Jochen Koedijk Is Teaching Travel Marketing to Speak Machine

Before Jochen Koedijk had a global marketing organization, he had a web-design shop. Jokerweb served small and midsize businesses in the Netherlands at the beginning of the century. The offer was practical: build the site, decide what job it should do for the business, help search engines find it, then buy the traffic that search could not earn. It was marketing close enough to the metal that the person making the promise also had to make the page work.

That origin explains more about Koedijk’s current job than the title does. As Chief Marketing Officer of Expedia Group, he leads teams across advertising, creative, performance marketing, engineering, and machine-learning science. The portfolio is larger, the systems are more complicated, and the customer may be planning a trip across a half-dozen screens. Yet the old sequence remains visible: attract attention, make the proposition legible, and turn interest into an action worth measuring.

What has changed is the reader. For most of Koedijk’s career, marketers wrote for people and optimized for the machines that ranked pages or placed ads. Now a machine may become an active participant in the decision. A traveler can ask an AI agent to suggest a destination, compare flights, respect a family’s preferences, and narrow a catalog no person could inspect. The brand may meet the agent before it meets the traveler.

A career built inside the click

Koedijk studied two subjects at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam: business administration and social sciences. The pairing looks almost designed for modern marketing, where economic choices arrive wrapped in identity, habit, memory, and group behavior. He earned master’s degrees in both. While studying, he also ran Jokerweb and completed an eBay Netherlands internship, helping manage the affiliate network and the business’s early paid-search work.

After brief consulting assignments in risk, compliance, and process management, he returned to the internet. At eBay and Marktplaats.nl, he was responsible for natural search and later paid search. Shopping.com expanded the map to Britain, Germany, and France. These were years when the search box was becoming a tollbooth for commercial intent. A marketer could see the query, buy the placement, tune the page, and watch the result. Taste still mattered, but feedback arrived in columns.

Electronic Arts added another kind of complexity. As part of its digital business leadership, Koedijk led in-house global performance marketing for console, PC, and mobile games. Amazon then put him in charge of worldwide social media and new-channel advertising from 2014 to 2017. His cross-functional group grew past 70 people, and the work posted triple-digit year-over-year growth. At Chewy, where he became vice president of marketing, the product changed again. Pet retail is transactional, but affection sits in every basket.

ADT gave him the full CMO job in 2018. Here the emotional stakes were explicit: a long-established security brand had to translate protection into digital engagement and profitable growth. In a 2021 podcast conversation, Koedijk discussed brand purpose, versatile marketing skills, and the principles of leading a fast team. His route to the executive floor had not been a clean move away from tactics. It was an accumulation of them.

The CMO becomes a systems operator

Koedijk joined Expedia Group in 2021 and spent three years leading full-funnel investment, marketing channels, and technology before being named CMO in March 2024. The promotion placed him alongside incoming CEO Ariane Gorin’s operating team. Expedia credited him with putting data, technology, and machine-learning science into marketing decisions across its consumer brands, building new channels and partnerships, contributing to expansion, and helping move media buying in-house.

That list reveals the modern CMO’s problem. Television, paid search, social feeds, loyalty, mobile apps, connected TV, and generative interfaces do not form an orderly funnel. They form weather. A traveler may begin with a creator’s video, ask a model for options, check a familiar app, compare prices, confer with family, and book days later. Creative judgment and causal measurement must occupy the same room.

Koedijk’s response is organizational. Expedia has a full-stack in-house marketing team, including a machine-learning science group. For focused AI projects, creatives work with scientists, software developers, and marketers. The point is not to turn every copywriter into an engineer. It is to shorten the distance between an idea, the system that can execute it, and the evidence that says whether it helped.

He divides AI’s marketing value into three areas. First comes analysis: lifetime-value models, bidding systems, summaries, trend detection, and faster access to what is changing. Second comes production: text, images, and video at a scale suited to a catalog of hundreds of thousands of properties and rentals. Third comes behavior. As people move from conventional search toward conversational tools, the old acquisition playbook loses some authority.

