Priceline is promising "one of the most advanced AI booking experiences in travel" with the rollout of its fully agentic AI-powered travel assistant, Penny.
Running on Priceline's proprietary AI stack, Penny incorporates the latest Claude models to support core conversational reasoning and planning, while Google Cloud and OpenAI also support capabilities across search and voice.
The next generation of Penny can take a request to compare flights between various cities for a specific time of the year and quickly share options across destinations and allow users to book without leaving the conversation.
"The experience is built around a live, interactive map where options surface and sharpen as the conversation evolves," according to Priceline. "A preference layer combines traveler behavior with stated preferences travelers choose to share, helping Penny distinguish between what someone has done before and what matters for this trip, from budget and location to loyalty and trip purpose."
Highlights of the enhanced AI travel assistant include Penny's Pick and Penny's Take.
The former reveals Penny's top recommendation across hotels, flights and rental cars, weighing the traveler's stated preferences, the context of the conversation and overall value. Meanwhile, Penny's Take dives deeper to provide an opinion on why a particular hotel best fits the trip and the details guests should know before booking.
Penny's Take is currently in beta for hotels and will expand across the platform over time, Priceline said.
"Our conviction from the start was that the real advantage in AI travel would not come from the model alone, but from connecting it to the context, inventory and deals that make travel bookable," Priceline's Chief Technology Officer Sejal Amin said in a statement.
"By starting Penny at more complex problems in travel booking and building outward into search, maps, preference learning and this new experience, we've designed a system that understands why a traveler makes a choice and can carry that understanding from one trip to the next," said Amin.
"The value of AI in travel comes from connecting models to the real context of inventory, deals, and trip purpose," added Guillaume Princen, Head of International - Technology Companies, Anthropic. "Penny pairs that foundation with Claude's frontier capabilities in reasoning and agentic problem-solving to handle complex decisions that turn an idea into a booked trip."
"Travel planning has always been the hardest part of a trip. It doesn't have to be," Priceline's VP of AI Experiences Cobus Kok said in a statement. "The next generation of Penny is built around a simple idea: describe the trip you want, and Penny handles the rest, helping travelers understand their choices, book with confidence and get to the trip they want faster."
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