The integration of the AI platform adds to search and voice capabilities provided by Google Cloud and OpenAI.
Priceline’s CTO Sejal Amin said the company’s approach is “model-agnostic by design.”
“For the next generation of Penny, we brought Anthropic’s Claude into the agentic core to support the long-running, multi-step reasoning required to coordinate specialized agents and manage more of the trip in one conversation.”
The travel assistant, developed on Priceline’s AI stack, uses traveler behavior and shared preferences to surface what is appropriate for a particular trip based on factors including location, budget and trip purpose.
The conversational interface also aims to instill trust, a much debated concern around AI and agentic AI more specifically, by giving users control over the data it can access.
Priceline said Penny also offers top recommendations for hotels, flights and car rental based on traveler preferences, conversation context and value. A Penny’s Take feature, which is in beta, can provide deeper information on a specific property, demonstrating why it’s a good fit for a trip.
Priceline first unveiled Penny almost three years ago as part of a “Trip Intelligence” suite of tools for travel planning and booking. In early 2024, the company expanded Penny’s capabilities beyond hotels, adding flights, car rental and packages.
Later that same year, Priceline added voice capabilities from OpenAI to the assistant. Penny is now a “coordinated system of more than 10 specialized agents,” according to the company.
Updates in 2025 included an interactive map, which presents options as the conversation evolves, and neighborhood discovery features.
The Booking Holdings-owned brand said that in testing, travelers who engage with Penny have “shown stronger engagement and higher conversion than those who do not.”
“The simplest explanation is that Penny reduces the friction that can slow travelers down at the point of decision,” Amin said. “Often, what looks like hesitation is really an unanswered question: Can I bring my pet, is there a cot, what is the cancellation policy, etc. Penny can answer those questions in the moment and in context, instead of making the traveler search for the information on their own.”
She added that trust also plays a role.
“When a traveler tells Penny what matters and the next set of results reflects it, the experience starts to feel more useful and more reliable.”
