.
We had a signed agreement.
We had a signed agreement.
Along comes 9/11, and of course, there is no travel. We had a material, excuse me, adverse change clause, kind of common. This was definitely a material change. We had the option to get out of the deal. My colleague said, "How can you go forward and pay," I think it was about $1 billion, something like that, for the-
It was the first tranche, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
For the whatever. They said, "There is no travel. You're buying a travel company and there's no travel. Are you crazy?" We're all sitting around, I don't know who said it, but someone in the room, it was not me, said, "If there's life, there's travel." I heard that, I said, "Yeah," We closed the deal.
That, had so much respect.
Whatever.
Yeah.
I mean-
No, I did. I thought there was a material adverse change clause, which is the famous act of God clause when you're negotiating contract. I was like, "This doesn't constitute a material adverse change." Barry, you stepped up, and you basically said, "We got bigger problems if there's no travel.
Well, for sure.
Yeah.
It really is true.
Yeah.
One of the things that I think it's just, first of all, by the way, it's so great to be here with all of you, 'cause, you know, your support over these 30 years has allowed us to build a really huge enterprise. On behalf of its founder, and Dara, who helped us along at one period, and certainly Ariane, who helps us every day go forward, I really just wanna say thank you. All right, what are we gonna do now?
I've got an idea. You all know Barry in the context of the travel industry, but Barry really is, Howard Stern may say he's the king of all media, but Barry really is the actual king of all media. By the time he even got around to talking to me at Expedia, he had had multiple careers in every phase of the media industry, from TV at ABC, through building the Fourth Network.
for Rupert Murdoch.
Yes
at Fox, to running Paramount
However, not Fox Broadcasting.
Not Fox Broadcasting. Yeah. Running Paramount Pictures. How, you were 32 years old or something?
Yeah, I was.
I know this because I read his fantastic book, Who Knew. I highly recommend that. It was also lore. As I said, I think Barry's always been able to see quite a bit further down the road. You really are a vision-
You're gonna ask me some futuristic question for which I will have no clue?
No. No. I'm gonna say that you realized media, the media industry, the film and television, then cable, you did QVC and HSN in cable. You realized that the action was happening somewhere else, it felt like. It felt to me like.
What I had actually, quickly, was an epiphany. Very, you know, a big-time word, very few real applications.
Right.
I saw this primitive convergence of televisions, this was at QVC.
Yep
of televisions and computers and phones coming and working together. The thing that was like wow to me, was I saw screens. Screens to me were for telling stories. That's what I'd done all my life. Here, I saw a screen that was being used interactively.
Yep.
I didn't really know what its application was gonna be. This is early 1990s, three years before the internet. I knew screens were not just gonna be used to tell stories, and that is why I really switched kind of out of I'd been in the movie business for 20 years, and I said, "Nope, I'm going to the wilds of Pennsylvania to QVC to figure out what to do with these screens.
What did people, what did your peers think of that?
They thought I was nuts.
Nuts.
They all thought, I mean, this kind of Hollywood person is now going to a home shopping network? What has happened to his brain, much less anything else? I kind of, I was happy at that. I've always liked the idea of people thinking I would fail, or that what I was doing made no sense. Couple of reasons. First of all, it kind of allows you to work without distraction, 'cause nobody really wants to be around you. 'Cause they think it ain't gonna work out. And the other thing of course is, if you're discounted, look at what you get to do if you pull it off. That was a period where, again, luckily, 'cause I did not see the internet coming, I had a little bit of fluency in my fingertips about interactivity.
Yeah.
The internet comes along in 1995, and I was like, I was ready to twerk.
Yep. Well, you twerked. I mean, Is that the logic that brought you to my door? Tell me what leap you made from the interactive epiphany and then the experience you had with HSN to Expedia.
It was, for me, it was to me so obvious. I thought, "What is the easiest, simplest, most obvious thing for the internet to colonize? Travel.
Yeah.
Trillions and trillions and thousands and trillions of individual little things that could actually, with the technology available then, could, as you say, be pulled out of the computer.
Yep
into a consumer's hands.
Yes.
As soon as I, as I thought that, really, I 'Cause I didn't know, it wasn't like Expedia came into my head. Really right after that, I'm browsing around something, and I see a little ad for this little embryonic Expedia, and I said, "Whoa, honey, there it is.
