Sabre-Google roundtable highlights AIs relevance, impact on travel industry

Why 30% of Travelers Are Turning to AI for Holiday Planning

Travelport, a tech company that provides reservation software for travel agents, this month introduced a feature called the Content Curation Layer (CCL). This feature uses AI to improve travel searches by quickly sorting through billions of options to find ChatGPT App the best matches for customers. Someday a computer-generated avatar may explain why you can’t fly business class to Dubai. In the meantime, travel management and travel tech companies are testing how to apply Gen AI to various parts of business travel.

Travel metasearch engine Kayak earlier this year released the first version of a reimagined travel planning and booking process, a tool called Ask Kayak. HomeToGo is testing one of those building blocks in a new customer service chatbot called AI Sunny, which repurposed the previous traditional chatbot. The company said that so far, AI Sunny has reduced the transfer of customers to human agents by about 40%. Many of the travel booking platforms that experimented with generative AI tools early are now releasing second or third versions of that tech. I founded Speakspots in 2019 and launched the proprietary travel AI product in 2021, well before the advent of ChatGPT.

As a depository of static information, genAI is ill-prepared to handle the dynamic pricing and perishable inventory availability in travel. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. Therefore any travel information or itinerary suggested by genAI, has to be powered by real-time ARI (Availability, Rates and Inventory) aggregators and tech platforms. A main catalyst in this evolution is the dominance of Gen Z and Gen Alpha in guest audiences.

Uncharted Territories: Exploring AI’s Impact on the Travel Industry

In the results, Millennials and Gen Z are the most likely to use AI (about half of them plan to), while Gen X and Baby Boomers are less likely. Equally as important, people planning trips with families are more likely to use AI, as are people with disabilities. Expedia in May said it would be adding multiple AI tools, and property review summaries have been available for a while. Among others, HomeToGo has been working on its AI trip planner for some time. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Apple Intelligence, Bing and Meta are some of the obvious large sources.

Travel Technology Reporter Justin Dawes tested how it works for trip planning. The initiative aims to ease passenger frustration caused by flight delays. Seventy-five percent of these delays are due to weather conditions, according to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). United’s new generative AI software can text updates to passengers in near real time, a task previously handled by airline staff.

Similar offerings from OpenAI and others will provide more GAI query options. Today, we can type requests into chatbots and receive responses in text, images, and sound. Soon, we’ll have natural language conversations with photorealistic avatars, blurring the line between human and AI interactions. Search in its current form factor is ripe for profound change over the coming years. But the underlying need of travelers to browse the world wide web for information when researching, planning and booking their travel plans will last over decades.

• Such high levels of personalisation, according to Tharp, would “break down the friction in a journey and not only lead to higher revenue but also potentially more trips and more things purchased during a traveller’s journey”.
• He said Booking Holdings has to figure out how to differentiate services for its top customers.
• Our Deaf travellers told us that, in a perfect world, they would want live interpreters.
• The company plans to generate revenue through travel bookings and partnerships with destination marketing organizations, while continuing to develop and enhance its platform.
• Additionally, the piece underscores the urgency for travel companies to invest in AI despite industry-specific challenges and evolving benchmarks.

With this vision in mind entrepreneurs Luuk Verhoeven, Omar Sheshtawy, and Robin van Rijn created travel platform Stippl in 2022. Since then, the platform has evolved into a pioneering all-in-one travel app where travelers can plan their journeys, including accommodation, transportation, activities and much more. In the future, business travelers could also benefit from AI applications that take care of everything, from planning and rebooking to billing. The company released the first version of its AI trip planner in June 2023. It could only answer general travel questions at that time and search for hotel bookings, not answer questions much more complicated than that.

