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,” says Michael Coletta, senior manager of research and innovation at Phocuswright, a market research firm focused on the travel industry. Travel website Expedia was quick to recognize the transformational power of generative AI. In April of last year, less than five months after the release of ChatGPT, the company announced a new feature allowing users to build travel plans with the chatbot’s help.
Since then, a growing number of other AI-powered features and platforms have proliferated throughout the travel and tourism sector. Layla, for example, is a website with an AI chatbot that’s designed to look and feel like a very friendly and responsive human travel agent. It even comes with a profile picture: a smiling, 20-something woman with curly brown hair, wearing a dark jacket and a backpack.
Advertisement When asked to provide some potential budget-friendly travel destinations in Europe for this fall, Layla recommended Kraków, Budapest and Lisbon, and provided a flight cost estimate for each. The system also appears to have built-in guardrails to prevent users from veering into non-travel-related conversations: When asked to recommend a presidential candidate, the system advised me to vote for in the upcoming US election, but immediately tried to veer the conversation back on-topic: “Let’s stick to planning that epic trip, shall we?” Layla launched late last year after reportedly securing more than $3m in seed funding from a cohort of investors that included a cofounder of Booking.com, a cofounder of Skyscanner and Paris Hilton.
Another platform called iPlan.ai is designed to build personalized travel itineraries. Users can modify parameters like budget (’Economy,’ ’Normal’ or ’Luxury’) and interests (’Historical’ or ’Nature,’ for example), and, with this information, the algorithm will automatically generate a proposed itinerary.
Advertisement Airbnb has also hinted at some big plans for AI. In November, the company acquired stealth AI startup GamePlanner.ai for a reported value of close to $200m.
Then, in a Q4 2023 earnings call earlier this year, company CEO Brian Chesky called AI “the ultimate platform shift” – a new phase in the evolution from web, to mobile, to new kinds of digital experiences. A generative AI-powered user interface, Chesky went on to say, can “provide an experience that’s so much more personalized than anything you’ve ever seen before – imagine an app that feels like it knows you. It’s like the ultimate concierge, an interface that is adaptive and evolving and changing in real-time .
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” Citing the recent acquisition of GamePlanner.AI, among other efforts, Chesky said he believes Airbnb “can become a leader in developing some of the most innovative and personalized AI interfaces in the world.” Catch up on the most important stories of the day, curated by our editorial team.
See the best ads of the last week - all in one place. Learn how to pitch to our editors and get published on The Drum. Leading AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini can also help users plan travel itineraries.
They don’t always appear to take current geopolitical events into account, however, in the manner that any competent human travel agent almost certainly would. Asked to provide a travel itinerary for a five-day trip to Kharkiv, Ukraine, ChatGPT enthusiastically did as it was asked without any mention of the bloody conflict currently underway in the region. Gemini, however, did provide a disclaimer: “Due to the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, I strongly advise checking the latest travel advisories from your government before making any travel plans.
Safety should always be the top priority.” (For reference, the US government currently has a Level 4 travel advisory – ’Do Not Travel’ – in place for Ukraine). Despite these seemingly major changes, Phocuswright’s Coletta believes that the travel and tourism industry is “still in a very early stage” in its adoption of AI.
“I wouldn’t call it a revolution in travel planning yet,” he says. Even so, some travel professionals are already feeling the effects. In the subreddit r/Singularity four months ago, one Reddit user said they were fired from their travel consultant job, “and lo and behold, the company is a partner with OpenAI.
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