Yep. Yeah. It's fascinating. I think we're lucky to be in this industry, and I'll still count myself as part of it, because it's so fun and entertaining. I mean, one of the insights that I had when I founded the company was that the individual traveler treats travel shopping, at least the non-business travel shopping, travel shopping as entertainment.
Well, it's also romantic.
It's romantic. It's sport. It's sport. It's aspirational. One of the first ads we ran at Expedia was a print ad, was somebody at a computer at night in their pajamas, in the glow of the CRT of the-
Right
of the screen. I can't remember exactly what it was, but it was like, "Expedia never sleeps.
One of the first ads at QVC that I took out, I took out a full-page ad in The New York Times, it simply said the following: "Buy underwear in your underwear.
We literally had an underwear one, too. It's so funny.
Who came up with the with the Expedia end sound? I can't do it.
Dot com.
Yes. Thank you. You did that well.
expedia.com. We heard it in the.
Yeah, yeah.
That was so good. It's too bad dot com means nothing anymore. It was the team. I honestly don't recall very, you know, the creative process. It was great. We didn't have a lot of budget. Ballmer didn't give me much budget. We had to be creative, but it was such a creative product to work with, and so much fun. We knew that the average traveler would spend 100 times more time travel planning with Expedia than they did previously. That has played out incredibly. I mean, interestingly, Ariane or Shilpa was talking about the advertising business.
I mean, it makes a lot of sense that Expedia now has a big media advertising business because of how much time, non-productive time consumers spend dreaming about travel.
Of course.
Yes. Okay. All right. You saw the internet disruption coming with Expedia. We weren't working together at Expedia then, but the mobile disruption came. The next, kind of the next internet was a big set of new things that were scary. Mobile came along, that was new and scary. Of course, Expedia born at Microsoft was full of technology people, and was able to create a big arc for its partners into which all its partners could go and know even though they were scared about this disruption, they could actually sail safely into the future. I think that happened with mobile as well. I do believe we're feeling that way. We, the room, and probably we individually, are feeling that way relative to AI too.
Oh, God.
We couldn't-
The dread subject.
We couldn't get away from it, though. We don't have to go there.
No, no, we'll go.
Yeah. I
See what we can make of it.
The aliens, the new aliens have just, you know, they've just arrived. They're on the planet. They're at the kind of, "Take me to your leader" stage. We're all asking ourselves questions like, "What is real?" Will any business or person survive the invasion? I'm personally optimistic, and I assume you are too, because I know you. I am curious how you are feeling about this new technology magic, this new wizardry that has just showed up relative to Expedia and relative to your other businesses.
Well, you know, the reason I said dread, it's obviously not that. It is the next revolution for sure, with truly unknown consequences. I also think when something is kind of out of everybody's mouth at the same time, and the hype around it and all the, quote, "people" who are figuring out exactly what the terrible future might be or the great future might be, while all of us humans just have to go about our kind of daily tasks. I try at least to keep it into, you know, some at least narrow band of thinking. Which is, sure, it's gonna help us in lots of ways. There's no question about that, and probably a lot of unknown ways.
It is not a replacement for human activity, and I do not believe it will be. Actually, one of our companies, it's called IAC, just changed its name to People Inc. A part of the reason I did it is partly because we own a group of magazines, one of them People. I also wanted to, in a sense, kind of say, "People, let us not forget that. Let us not think that all of the actions of every possible kind are going to be led by artificial intelligence." Artificial is a really good word.
Yeah.
It is, it is however smart it's gonna get to be, until we are the simulation, which may come. Short of that, I do not wanna be led by anybody, certainly much less tech lords who are imposing their own, their own almost They're essentially wanting to take over everything.
Yeah.
Look at what it's done for all of the things that we do in a daily life and all of our businesses. It is not. It will replace jobs. Other jobs are going to get created. It is not the human equation.
Yep.
I keep going back to that in kind of every iteration that I come across with regard to that word I'm never gonna say again.
You know, hallelujah, I thought that might be where you would go, and I thought that might be behind. I hadn't chatted with you about it, but I thought that might be behind the People rebrand.
Yeah.
Even the people move, even the move into, you know, the magazines. You're a contrarian, you're usually always one step ahead, I really took note. I also took note when IAC now People moved into to take a big piece of ownership in Las Vegas.
Yes, thank you for all.
Yes
being in one of MGM's properties, one of our really nice properties, the ARIA. I hope it's treating you all very well. If it isn't, yeah, I am open to complaints. Although I don't really want to hear them.
