Flight delays, interminable waits on the tarmac—Booking.com CEO Glenn Fogel knows all about travel frustrations firsthand: “You can’t believe you even bothered.”Booking.com and sister brands like Priceline, Kayak and OpenTable are pouring hundreds of millions into AI tools to smooth out travel hiccups. In the AI-powered future Fogel envisions, the company will flag in advance whether it is going to rain the day of your boat tour or be sunny when you plan to go to the museum. It will ask if you would like to swap days, then handle the changes.“When we start doing that,” says Fogel, who also helms parent company Booking Holdings, “that’s when I’ll feel OK, now we really are a good AI travel agent on your phone and in your pocket.”Fogel, who has been with Booking Holdings since 2000 and CEO for nearly a decade, spoke to The Wall Street Journal about summer travel, AI and how it changes customer service. Here are edited excerpts:Has anything surprised you about travel this summer?No, actually. We expected difficulties due to the war in the Middle East.A lot of people who are U.S.-based or just not that aware of the world don’t realize how incredibly important the Middle East is to global travel. When they shut down airports like Dubai or Doha or Abu Dhabi, that’s going to have ramifications throughout the world.Then on top of that, the impact on the cost of oil directly impacts the cost of kerosene, which is jet fuel. [That] directly impacts the cost of an airline ticket, which impacts travel.How are you using AI now?Let’s go with our company Priceline. Priceline has a very good AI travel discovery called Penny. It is really sharp. I’ve tried a lot of complicated, difficult information (on it).What’s an example?I’m going to Switzerland with the family and there are five of us. I explained that my wife and I want to go business class, and I want the (adult) kids back of the bus. I have frequent flier miles with lots of different airlines—what is the best way to do all this?Penny went through the whole thing, explaining: Use the frequent flier miles for the best deal for the business class tickets and use cash for the ones in the back.I get emails from people who are really frustrated with Booking.com’s customer-service experience. They have to talk to an AI agent first and can’t just get to somebody.We actually have data that shows people prefer the AI agent versus having to wait for a human, or the human doesn’t understand what they’re saying or they can’t understand the accent of the agent.I want it so nobody ever has to wait on line ever. How will that happen? Well, when you’re using AI agents, you don’t need to hire more people. You just need a little more compute.Do you have fewer customer service agents now?We’re still growing, so I don’t know the numbers offhand. But we have fewer customer contacts per booking because of improvements in the way we’re doing business. And our actual costs for customer service per booking are going down.How do you balance your AI investments versus preserving the customer experience?I get a lot of customer complaints—they come directly to me. Most of the problems are issues where we’re not the supplier of the flight. We are not the hotel that has a noisy air conditioner. We are not the rental car that has a flat tire.I’m not saying that’s not our fault. I’m just saying that we have to deal with the airline, the hotel, the car rental company, or pick whichever the issue is. AI will help improve that.What about people who are using ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude and not your company’s AI tools?We want to make sure we are there when they are ready to book because those companies are not going to take on the responsibility of actually doing the bookings.Travel is one of the most complex transactions. We’re working very closely with all the frontier players to make sure that together we can both create a great experience for people who prefer to start there.One way we’re doing it right now is to put an ad into ChatGPT. ChatGPT gives some thoughts and a person wants to book it: We’re right there. It’s no different than Google.Write to Allison Pohle at allison.pohle@wsj.com