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AI: A Useful Travel Agent

Pulse Labs • August 1, 2023
AI: A Useful Travel Agent

Travel and trip planning is seen as a natural use case for AI platforms. In the planning stage, consumers are making large considered purchases and need to compare and weigh different options with a number of variables.

Consumers see high potential in AI’s ability to alleviate trip planning anxiety and help them make decisions.

  • 88% of consumers are satisfied with travel and trip planning on all AI platforms tested
  • 61% are “ very satisfied” and 27% “ satisfied”
  • Among the platforms tested. Bard ranks highest among those platforms tested with 73% “ very satisfied” score
  • This was attributed to Bard’s ability to incorporate videos and images directly into its responses, providing a more immersive and visual experience, which facilitated easier understanding and visualization of the information

Consumers indicate that they would like to use AI platforms for planning travel and trips for several reasons, including:

  • Personalized recommendations
  • Efficient itineraries
  • Minimize trip-planning anxiety
  • Real-time updates and alerts
  • Cost savings and deals
  • Local understanding
  • Customer support and chatbots
  • Get honest reviews
  • Suggest options that are off-the-beaten track
  • Simulated and Virtual tours

Why?

Faster decision support

Here are some quotes directly from users about the positive aspects they see:

“I think that it could really ease my anxiety. It can help me create an itinerary within a few minutes so I can save a lot of time doing research online.”
“I am actually excited and curious to use the first ‘AI Travel Agent’ once those become more readily available. It would be really nice to have my own tool that would look up prices, best travel dates, save money, etc.”

Why not?

Up to date info

One concern mentioned often was around AI’s ability in “keeping up with travel trends.” This is rooted in the perception that the travel industry undergoes frequent changes and the limited data sets used to train AI models may not always possess up-to-date and real-time information.

“I don’t see it entering my travel or trip planning anytime soon. Travel information changes frequently and even dedicated, up-to-date sources have trouble keeping up. I feel like AI is always behind on latest changes.”

Implications

Planning a trip is a deliberative process and AI is seen as well suited for this use case. AI has the potential to play a role more like a travel agent vs being a brochure of options and destinations.  

This may give AI an advantage over traditional search and synthesis that consumers do themselves.  

Companies in the travel/hospitality/tourism space should be looking to leverage AI platforms' abilities to help gather and personalize information. Not just in how options are presented, but in its ability to have a dialogue with the customer about trade-offs. Some possible examples might include:

  • If you want to save money, would you consider changing your flight to Tuesday
  • If you have people who don't like the same activities, here are ideas that let you be close to each other but do different things

With that said, given the consumers' concern about the recency of information available, travel companies should consider prominently displaying a message on the freshness of the information and if recent, promote that upfront.

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