CEO Spotlight - Brett Keller of Priceline

Brett Keller, Priceline

Brett Keller joined Priceline in 1999 and held a number of roles including chief operating officer and chief marketing officer. He took over as the interim CEO in 2016 and has steered the brand ever since.

As a subsidiary of Booking Holdings, Priceline follows some of the same strategy but often has a different thought process and takes different steps. Its recent introduction of chatbot Penny is a good example.

Priceline launched its Trip Intelligence platform in June, Penny aside, what are the most impactful developments you’ve released?

I think we’ve done a nice job with our most recent feature set at giving consumers more tools and features to help them make a really smart and educated choice. A lot of features we released are targeted at families - we felt that was an area we needed to sharpen up so we’ll give you guests reviews, but now we focus those around the traveler type. So if you’re coming in as a family, you can easily narrow those down and look at reviews written by families.  

I love the neighborhood look-around on the iOS app, because as a family traveler you’re more concerned about safety, location and amenities that are close by so, we have you those tools so you can find the property that’s best and right for you.

You have a partnership with Google for generative AI. Why Google?

We like to have our hands in all of the players in the space. Priceline has worked with ChatGPT and Google to test and understand the products. One of the keys of the relationship is that we are a Google Cloud business, we transitioned to Google Cloud a few years back so all our products and services run in the Google stack. By partnering with them in the generative AI side, we get to keep all of that inside the same technical stack. In the gen AI race this is huge because it improves your cost, your speed and your efficiency in the way that data moves up and down your data stack. So, for us, that does a couple of things, it allows us to have early access to Google’s features that have not been released to the public at large - that allows us to have a leg up to get products and services up more quickly.

We think over the long run we are going to be faster and more cost efficient in scaling these products to as many consumers as possible. Google is also extremely concerned about security and compliance and using customer data in the right way. So, by utilizing their services, that comes baked in with our cloud relationship and the APIs that we have in place with them. We also get access to Google’s Places and Maps content, which is a huge benefit because they have been building out that content for years.

Booking has its ChatGPT plugin, Expedia too. What’s your thinking around integration versus plugin?

The integration side is beneficial to the entire booking process, so as you’re moving through the booking flow, we marry our data with Google data. What we’re trying to do is answer a customer’s question that’s very specific to their experience on our site. As a customer you could easily go to ChatGPT or Google’s product and ask a question about travel - what’s unique about that? Nothing. What we want to do is embed our own data into the engine so the engine is looking at the spectrum of data around the universe as well as what’s relevant to what the consumer is looking at on our website right now. As we build out our models, and we’re now scripting the bot to respond, it’s accessing our data. So if you’re looking at a hotel and want to know what amenities it has, it will instantly pull from the amenities we have in our database and will also look outside of that. But, we preference our own data if we know we have the right data for you. The combination makes for a more powerful and precise response to a consumer.

Glenn Fogel was saying on the last earnings call that Penny is at the bottom of the funnel and Booking’s trip planner is at the top. What does that mean?

This just shows how companies internally approach things differently. Booking wanted to test and iterate at the top of the funnel, and our team said why don’t we try to use this to help people move through the booking process. We just decided to start in different areas, but what you're going to find is we’re moving in both directions.

We haven’t announced this yet, but you will find that Penny is now post-booking and we are also moving upstream and we will have trip planning. We assume large travel companies will probably start the top of the funnel because it’s an interesting place to start. We wanted to put it to work along the entire booking funnel. As you’re doing your first search, looking at a specific hotel, when you get to checkout where a lot of difficult questions come up about payment mechanisms, [or] is this really the best room type? Questions that we can respond to in real time.

The early releases of the [Penny] product were not conversion-positive and were probably slightly conversion-negative. So, we started to iterate around prompt writing and prompt development.We learned a lot about how to write great prompts and answer the questions that came up.

Brett Keller

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Our team thought this was a great place to start and our relationship with Google also pushed us into the details section of the search. When you’re looking at your hotel a lot of questions come up about amenities but also about attractions and surrounding things to do so our relationship with Google allowed us to pull their data in to answer those questions much faster.

Looking at what you’ve released including Penny, are there any early results in terms of consumer behavior and driving conversion?

