Peter Kern: China first. Our biggest relationship there is outbound with trip.com in China, and then we have some smaller relationships and some offline travel relationships. It’s early days, there’s tons of interest. I’m sure you’ll hear this from other players, but there’s a lot of shopping going on. But it’s still fairly challenging for outbound travel between the political issues, between airlift which is challenging, and there’s still a lot of unique rules now getting in and out of China that the airlines are dealing with, making it hard to fly direct and so forth. And then, of course, you’ve got the issues of Russian airspace, with great issues with European airlift to China. So it’s going to take a little while to work itself out.
But interest is very high. We are seeing uplift, but we expect a big uplift to be still a little ways out. But it’s very exciting, obviously, and hopefully, some of the things that are going on will quiet down, and we’ll continue to see more robust cooperation between various governments to make it more possible. Certainly, the US travel industry is doing a lot to lobby to get rid of various restrictions. The second piece, we are already planned at 4x velocity. So that has a lot to do with bringing sort of the core classic OTA brands together. So Hotels, Expedia, and then some of the smaller brands that ride the same rails already. Vrbo is the next thing to come across. And it will benefit from a lot of similar testing. But it will also be a somewhat unique product in its own right.
So, the 4x has nothing to do with Vrbo coming across or not. It’s really around core OTA. When Vrbo comes across, it will get the knock on effect of some of these winners and some of these benefits that can go across everything, whether it’s in checkout or payments or other things. But on the front end, the Vrbo front end will still be a little different, and it will get some of those benefits, but the 4x is already baked, going to happen. And I think in terms of what we’re capable of as a company, I would say that’s less than halfway home because as we get more and more of the whole back end of the stack aligned, as we get our test environment all aligned, we have lots of opportunity to go faster. And a lot of our tests are now really more than what used to be a single test because they’re AI driven with multi variables.
And so, one test might be the equivalent of 10 tests. So it’s really starting to amp up considerably. And there’s a lot of opportunity that we haven’t gotten to during all our big transitions because we’re just so focused on shifting things and moving them into one platform. And we’re finally getting back to the bread and butter of doing that. And there’s a lot of upside there.
Operator: The next question comes from John Colantuoni with Jefferies.
John Colantuoni: I wanted to start with the comment you made about the Expedia brand performing well, and that some of your smaller brands and geographies have been sort of dragging down the overall business because of sort of intentional decisions to deemphasize them. So, I’m just curious if there’s going to be an inflection point when those smaller brands and geographies become less material, so that the overall growth improves as it starts to mirror the Expedia and Vrbo brands? The second question is there’s been a big uptick in conversations about AI. And I’m curious if you could unpack where you see the biggest opportunities to leverage AI capabilities across the business and how that could alter your trajectory in the travel ecosystem. Customer service is obviously one that immediately comes to mind, but curious to get your perspective on that as well.
