Baidu had just completed its investment when Expedia made the acquisition: Is this the best possible outcome for an AI travel planning startup?

Online travel group Expedia recently announced the acquisition of Layla, an AI travel planning startup.

The investors behind this startup are all star players: previously, Andy Phillipps, co-founder of Booking.com, Barry Smith, co-founder of Skyscanner, celebrity entrepreneur Paris Hilton, United Airlines Ventures, and Baidu Capital have all successively participated in the investment in Layla.

This acquisition was not a sudden move. For many years, Expedia has continued to independently develop various AI travel functions, and Layla, as an enterprise that deeply focuses on the natural language itinerary search and planning track natively, can exactly complement the group's existing technology map.

With the support of investors including Baidu on one hand and the full acquisition by the global leading OTA on the other hand, Layla's development path also raises a core question in the industry: for AI itinerary planning startups, is being acquired by giants the only viable way out in the end?

Berlin-based Startup Layla: A Challenger Breaking into the "Startup Graveyard"

Layla was founded in Berlin in 2023 by Saad Saeed, a Pakistani-origin entrepreneur, and his partner Jeremy Jauncey.

Co-founder Saad Saeed used to be a member of the founding team of Flink, an European instant fresh food delivery enterprise, while the other founder Jeremy Jauncey is the founder of Beautiful Destinations, a well-known travel content platform.

Since its inception, Layla has focused on conversational travel assistants: users put forward travel ideas in natural language, and the platform integrates inspirational content, flight tickets and accommodation plans to complete itinerary planning in one stop.

Itinerary planning has long been regarded by the venture capital circle as the "startup graveyard" of the tourism industry.

Over the past two decades, a large number of entrepreneurs have poured into this track, but most of them failed. The core pain points have been difficult to solve for a long time: planning behavior is hard to convert into actual orders; many travelers themselves enjoy the process of searching for travel guides independently, and their demand for automated planning tools is limited.

Many investors have also directly advised Saad Saeed not to get involved in this field.

But from the founders' perspective, the failure of past players only means that the timing is not ripe, and the real demand of tourists for itinerary planning always exists.

Layla has also explored a monetization path combining subscription, commission and human consultants. The platform has received a total of more than 30 million travel conversations, and the total value of planned itinerary transactions has exceeded 1 billion US dollars. 40% of users directly skip the traditional destination search and use the conversation function to initiate demands. The platform has accumulated about 30,000 paid members with an annual fee of about 50 euros.

Interestingly, the group with the highest activity on the platform is not the younger generation, but middle-aged travelers aged 40 to 60 who plan complex long-distance itineraries such as honeymoons, multi-country self-driving tours and wildlife trips.

At the same time, Layla has explored a hybrid mode of "AI + human consultants": AI is responsible for quickly generating preliminary itinerary plans and screening potential customers.

When users book high-priced and complex travel products, human consultants will intervene to check details and finalize orders.

This mode has greatly improved the conversion efficiency, and the number of effective leads for cooperative travel consultants has increased to five times the original. The platform once completed a wildlife Safari order worth 26,000 US dollars, and the whole process from users' interest to final transaction took less than two days.

Expedia Continues to Bet on Conversational AI, Acquiring Layla to Complete the Key Puzzle

The acquisition of Layla is a continuous move of Expedia's layout in conversational travel, not a temporary decision. As early as November 2025, Expedia launched an application function integrated with ChatGPT, where users can directly search for destinations through conversation, compare prices of flights and hotels in real time, and access the platform's map resources.

It is worth noting that this acquisition also marks an adjustment of Expedia's own AI strategic route. Previously, the group once promoted the "all-round" AI housekeeper product Romie, but from the subsequent product layout, the focus of Expedia's AI strategy seems to be changing. Instead of letting a single assistant cover all demands, the group is splitting more capabilities into specific links such as accommodation search, itinerary planning and agency booking.

The acquisition of Layla, together with the natural language search function previously launched on Vrbo and the AI agent tool integrated on Hotels.com, points to Expedia's new technical path: abandoning the idea of "one assistant handles everything" and turning to an architecture where multiple professional agents in vertical fields work collaboratively.

According to the official announcement, Expedia plans to integrate Layla's mature personalized itinerary planning capabilities, superimpose its own global travel supply chain, massive first-hand user data, and mature booking transaction system. The synergy goal of the two sides is clear: to build a full-link AI travel experience from inspiration discovery, itinerary planning to order booking and travel guarantee.

However, at this stage, Expedia has not disclosed the detailed integration plan. There is no news that the group will take offline the traditional search engine, or fully replace the existing booking process with a conversational interface; how Layla will be embedded in Expedia, Hotels.com, Vrbo and other multi-brands under the group, the technical implementation timetable and transaction amount are all kept confidential. For the concerns of platform suppliers about housing sorting, product listing and distribution rules, there are no adjustment plans for the time being.

But this acquisition sends a clear industry signal: leading OTAs are willing to acquire vertical AI itinerary planning enterprises, which proves that AI-assisted travel planning has been upgraded from concept testing to a core track with strategic value.

Industry Thinking: Where Is the Path for the AI Itinerary Planning Track?

At present, more and more players are competing for the "new entrance of travel", and the track has rapidly changed from a blue ocean to a red ocean.

Airbnb, Booking.com, Skyscanner and Expedia have all successively launched conversational travel tools, and a large number of startups continue to enter the competition.

The track now presents two clear paths: one is to continue independent financing and development, and achieve self-sufficiency through the subscription and commission model, which is exactly what Layla did before being acquired; the other is to embrace giants and rely on the mature supply chain to complete commercial implementation.

Itinerary planning itself is difficult to make a profit independently. Startups that only develop tools lack flight and hotel inventory, so it is difficult to complete the closed loop of "planning → placing an order"; while large OTAs with supply chain lack lightweight and native conversational AI products. The two are naturally complementary.

More realistically, with the gradual popularization of large model capabilities, "generating an itinerary" itself is increasingly difficult to form a long-term barrier. Chat interfaces, route recommendations and natural language search are easy to replicate. What really determines whether a product can achieve sustainable commercialization is real-time inventory, dynamic pricing, payment, membership system, after-sales performance and stable traffic. Precisely these capabilities are mainly in the hands of large OTAs.

Layla was supported by institutions including Baidu Capital in the early stage, and relied on external capital to continuously trial and error and polish products; after the product model was verified and the technical system became mature, it was finally acquired by a global leading OTA, which may have become a relatively decent way out.

This is not the dilemma of Layla alone. Rafat Ali, founder of Skift, recently said bluntly that in the past ten years, most consumer-facing travel startups have only three endings in the end: turning to B2B, being acquired by giants together with their teams and technologies, or closing down directly. The enterprises that can survive for a long time are often those infrastructure companies hidden in the back end of the industry, whose names are even unknown to ordinary travelers. The itinerary planning tool is one of the most crowded areas in this "startup graveyard".

After the independent startup team is integrated into the large group, whether the innovation vitality can be maintained, how much order increment the conversational AI tools can bring, and whether travelers are really willing to completely abandon the traditional search methods and turn to natural language planning are all still unknown.

This acquisition is worthy of continuous attention from the travel technology industry.

This article is from the WeChat Official Account "TravelDaily", author: ZHAO Linlin, published with authorization from 36Kr.