{"id":18199,"date":"2025-07-18T05:47:12","date_gmt":"2025-07-18T05:47:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/18199\/"},"modified":"2025-07-18T05:47:12","modified_gmt":"2025-07-18T05:47:12","slug":"former-heads-of-google-travel-and-tripadvisor-form-ai-startup-to-head-off-online-travel-agencies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/18199\/","title":{"rendered":"Former Heads of Google Travel and Tripadvisor Form AI Startup to Head Off Online Travel Agencies"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>DirectBooker, a startup backed by former Tripadvisor CEO Steve Kaufer and ex-Google Travel head Richard Holden, wants to feed hotel listings directly into AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini \u2014 challenging the role of online travel agencies like Booking.com.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The default behavior is going to be for the OTAs to win again,&#8221; said Sanjay Vakil, a co-founder and the CEO of DirectBooker. &#8220;And I would like to head off that outcome. But it&#8217;s going to take more than three people to do that, so we&#8217;re looking to grow a little bit.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Vakil held various product management leadership roles at Google Travel and Tripadvisor. The other two co-founders of DirectBooker are Chief Product Officer Theresa Meyer and Chief <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"DirectBooker, a startup backed by former Tripadvisor CEO Steve Kaufer and ex-Google Travel head Richard Holden, wants to&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":18200,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,184,181,507,16838,3195,16839,16840,11458,168,16841,1283,12741,74,16842],"class_list":["post-18199","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-anthropic","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-ceo-interviews","tag-chatgpt","tag-direct-booking","tag-directbooking-com","tag-gemini","tag-google","tag-online-travel-newsletter","tag-openai","tag-perplexity","tag-technology","tag-tripadvisor"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18199","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18199"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18199\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18200"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}