It's fun walking around the hotels with Barry. He's, you know. Investing in people and the convention of people and in entertainment and in sporting, you know, speaking of which, it's amazing.
Yeah, one of the things that was so obvious to me.
Yeah, yeah.
is that I thought there is no technology that's gonna get between a person going to one of our properties. That is not possible. While every day I have to worry about disintermediation in our advertising businesses, certainly in Expedia, et cetera. At MGM Resorts, I don't have to think about really other than applications of AI to make the business run a little better. I don't have to give a second's thought to any technology actually getting between me and my customer. The same, by the way, for all of you who have hotels. I mean, you're impervious to.
Yes
anything that comes from technology. Right now, as was mentioned in the last thing, when, you know, people go on stage and talk about AI, they get booed, et cetera, tech, which used to have a very optimistic and, you know, most people were big cheerleaders, certainly really kind of when the iPhone came out, and the emotional connection to the iPhone. We're fond of it, and thought well of technology. Silicon Valley was a good place.
Full of heroes like me.
Yeah, exactly. It had wonderful aspirations. Right now you kind of ask people and they go, "Oh, no, I don't like that place. I think there are a lot of very odd folk coming out of that environment.
It's interesting, Barry. I told you yesterday, I'm a Stanford University trustee, and have been for four or five years now. I'm an undergraduate engineer from Stanford, where I met my co-founder of Zillow, who you know, and an early Expedia friend, Lloyd Frink. Okay. At Stanford, for the first time in 15 years, we are seeing a decline in computer science engineering degrees.
Wow.
As a percentage of total degrees.
That's extraordinary.
We are seeing a decline. I will tell you, I have been developing a thesis since I saw ChatGPT in November of 2022. I have had a thesis that the humanities are coming back, that humanity is coming back. At Stanford, we called them the techies and the fuzzies, and they were always at odds with each other. The techies have been winning for the last 15 years, and I actually believe we are entering a revenge of the fuzzies period.
I mean, what a great thing, though, to think that the humanities, that out of, I would say, some tech overreach, that actually people are caring about the human condition.
It's amazing to me. We have kind of forgotten to think philosophically and intellectually about what it means to be human until the aliens have arrived. Now we're actually thinking about it and we're teaching it and the kids are interested in it. Anyway, I'm very excited. Literature's coming back. Kids wanna read books. Oh, my God. It's so exciting to me.
All good.
Okay. This is an interesting segue into an aspect of you that I really respect and it differentiates you from, you know, other business visionaries who've been very successful. You don't call yourself a creative. You know, you downplay your own personal creativity. In almost response to that, I think you have developed a way of cultivating creativity around you.
I hope so.
I think throughout your career. You were one of those business-oriented people who so loved and respected the creatives, and understood how creatives are different from other people, okay? How they need to be care and fed and watered in a bit different way.
Protected.
Protected.
Yeah.
Yes.
For sure.
Because they get preyed upon.
Yeah, yeah.
by other folks.
They're also, they're also a little crazy, and, you know, good crazy. I mean, sometimes bad crazy, for sure, but generally good crazy. Good crazy needs nurturing. It needs an environment of protection. It needs an environment where you can make mistakes, 'cause if you can't, if you're doing anything, it Most creative things are kind of, let's call it editorial judgment, which is yes to this, no to that, in the kind of process. In doing so, there's no formula, no AI, he said quickly, I'll make this bet. No AI is gonna better the ability of someone to recognize a good idea or a bad idea. You're gonna make mistakes, you have to have an environment where, you know, mistakes are encouraged. Hopefully not the same dumb mistake after the other.
Good individual mistakes are a joy.
I really respect that. You always talk about how you just kinda plodded along and put one dumb foot in front of the other. You know, I don't think you're fishing for compliments when you say that. I think you believe that.
Yeah, I do.
there's nothing dumb about the steps you've taken. I guess on the creative side, I also observe and respect and try to emulate to the extent I can, your aesthetic eye. Part of your creative cultivation has meant you actually understand what beauty is and what beautiful things are. You know, I observe in your, even in your business life, the world that you've created around you is a wonderfully beautiful place. You built beautiful buildings.
Yeah.
I'll highlight one thing. You're a very philanthropic and community-oriented person as well, another thing I really respect.
Gee, thank you. This is enough of this.
But-
Let's get to something different.
I want to bring up one thing, because people may not know this, and it's sort of travel oriented, who out there has been to Manhattan and been to this wonderful little island.