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We’re also experimenting, not at the scale of some of the bigger travel companies, but we’re definitely experimenting on UX changes for recommendations. So we want to use it to recommend the packages and the combinations. From established online travel agencies to the latest travel startups, we have the latest news on everything in online travel. Like ASTA, Fora Travel sees the online travel agency approach as lacking. AJ Blanchet, another millennial Skifter, based in Salt Lake City, Utah, likewise has never used a travel advisor and expressed similar feelings about the fun of do-it-yourself trip planning. We asked a few Skift staffers who are Gen Zers or millennials whether they had used a traditional travel agent to plan recent trips, and got a mixed response.

Ensuring a brand’s unique value propositions and positive customer experiences stands out in the search results will impact click-through rates, conversion and ultimately shape the success of travel companies in search marketing. A majority of travelers believe that using generative AI to create travel itineraries will be easier than planning on their own, according to a survey. Speakspots has over 50,000 lines of JavaScript code logic, which is longer than the Lord of the Rings trilogy and certainly didn’t get written overnight.

Voice communication and input is faster, convenient and more effective than the need to type. While so much has advanced in terms of computing input format to cater for all persons and their individual capabilities, the main stream will relaign to voice input as we move forward. Jeff Bezos famously said that in business it is more important to ask about the things that are not going to change in the next 10 years than what will change. A hotel chain’s pay-per-click strategy to capture search traffic in relevant hotel queries might turn into a wasted effort if the search results highlight overpriced resort fees or consistent long check-in queues in the AI answer. A recent research paper claims that adding quotations, statistics and citing sources are effective content strategies to increase the odds to be referenced in AI answers.

GuideGeek is a free AI chatbot built on OpenAI that can provide instant responses to travel-related questions. For example, you can ask it to help you plan travel, which includes details about places to stay, places to eat, sights to see, and more. About 30 percent of travelers plan to use some form of AI to help them plan their holiday trips this year. So if you’re a hotel, having fluff like “Uncover the allure of [city] with hotel [name] as your sanctuary. Seamlessly blending style and convenience, our boutique hotel offers contemporary comfort and personalized service at the heart of the city.

We are thinking of partnering with a company like Stripe, so we can have a wallet specifically for the agent where you can put some money. We’ve been thinking a lot about how can you make this a safe
experience, especially once there’s a lot of money involved, like for travel. We
don’t want to have unauthorized transactions, and we don’t want to accidentally
book a wrong flight, or to the wrong place, where you might travel chatbot lose money. So we’re looking at how can you build trust … how can you have almost like a
shared credit card program, like if you have a credit card for your child. So
it’s like having a shared card with the agent, and the agent can spend something
but then you get notified and you can approve or disapprove. We are internally
testing it out – and we are seeing positive responses from the users that have
tested it.

Conclusion: AI in travel – overhyped or the future?

Airlines have ambitious plans to integrate generative AI into their operations. So far, these implementations have mainly focused on passenger engagement roles. This could soon change, however, as airlines explore how to leverage this technology in technical, back-end functionalities. There’s a lot of focus now on the availability and abundance of data for AI, and we are already seeing data licensing agreements from the AI companies that are building the foundational models.

Speech-to-text software might seem like an easy solution to some of these problems. But for many Deaf people, English is not their native language and Auslan can be processed far more easily and quickly. The greatest frustration came in situations where other passengers weren’t willing or able to provide information, leaving our Deaf travellers to just “follow the crowd”. But they also said they felt they needed to stand near information screens to watch for updates, and ask station staff or other passengers for information when the situation had changed. They also reported being hypervigilant while on the train, watching to make sure they don’t miss their stop. Jessica Korte has received funding from Qvest Australia, a technology solutions partner to Sydney Trains.

Balancing Generative AI’s Benefits With Realistic Limits

Expedia has introduced Romie, an AI-powered travel assistant, and updated its app with itinerary builders and AI-generated review summaries. HomeToGo is developing ‚Super AI Sunny‘ to assist with search and booking, and Kayak has launched ‚Ask Kayak‘ to streamline travel planning. Despite these advancements, Skift’s tests indicate that these tools still have room for improvement.

