Expedia CEO Mark Okerstrom: “War over the best booking experience is almost over”
According to the boss of one of the biggest players in online travel, the battle over who is winning the booking game will soon become a thing of the past.
"If I look into the future, the war for having the best booking experience is kind of almost over," Expedia Group president and CEO Mark Okerstrom says, speaking at the company's first-ever Research Summit in San Francisco last week.
"In many ways, the booking experience has become standardized. Not even just in travel; e-commerce in general."
The next "vector of innovation," he says, happens after the booking is made. "The days of driving huge conversion gains by changing the fields where you enter credit card information - there are diminishing returns on those types of changes."
For Expedia, the question becomes how to change the experience from being "click-focused to customer-focused," which Okerstrom believes is enabled through data ("data knows more about your business than you do") and development in technologies such as artificial intelligence.
"It starts with creating a real vision and a real view on what [that future] could be."
