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Tripadvisor has begun a trial to power some travel-related answers on the AI search engine Perplexity.
Perplexity is a startup competitor to platforms like ChatGPT. The company last month raised $500 million at a valuation of $9 billion, according to a report by Bloomberg.
This is Perplexity’s first partnership with a travel company, according to a spokesperson. And it’s also Tripadvisor’s first partnership with an AI search engine, according to Rahul Todkar, head of data and AI for Tripadvisor.
The partnership focuses on sharing Tripadvisor data that’s largely unavailable to third-party search engines, including information about its users’ habits. It also includes Tripadvisor links to hotels, restaurants, and Viator experiences, as well as AI-generated summaries of user reviews for those businesses.
The data sharing is meant to help Perplexity’s AI generate richer, more personalized travel search results, Todkar said, and builds on the publicly available content that all search engines can access, like travel blogs.
More features will be released over the next three years, the companies said.
Tripadvisor may also consider similar partnerships with other AI search engines in the future, depending on how the trial with Perplexity goes, Todkar said.
Richer Content
Tripadvisor is sharing data from business listings, including AI review summaries, ratings, photos, and details like operating hours. The AI review summaries on Tripadvisor compile common themes and details from user reviews into a single description on business listing webpages.
The AI summaries are an example of info that’s not generally available to search engines, meaning platforms like Perplexity can’t easily grab those details to inform results.
In order for a search engine like Perplexity to have a full database of Tripadvisor’s info, the company would need to scrape the data, store it, and run its own AI model on top of it. Because Tripadvisor has all of this information, the company is able to easily share the data with Perplexity.
The commercial terms include data licensing and commissions agreements. That means Perplexity pays Tripadvisor for the data, and Perplexity gets a commission if a user makes a booking through a Tripadvisor link that’s presented in search results.
Personalized Travel Results
Todkar, who used to work for LinkedIn, said the social media website makes specific recommendations about who to connect with based on the connections in a user’s existing network. He believes that AI could make travel recommendations using similar logic: If users with similar interests like this hotel, then you probably will too. That type of data network is known in tech as a user graph.
The Tripadvisor brand has been struggling — and some industry leaders question how much longer it will exist, especially with the changing nature of search. But Todkar sees value in the large swath of data that the company has gathered since it was founded nearly 25 years ago.
Industry leaders also believe that traditional search engine optimization (SEO) will be a thing of the past, so partnerships could be a way that companies like Tripadvisor can ensure that the brand still shows up in search results.
“A billion-plus reviews and contributions — that’s a substantial corpus of data from which you can learn and understand and make these kinds of recommendations and insights,” Todkar said in an interview with Skift. “The foundation of data, the insights, and the user graph becomes even more important, so the role of Tripadvisor is going to be even more important in that context.”
Much of the data sharing at first involves hotels, restaurants, some experiences through Viator, and the AI review summaries. Next, Tripadvisor wants to push users from searching to booking.
If a Perplexity search leads to a result with data from Tripadvisor, then the result should include a logo and links to the Tripadvisor websites.
The trial could also lead to Tripadvisor joining Perplexity’s advertising program, which launched late last year.
While there have been questions around how AI search engines plan to sell advertising to travel companies, Perplexity was the first to say it’s experimenting with a program. The company has struck deals with some companies but none in travel so far.
