Booking.com to Open an AI Innovation Center in Tel Aviv

Booking.com is opening an innovation center in Tel Aviv, CEO Gillian Tans announced Wednesday in a post on Linkedin. In her post, Ms. Tans said that the center will be dedicated to artificial intelligence (AI) technologies.

According to Ms. Tans, the company chose Tel Aviv due to the city’s status as “one of the most tech-forward markets in the world.”

“Things like chatbots, machine learning tools, natural language processing, or sentiment analysis are applications of Artificial Intelligence that may one day profoundly change how we think about and transact in travel,” Ms. Tans wrote. “We want to be at the forefront of these technologies.”

In her post, Ms. Tans did not disclose a timeline for the new research center. The company is currently recruiting for three Israel-based jobs: A full-stack developer, UX designer and a data scientist in the field of machine learning.

Headquartered in Amsterdam, Booking.com is an online accommodations booking service receiving more than 1.5 million room night reservations daily at more than 1.4 million properties worldwide. The company was founded in 1996 and was bought by U.S.-based The Priceline Group in 2005, operating as a Priceline subsidiary. It now employs more than 15,000 employees in 70 countries.

In September, Booking.com announced it bought Tel Aviv-based startup Evature, which develops natural language and chatbot technologies for the travel industry, for an undisclosed sum.