Automated travel agents, itineraries generated in a matter of seconds, multimillion-dollar acquisitions. The travel industry may never be the same. A number of major travel companies have recently been embracing AI.
/ Adobe Stock In 1841, a British cabinet-maker named Thomas Cook organized a railway trip for more than 500 people from Leicester, England to a temperance (anti-alcohol) meeting in nearby Loughborough. The journey is often cited as the world’s first example of organized tourism, and it led to the creation of Thomas Cook & Son – widely credited as the world’s first travel agency. Much has changed since that fateful train journey more than 180 years ago.
Not only have cars and airplanes replaced trains as the preferred mode of travel for much of the world, but increasingly, the Thomas Cooks of the world are being unseated by a new kind of travel assistant: artificial intelligence. Consumer-facing generative AI models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Copilot and Google’s Gemini are already masters at producing text and other forms of content from simple user prompts. It was only a matter of time, then, until the technology was widely embraced throughout the web-based travel industry to enhance the user experience.
“On the B2C side, travel planning is very low-hanging fruit for generative AI tools due to the wealth of knowledge that [large language models, or LLMs] contain about destinations and the ease with which they can output text itineraries,” .