The caution inside this program is useful. Koedijk calls AI a means, not an end. A generated asset that does not strengthen the brand, earn useful attention, or help a traveler decide is merely more inventory. Expedia uses AI tools to moderate quality as well as create material. Speed expands the need for judgment; it does not retire it.

From search engine to choosing agent

Travel is unusually suited to conversation. A conventional Thailand plan can scatter across searches for flights, neighborhoods, weather, hotels, restaurants, and things to do. An agent can hold the constraints together and return a smaller set. Koedijk expects agents to become useful here, especially for repeatable trips. He also believes people may keep more control over leisure planning, where wandering through the options is part of the pleasure.

This is the context for Expedia Trip Matching, launched in the United States in 2025. A traveler can send a public travel Reel to Expedia’s Instagram account. The system interprets the clip and returns destination ideas, tips, a personalized itinerary, and routes to booking. It turns the stray moment between envy and intent - “I want to go there” - into a conversation with a travel platform.

By 2026, Koedijk was giving the shift a name: business-to-agent marketing, or B2A. His framing does not replace business-to-consumer or business-to-business work. It adds another audience. Humans use brand as a shortcut for trust and memory because attention is scarce. An agent can compare far more options, but only if useful qualities are present in data it can read. A lovely hotel whose distinctions remain trapped in vague copy may be invisible to the system assembling the shortlist.

This makes brand both emotional and computational. A company still needs a promise people recognize. It also needs structured, current, specific information through which an agent can understand availability, fit, value, and context. Koedijk’s early SEO career returns here in altered form. The task is again to become discoverable to a machine without forgetting the person behind the query.

Brand, media, and the same data

In May 2026, Expedia Group moved its advertising business into Koedijk’s global marketing organization. He described marketing and advertising as two sides of one coin. The logic is circular in a productive way. Expedia’s marketers can use the company’s advertising tools themselves, improving the products with direct operating feedback. Advertisers can draw on travel demand, loyalty relationships, creative capabilities, and first-party data. Measurement can run across performance, brand building, and media instead of stopping at departmental borders.

The arrangement also clarifies Expedia’s leverage. Marketing investment has limits; an advertising network can sell useful access and measurement to partners across and beyond travel. Koedijk’s task therefore extends past spending Expedia’s budget. It includes turning the company’s understanding of future travel into a product for other brands, while proving that the system delivers returns.

There is a personal detail that fits this operating style without explaining it too neatly. Koedijk has followed Formula 1 since childhood and is an automotive enthusiast. He has expressed delight that a Dutch driver became world champion. The sport rewards joined-up systems: design, software, strategy, weather, driver judgment, and quick feedback. Marketing at Expedia has acquired a similar instrument panel. A small gain in bidding, content quality, loyalty, conversion, or relevance can compound across enormous volume.

But the more revealing personal note may be travel itself. Originally from the Netherlands, Koedijk has visited more than 40 countries and now lives in Medina, Washington, with his wife and two sons. He markets a category he uses, and a category where efficiency is only half the product. A perfectly optimized trip still needs somewhere worth going.

Curiosity is the durable channel

Koedijk’s public advice to marketers is less about mastering one tool than remaining willing to feel unskilled. Prompting, multimodal production, and agent design will change. Curiosity, openness, and tolerance for failed experiments travel better. His own career supports the claim. Affiliate networks gave way to paid search at scale; performance marketing widened into social; social joined brand and loyalty; now agents may mediate discovery. Each turn made an older specialty insufficient, but rarely useless.

The practical lesson is not to predict the final interface. It is to build a team that can learn while the interface changes. Keep creative people close to technical people. Attach experiments to outcomes. Protect quality when production gets cheap. Give machines facts they can understand and people a reason to care.

Koedijk began by helping websites earn a place in search results. A quarter-century later, he is working on the same broad puzzle at Expedia scale: how to be chosen. The answer now must pass through a traveler’s imagination, a brand’s memory, a marketplace’s inventory, and perhaps an agent’s reasoning. The search box did not disappear. It grew a voice, a memory, and a seat at the planning table.