The AI filter tool is located in the property filter section of the results page in the app. A great way to think about this is also in your Frequently Asked Questions section. Going forward, you can add a lot more long-tail information here, which is really targeting the AI more than the humans.

Search engines delivering AI answers will not only collect and summarize facts, but also crawl opinions and reviews available across the web when the query relates to a brand, product or service. Google’s existing Pros & Cons structured data, available today as product snippets in result pages, lays the foundation for informed opinions in future AI results. Travel marketers need to put marketing money into these types of campaigns today. Learning how to optimize the campaign configurations and feed Google’s algorithm with enough data to optimize performance will give advertisers a head start in paid AI search marketing.

But such tactics might be shortsighted in a constantly evolving landscape and different per vertical. Google’s Gemini model powers HomeToGo Smart AI Reviews, a tool in testing that summarizes a property’s guest reviews and highlights key features. That’s been the case for Expedia, Kayak, and HomeToGo, all of which have announced upgrades or new AI tools in recent months. Next, several prominent airlines are using the Paris Olympics to build brand recognition. Airlines Reporter Gordon Smith takes a look at carriers that have entered into Olympic-related partnerships.

What one piece of advice would you give other founders or future founders?

Altour, a travel management company run by Internova Travel Group, which is owned by Certares, debuted new AI-based tools related to helping travelers recover when their flights are delayed or canceled. The company is testing how to essentially input those details into its platform so that its online booking tool only displays travel options that comply with a road warrior’s travel policy. This removes the need for an advisor to read the email and input the information manually. Social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram have played a significant role in making spirituality cool again.

By targeting brand keywords effectively, hotel websites appear prominently in search results when users search for their brand name. This not only increases brand visibility but also helps reputation management and driving targeted traffic to hotel websites. Concur founder and Madrona managing director Steve Singh acquired Direct Travel in April. Using artificial intelligence, Otto wants to create a travel assistant to plan, book and support business travelers during a trip. In February, Priceline updated the suite using OpenAI’s GPT-4 Turbo and Google Cloud’s Vertex AI. We’ve shipped features that utilize content analysis and summarization in our hotels funnel.

On Instagram, some interpreted the launch of Emma as Germany replacing human content creators. The German National Tourist Board envisions Emma as a key representative for Germany in the tourism industry. „All those break points that we see between distribution technology and supplier technology we can hopefully see get healed by AI.“

Tourism providers and destinations that want to be noticed, need to  make their data available and optimized. The investment backs the strong progress YGO Trips has made in the field of AI development since its founding in January 2023. According to the startup, the tourism ChatGPT industry is largely run on outdated technologies, and that is why they want to take it into the AI era. Our community is about connecting people through open and thoughtful conversations. We want our readers to share their views and exchange ideas and facts in a safe space.

Altour’s new product, AI Transform, is a tool meant to help with travel program compliance. It allows travel managers to create and update video content that is supposed to be especially persuasive at encouraging compliance with policies. The tool creates white-labeled mini-videos with supposedly life-like avatars explaining policies.

That was the key takeaway from discussions with travel tech companies gathered at WiT Japan & North Asia in Tokyo this month. Amadeus has announced a partnership with Microsoft to introduce an AI-powered chatbot designed to revolutionise the way hoteliers access and interpret business intelligence data. I believe the change is here now, but it’s hard getting AI into the hands of consumers as the business models that AI enables don’t really work with how the sectors currently work. In the background, the AI creates potential travel options from multiple sources of information. That’s what executives repeated as they showcased how AI pulls information from across its products to create detailed trip plans and more. To embrace AI innovations, hoteliers must ensure their technical ecosystem supports seamless AI integration.

… What
happens today is you go to United, for example, and you have to put in all your
information, but if we can remove all of that part and you press a button and …
the agent can finish the whole task. Can we make use of existing systems so the agent can also focus on that. It’s also possible we can have some sort of auction-based models, or partnership
models.