AI News has caught up with Booking.com Senior Product Manager Siddhartha Choudhury to get an internal scoop on how technology keeps bookings and how data is kept secure from security threats such as online fraud.
When booking holidays online, you have a lot of trust in the website. You trust it with your money, your personal details, and your travel plans. For giants like Booking.com, trusting millions of people every day is a big task. So, how do they do that? More and more, the answer is AI.
AI support is needed to combat the latest online scams
A huge amount of data Booking.com handle makes it difficult to wrap your head. This isn’t just about preventing someone from using stolen credit cards. This platform needs to find everything from fake hotel reviews and marketing scams to phishing attacks and account acquisitions.
“We use AI for a wide range of safety and fraud risk mitigation use cases,” Choudhury explained. “We’ll be dealing with petabytes of data, including events generated from applications, infrastructure, messages and emails.”
To handle this, they do not rely on a single magical tool. “We also leverage multiple vendor-specific embedded ML and internal solutions to identify and mitigate fraudulent attacks,” adds Choudhury.
In short, they combine the best off-the-shelf software with their own custom built AI to create powerful security cocktails, protecting both travelers and property owners on the platform.
Million Dollar Question: Is it better or cheaper?
Naturally, running a security system at this scale is not easy. One of the biggest headaches is simply getting a variety of tools, both internal and external, to play together nicely. But Choudhury pointed out even more severe, more constant balancing acts: performance and costs.
Cyberattacks become smarter every day. This means that defense needs to be constantly improved. But better technology costs more money.
“As the evolution of cyber threats, attacks are becoming more refined and data scale is constantly increasing,” says Choudhury. “So the decision is: Do we need to make things more cost-effective, or do we need to improve our performance even further?”
How AI can help ahead of the threat of online fraud
It is often said that the best defense is a good offense. Instead of responding only after a problem occurs, Booking.com uses AI to discover the trouble before starting the problem. Most of this involved moving the system to the cloud. This allows for smarter and faster tools.
Choudhury explained that their human security experts now have a team of digital helpers. “Several AI assistants work in parallel to help security analysts improve efficiency and reduce operational hardships,” he explains.
By giving the best human detective a digital partner that can organize a pile of clues in seconds, experts can focus their skills on the most important threats, but a powerful surveillance system ensures that the AI itself is running smoothly and accurately.
Make sure the AI plays fairly
When giving AI the power to make important security decisions, you need to be extremely careful not to make it unfair. Choudhury has made it clear that ethics is at the heart of strategy. This is based on a few important ideas.
Fairness: The company actively checks AI to AI to ensure that it is not unfairly flagging certain people or groups due to potential online fraud. Human Surveillance: This is a big thing. For big decisions, you often get the ultimate say, not just the program, but also the program “There is enough human involvement to identify false affirmations.” Teams need to understand why they made certain decisions to ensure accountability. Privacy: And of course, everything is built on a solid foundation of “strong data protection, privacy and compliance” and always keeps user consent in mind.
What is on the horizon?
Choudhury believes the next big leap is not about finding brand new things AI can do, but about efficiently working together all existing AI tools.
“We expect more and more solutions to be designed, but we also hope that they will be organized in ways that make departments more efficient,” predicts Choudhury.
The goal is to create a system in which all security parts communicate and collaborate intelligently. For Booking.com, the mission is clear. “The key focus is to promote innovation along with ensuring reliability and cost-effectiveness.”
For the rest of us, AI is giving us a little more peace of mind. After clicking “Books” on that holiday, you will not be a victim of online scams.
Siddhartha Choudhury and the Booking.com team will share more insights at this year’s AI & Big Data Expo Europe, held in Amsterdam from September 24-25, 2025.
See also: AI Hacking Tools Exploit Zero-Day Security Vulnerabilities in Minutes
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