In 2015, Skift ran a headline, “Priceline CEO on the Death of Search Engine Optimization (RIP)." The story centered on comments from Paul Hennessy, who was Priceline CEO, at Skift Global Forum in Brooklyn. Hennessy declared that digital marketing had become "a paid world." The strong implication of his remarks was that SEO (search engine optimization) was, if not dead, then on life support. As he put it: "I believe it is a paid world. Google is an advertising engine and they drive paid traffic to advertisers. And I think that's going to continue for quite some time. We will do our best to play in that environment."
Fast forward to Tuesday, and Booking Holdings CEO Glenn Fogel acknowledged that Google’s AI Overviews are leading to the loss of SEO benefits for Booking’s brands. The problem that Hennessy cited 11 years ago has only become more dire in the AI era.
The other problem now for travel brands is how to become the favored results in the LLM platforms. That issue becomes even more acute because these frontier platforms are changing rapidly. Fogel said Booking appears often in LLM search results, but the referrals it is getting are miniscule.
So in both traditional Google Search and in the new LLM environment, the challenges are mounting and the squeeze is on.
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Every travel company started 2026 with a plan, and most have already rewritten it.
On September 22–24 in New York City, the CEOs of Uber, Hilton, Booking Holdings, and Expedia take the main stage to pressure-test what changed and decide what travel does next.
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Viator and GetYourGuide built billion dollar businesses selling tickets to the Louvre, the Vatican, and the Met. Airbnb has been trying to sell bespoke local experiences. In this clip from Good Morning Hospitality, A Skift Podcast, Michael Goldin, Brandreth Canaley, and Jamie Lane break down why Airbnb's move into mainstream ticketing is the right call, what it says about the company's evolution into a full OTA, and why it took them nearly a decade to get here.
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