Oh
On the Hudson River?
Yeah. It was I mean.
That's-
Well, no, it was really an incredible journey. It took 10 years to build it. We had enormous adversity. All sorts of things, people said, "You can't do it," then of course, we're driving 287 piles into the Hudson River at depths no one knew upfront, et cetera. 10 years after we started, there it is. What gives me and my family so much pleasure is seeing people leave the city on the bridges to get to it, you see them expectant of something, then when they come back, they're smiling and they're happy. How could you do anything better than that?
Well, the city.
No, no. I honestly Thank you, but.
that's just part of your philanthropy, but, you know, creating beauty for people and giving it to the community and punching through all the assholes that were trying to stop you from doing that, I mean, it's just-
Yeah, yeah.
it was a, it was a-
Well, one of the things that's true, which I think is just generally true, is you can't really remember pain.
Yeah.
I don't remember the painful part.
Now you have a beautiful thing.
We have a good thing.
Yeah.
We're starting a project in L.A. where we have Our family got 100 acres on top of a mountain, and we are going to build some a kind of public art that I hope, dare I say it, that will rival, in iconography, the Hollywood Sign in L.A., and that's our next project.
Really?
That is so much fun to try and create.
Can we bring actors and all of the crews.
Yeah, yeah.
back to L.A. as a result?
We'll see what we come up with. Yeah, we'll see what we do.
I hope, I certainly hope so. Okay. I'm being given the land the plane, Rich signal, I'll bring it back to Expedia to close. There was a picture of me and my firstborn child.
Yeah
in Ariane's presentation. What Ariane didn't say, we hadn't met at this point yet. This is November of 1999, when Expedia went public, spun out of Microsoft, 138 of us did that. It was crazy. I was 32 years old. Totally crazy, but a lot of fun. My wife was pregnant. Sarah was pregnant during the whole roadshow and the whole wind-up period. I had been on the roadshow with our CFO and others for two and a half weeks, which doesn't happen anymore I don't think. I think it's all on Zoom. I was exhausted, and my wife was still three weeks away from her due date, but I decided to call the roadshow short a day or two because we were overbooked. The IPO was gonna be so successful, we all knew that.
Of course, dogpoo.com could've gone public in 1999 in the internet bubble. Don't let that get in the way of a good story. I came back a night early, and it was late night, I crawled into bed with my wife, and my wife said to me, she kinda felt something going on, and she said, "If he's born tomorrow, do we really have to name him Expedia?" Which I had promised to my team long ago, if he was born on the day of the IPO, I would call him Expedia. Four hours later, she was in labor, and she was laboring in the hospital while Expedia was going public. We had brought a TV with CNBC going into the labor and delivery room and we were following the action.
I was not in New York with the team.
Well, how's Expedia doing, your child?
Speedy. Speedy. We call him Speedy now. He is doing fantastically. He's not 30 years old. That was the 30 was when we launched 1.0, but he's 27 years old, and he's, You, I told you this, he just got engaged to be married.
Oh, congratulations.
We're hoping for grandkids soon. Anyway, I wanna close. Thank you very much, Barry. This has been a lot of fun. I wanna close by turning back to you all and saying Expedia is this big arc, okay? We are, I'm saying we. I mean, it's not we anymore.
It is you.
we are nothing, we are nothing, Expedia is nothing without its partners, and we've always had a really firm grasp on having great partnerships, and we know we'd do nothing without you all. The technology, the scary technology stuff that always seems to happen, and it's certainly happening right now, you know, once again, at its root, Expedia is a technology company and understands this stuff, and I firmly believe that the AI revolution is an accelerant to what Expedia.
It is.
is doing, it is an accelerant and a highlighter, like the humanities in general, it is a highlight for the travel industry in particular. I think the travel industry globally has great prospects in the age of AI.
I think that's completely true, and I would, of course, yes, thank you all for decades of being part of it and being supportive. I'd also like to say the organization of Expedia, which has evolved over the period, and people have come and people have gone. I, you could say, "Well, of course he's gonna say it," I say it with such conviction. The current group, led by Ariane, who is just a truly wonderful leader of a company. Yes, for sure. Particularly this kind of company. Her and her travel leadership team are just so first-rate. I wanna thank them, I wanna thank you. I'm glad Rich and I could be here.
Thanks for inviting me.
I wish you a really nice couple of days. Thank you.