As a mature OTA, everything we put into the market is being tested. The early releases of the product were not conversion-positive and were probably slightly conversion-negative, which was actually good news. So, we started to iterate around prompt writing and prompt development. We learned a lot about how to write great prompts and answer the questions that came up. We started to see the types of questions that would come in, look at the answers the bot would provide and say that’s not the answer we want to give or we think we could do better. We started to change the voice and tone of the bot. So, everything about Penny began to iterate and change through prompt writing and then we started to see conversion wins.

If you ask the average e-commerce company what percentage of your tests are winners, it will probably be low single digit. It’s not easy once you have a mature and functioning user experience to bring something new in that is an instant win ... So, what happens is you iterate around that test to find a channel that’s winning and then run with it. That’s what’s already happening with our Penny experiments, it’s not there yet but within a few months I wouldn’t be surprised to see it at every step in the booking flow.

How much do you see generative AI as hype?

It’s a ton of hype at the moment because no one has rolled out anything meaningful using gen AI in the travel space. We’re at the front of this, but is it dramatically changing the customer experience at the moment? For most brands, no. Will it a couple if years from now? Yes, probably. All of the winners in this space will be those who can scale solutions and who have their data in order. What we love about our current position is that our relationship with Google allows us to run this all in a single stack.

This democratizes AI to some extent to small players. If you have enough data and it is organized properly, you don’t have to hire 300 AI specialists to be competitive now in the AI world. Now if you have good prompt writers and a data stack and access to these high end tools that Google and others have built, you can deploy this very efficiently and get all the value that they have built into their models and apply it to your consumers and user experience.

Other than saying that Priceline is a great company to work for, why have you been with the company for so long?

It does start with the industry. This is a very competitive, exciting industry to be a part of. I don’t know anyone who works in travel that doesn't love working in travel. That’s one. Two is that I love e-commerce. I love everything about building exciting user experiences and marketing to consumers and really delivering the best value.

Third, the people who have worked here as my leaders have been exceptional people. I’ve talked to many people who have left and gone on to work for other companies and it doesn’t match what we have here, the grass isn’t always greener.

Looking back over your career, if you could change one thing what would it be?

I think, and this is true for most younger employees coming up in organizations, that you don’t believe that you can be as impactful as you really can be. So I would say to believe that you really can dramatically change the company you work and operate within. It took me a little bit longer to realize that, I fully understand it now as the CEO. When people are engaged and excited about a brand or business or area they work in, they can have a huge influence on that business and change how it operates.

We saw an article with your new recruit Lesley Klein that said the brand marketing languished in recent years. Do you have plans for a refresh?

That’s why I brought her in to revitalize the brand. We went through a very successful number of years relying on William Shatner as the Priceline negotiator. It was one of the most successful travel campaigns in history. It was an eight- to nine-year campaign, exceptionally well known and understood, and we took a lot of value from that. As we moved away from that we did not have the same power behind the message. She has been working on that. We’re already into a campaign that started earlier this year that is beginning to do that.

Do you go after the connected trip in the same way Glenn talks about for Booking.com?

That is what is going to make us successful long-term - to help the consumer move through the entire trip experience. We won’t take the same steps as Booking, but the thought is the same, which is when a consumer comes in to your booking experience you’re helping them achieve everything they need. We already sell, flights, hotels, cars and we have a successful package engine to bring those things together. So, our mission over the next couple of years is to advance your understanding as a consumer of packaging these things together real time. For example, when you come to Priceline you’re thinking you need to find a hotel. We want to make it exceptionally easy to add the flight right then or come back at a later point and add it, so it’s seamless and easy to manage. 

As a consumer, you are typically visiting a site an average of three/four/five times before you actually buy and in most cases you have to start the process all over again. Why can’t we have a shopping basket experience in travel where you say I like this hotel, this car, but I’m not ready to book? And, you come back and the cart instantly reprices exactly what you have looked at last and saved and you can book that with one click. No one has that in the industry because of the complexity of pulling all those pieces together. But, we are on a path to do that, we’re not far off from releasing tools and features that will enable you to do that. To us, that plays in to the center of what being connected is as a consumer.

*This interview has been edited for brevity.