Expedia Group acquires Berlin AI trip-planning startup Layla for undisclosed terms

Expedia Group said on July 31 that it acquired Layla, a Berlin-based startup whose conversational AI plans and books trips across flights, hotels, activities, dining and transport. Deal terms were not disclosed.

The purchase is a bet that travelers will increasingly plan trips by chatting with an AI agent rather than filling out search forms — and that Expedia would rather own that interface than cede it to a standalone app or a general-purpose chatbot. Layla, founded in 2023 by Jeremy Jauncey and Saad Saeed, built its product around a single conversational travel agent that assembles a full itinerary from a natural-language request.

Shilpa Ranganathan, Expedia Group’s chief product officer, said Layla built ‘an exceptional AI-powered travel planning experience’ that fits the company’s AI strategy, Expedia said in announcing the deal. The company did not say whether or when Layla’s technology would appear in Expedia, Hotels.com or Vrbo, and named no consumer rollout date.

Layla arrives with consumer-brand history: it was backed by Paris Hilton and travel-industry investors in a 2023 seed round. For Expedia, the appeal is the AI-native architecture rather than the brand — the ability to fold a working conversational planner into apps that already hold inventory and payment.

The acquisition fits a broader scramble among online travel agencies to answer AI assistants that can research and, increasingly, book trips end to end. Without disclosed terms or a product timeline, the deal’s real test is integration: whether Expedia ships Layla’s planner inside its own apps, and how quickly, will show whether this is a product move or a talent-and-technology pickup. The first signal will come wherever Expedia’s brands add a chat-first planning surface.