Priceline Adds Claude to Penny as AI Travel Gets More Agentic

Priceline launched a major upgrade to Penny, making its AI travel assistant more useful for trip planning and booking.

The new version can help travelers compare destinations, flights, hotels, and rental cars inside one conversation, instead of making them search across several pages and filters.

The goal is to make travel shopping feel less fragmented. A traveler can start with a broad request, such as comparing trips to several European cities, and Penny can narrow the options using live prices, availability, maps, and trip details.

Penny now uses specialized AI agents

The biggest change is Penny’s multi-agent design. The system uses more than 10 specialized agents for tasks such as flight search, hotel search, rental cars, recommendations, and customer service.

Travel planning is not one simple search. A traveler may need to compare price, location, flight time, hotel quality, and trip purpose at the same time. Priceline wants Penny to manage those moving parts behind the scenes and return clearer options to the user.

Claude joins Priceline’s AI system

Priceline is also bringing Anthropic’s Claude models into Penny for conversational reasoning and planning. OpenAI and Google Cloud support other parts of the experience, including search and voice features.

This shows why travel AI needs more than a chatbot. To be useful, the assistant must connect to real inventory, current prices, booking rules, and customer preferences. Priceline says Penny uses inventory from thousands of travel partners in more than 100 countries.

Recommendations become more personal

The upgraded Penny can use details travelers choose to share, such as budget, loyalty preferences, location needs, and whether the trip is for business or leisure. Priceline says users can control what information Penny uses.

Penny’s Take, now in beta for hotels, gives a clearer read on whether a property matches the traveler’s needs.

A similar case is Expedia, which plans to launch MCP tools as its B2B revenue rises 25 percent. This shows why major travel companies are investing in AI infrastructure, not only customer-facing chatbots. Expedia wants partners such as banks, loyalty programs, and travel sellers to connect more easily to its travel inventory while keeping control of their own customer experience.

Photo by Solen Feyissa on Unsplash