Priceline has upgraded its AI travel assistant Penny with full agentic capabilities, letting customers move from a vague trip idea to a completed flight purchase without leaving the platform — a shift aimed directly at conversion and support costs.

The company announced the update Wednesday. Penny runs on Anthropic's Claude and sits atop Priceline's proprietary AI stack and data. Following the update, the assistant can handle complex travel questions, evaluate real-time pricing and availability, and lay out tradeoffs between options. Flights can be bought in the same interface.

Priceline claims early tests show Penny users deliver stronger engagement, higher conversion and fewer customer support contacts. The company also estimates travelers who used Penny saved an average of nearly 10 minutes per trip compared with those who called customer support. These are Priceline's own figures from early testing, not audited results, and the company has not disclosed baseline conversion rates.

"Instead of opening multiple tabs, changing filters and trying to compare hotel options on their own, travelers can describe what they want in natural language and let Penny help them narrow the choices," said Cobus Kok, VP of AI experiences at Priceline, describing the assistant's job as making travel planning feel less fragmented.

The move comes as online travel companies race to deploy agentic AI — but with sharply different bets. Airbnb is focusing its AI assistant on customer support and resolving inquiries. Hilton has launched a generative AI agent aimed at search and trip planning. Priceline wants both: Penny covers destination planning, flight and hotel and car rental search and selection, plus support for existing reservations, operating more than 10 specialized agents as a coordinated system.

"Many AI tools focus on the inspiration stage," Kok said in an email. "Penny is designed to go further. It can help a traveler think through the trip, compare choices and move toward a booking in the same experience."

Two product features carry the distribution weight. Penny's Picks surfaces top recommendations that weigh the traveler's stated preferences, overall value and the conversation's context. Penny's Take — currently in beta for hotels only — delivers a candid assessment of a single property and why it may be the best fit. Priceline plans to expand Penny's Take across the platform over time.

That recommendation layer targets a known revenue leak: choice overload and decision fatigue often push customers to abandon a platform without purchasing. If an agent can compress the funnel from browsing to booking, the yield implications for hotel and flight inventory are significant — and suppliers will be watching whose properties the assistant favors.

Kok argues hotel decisions are rarely reducible to price or star rating. "Travelers are weighing location, flexibility, loyalty, amenities, trip purpose and value," he said. "Penny is designed to understand those signals and make the hotel decision easier."

Personalization adds another layer, drawing on behavioral history. "Penny can combine what a traveler has done before with what they tell us matters for this trip," Kok said, adding that travelers retain visibility and control over what data the assistant can access.

For travel sellers, the stakes are straightforward. An assistant that evaluates real-time pricing, ranks options and closes the sale in one conversational flow moves the point of influence — and potentially the commission — earlier in the funnel, away from metasearch and direct supplier sites. The near-10-minute time saving per trip, if it holds at scale, compounds into lower contact-center volume and higher throughput per session.

Priceline's next step is expanding Penny's Take beyond the hotel beta across the full platform, a rollout that will test whether agentic recommendation can sustainably lift conversion or merely shift where customers abandon.