Booking.com is already buying ads inside ChatGPT
OpenAI switched on cost-per-click bidding in April, and the biggest OTA in the world is in the test group, buying position at $3 to $5 a click inside a channel that has yet to deliver 1% of its room nights
by Markus Busch
The line in the earnings call. Booking Holdings held its second-quarter call on Tuesday, and somewhere in a long answer about artificial intelligence, CFO Ewout Steenbergen mentioned where the company's paid traffic is going. Booking is part of OpenAI's test group for cost-per-click advertising. He likes it, he said, for diversification across paid channels, and the company is running its usual optimization models against it to convert that traffic into bookings. No press release accompanied this. It arrived as an aside.
What they bought into. The speed of what OpenAI built is the part worth holding. Ads went into ChatGPT on February 9 on a cost-per-thousand basis, invitation only, with a minimum commitment around $200,000 and Expedia already on the launch roster (per trade coverage; neither company announced it). Cost-per-click bidding switched on in April, with recommended bids of $3 to $5. On May 5 the self-serve manager opened and the minimum spend went to zero. Cost-per-action followed weeks later. February to May: a working ad auction, from nothing to any advertiser with a credit card.
What the spend isn't buying. Not bookings. Steenbergen gave the volume figure in the same breath — traffic from the assistants, paid and unpaid together, still sits significantly below 1% of room nights, unmoved for quarters. So the money is going in ahead of the demand, which tells you what kind of purchase it is. An aggregator can afford that. It bids once for a category — hotels in Lisbon, beach resorts in Portugal — spreads the cost across every property in its inventory, and treats an early auction as an option on a channel that might matter in two years. A single property bidding for its own forty rooms is funding a category-level auction with one hotel's worth of upside. We've walked through that math on Google, where the asymmetry runs to roughly a hundred thousand to one. This is the same trade in a new venue, at an earlier and cheaper moment.
What it means for your budget. The temptation is to read the OTAs' arrival as a signal that you should be there too. Read it the other way. They are early because being early is cheap for them and expensive for you, and because they are buying an option, not a booking. Nothing about $3 to $5 a click is priced for a property paying its own way into a channel that has not yet produced a guest.
The auction inside the AI answer opened for business in February. The bookings have not arrived. Both OTAs are bidding anyway.
Read also: Booking.com just told investors how little AI actually books
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