How AI Is Changing the Travel Industry

Our life can be so exhausting sometimes. We toil and toil to provide for our family. Our lives get tangled in the four walls of our office. So, naturally, we want to escape those 4 walls as quickly as possible and for as long as possible. So we wait for weekends or any type of holiday. Ah! Holiday, when we break free from the clutches of our boring office life and go on a trip with our family, And everything after that is hunky dory, right? Wrong!.

If you want to go out for a trip, what you need is planning. Without proper planning, no trip or vacation can be a success (If you want to enjoy that holiday)

You need to choose a destination based on several things like your budget, the weather, hotels nearby or with proper facilities, and a plan to visit all the tourist spots during that holiday. But now you’d think, “Common, can I have some little rest at least in the holidays!!” Well, your prayers have been answered. Here, I have discussed that solution; all you need to do now is relax, sit back comfortably, and just sit through it.

A few years back, you had to research the trip (You were planning to go for) a lot (Sometimes months before), even before booking the ticket. But today, most of those headaches of researching are gone, all thanks to AI (Artificial Intelligence). AI will provide you with the necessary information about the desired destination you want to visit. And not just in researching.

You want to stay in a hotel that meets your preferences; say you want to stay in a hotel that is near your desired destination, and you don’t care for the food in that hotel, as you can manage it in some restaurants, but the hotel should be near the location. You feed these preferences to AI, and it can help you with a list of hotels near the destination.

AI chatbots and assistants help the traveler if they have any kind of query. You can have questions regarding booking, pricing, hotels, anything, and AI will provide you with a proper response, helping you. Another important thing for a trip is planning; if you don’t have a proper plan, then it's a recipe for disaster. But with AI, you can plan the trip in advance. Airports also use AI for verifying a traveler.

So, AI has changed the world of traveling a lot, for the better and in some cases for the worse. As there are both benefits and challenges to AI in travel, which we will discuss in the later part of this article, but before that, let’s discuss. How AI has impacted, or let’s say changed, the travel industry, is making it easier for us to book a destination without worrying that much.So, without wasting any time, let’s jump into the topic.

How AI IS Changing The Travel Industry

We all know the impact of AI. It was created to make our lives a lot easier. So, naturally, the travel industry also adopted this invention, changing the travel industry forever and, in turn, making it easier for a traveler to plan their vacation. But what are the ways through which AI is affecting the travel industry? Well, let’s find out together. You will find a list of things that AI does to guide travelers.

AI-Powered Travel Planning

Personalized Destination Recommendations:

So, you want to find a suitable destination for your trip that meets your budget, hotel preferences, food preferences, and good weather. Earlier, people used to research this manually. They looked for a destination that met their budget, a place to stay, food, and other things. It was very rare for them to find a destination that aligned with their expectations and comforts (And the fact that it cost them their precious time is a different issue altogether), but with AI Personalized Destination Recommendation, AI suggests a destination based on your budget, likes/dislikes, stay, food, and other details that you feed it.

When you feed it the kind of destination you want for vacation (Specifying all the requirements, including budget and your comfort), it will suggest destinations that meet those requirements or demands of yours. This helps you save your precious time.

AI-Generated Travel Itineraries:

Now, planning is something that we all need to keep in mind before traveling to a destination. If you go to a place without any plan, then your trip will be a disaster. But then you’ll say, “If we are new to the place, no matter how much we plan, we will miss out on something.”

And it’s True; you can’t possibly make plans for a destination you have little to no idea of. That’s where AI comes in. You don’t have to make any plans; AI will. It will make a day-by-day travel plan. AI will suggest the places in that city/county that you must see. It will schedule them in an orderly fashion so that it is easier for you to visit those places. It makes planning easier for travelers. Saving them time and effort

Virtual Travel Assistants:

Imagine you have come to a particular place for a trip for the very first time; you don’t know much about it but have heard a lot about it. You would need guidance from someone so that it would be easier for you to explore the place. Here, AI works as an assistant, guiding you through various hurdles that you might come across while exploring that place.

You can ask it questions about what you should do and what your next step or location should be, and it will guide you accordingly. This makes your trip a lot simpler and smoother.

Smarter Booking and Pricing

Another way AI assists you is in booking and pricing. Let’s understand it properly.

AI-Based Demand Forecasting:

Here, AI recognizes a pattern and accordingly suggests that location. It would judge demand for a destination based on earlier search history and how many people search for that destination in a particular time.

To understand this a little better, let me give you an example: many people across India book tickets for Puri’s Jagannath Temple during the Ratha Yatra. So, AI recognizes this pattern, and during the time of Ratha Yatra, it suggests that people book tickets for Puri whenever they visit the booking site.

Personalized Booking Recommendations:

Another advantage of AI in travel is that travel websites often use AI to recommend Hotels, flights, or different types of activities to do. And these recommendations are completely based on an individual’s personal preference.

If you like to stay in an expensive hotel with a certain kind of food and another person likes to stay in a normal hotel with food that’s not necessarily what they like, but they prefer separate restaurants while on the trip, then the AI will suggest different kinds of hotels to each of you.

Dynamic Pricing:

This is more company-oriented than traveler-oriented- AI can help companies manage prices based on previously booked destinations and hotels. For example, if Location-A has an increase in bookings during festival seasons compared to Location-B, then AI will suggest the price of A to be higher than that of B.

AI-Powered Customer Service

AI Chatbots and Virtual Assistants:

These chatbots guide the traveler with any type of query they have. These queries, which earlier required a human employee (Who would sometimes take a lot of time to get back to the traveller) But now, if you have a query, say, “Which hotel is near my destination?” then the chatbot would provide you with a list of hotels near your desired destination; it will also provide you with the hotel’s information. So that you can decide if that particular hotel aligns with your preferences.

Multilingual Customer Support:

One of the major limitations of human assistants is that if the traveller is someone from a different state or country and is not comfortable in English, they may prefer their own regional language. Then it will be difficult for both the traveller and the human employee to even have a conversation.AI can communicate in any language. This helps travelers a lot, as they don’t need to learn a specific language to ask their questions.

You can speak any language on the face of the earth, and AI can assist you in that language itself. Many times we try to ask our questions in English even if it’s a little tough for us to get our point across. But maybe in English, you are finding it a little difficult to explain your problem to AI. Not to worry; just switch to the language you prefer to converse with AI, and it will provide your answer in that particular language.

AI in Airport And Transportation

Facial Recognition and Biometric Systems:

Sometimes airports use Biometric systems such as Facial Recognition, which can help confirm the traveler’s identity by using the person’s physical appearance for verification.

Predicting Delays and Disruptions:

If you are waiting for your flight and it’s been like forever. Thinking, “What’s taking it so long?” You can simply check with AI. As we know, AI can analyze a large amount of information. So when your flight is getting delayed, you can check with AI, and it will analyze all the information (as we know) and give you the exact reasons why your flight is delayed. What disrupts the flight, everything.

Optimizing Transportation Operations:

This is something that is more helpful to companies than to the traveler (But even the traveler has some advantages of this). Companies use AI to use a particular vehicle more efficiently, navigate routes, and many more things. To understand it a little better, allow me to give you an example-

Suppose you’re traveling to a tourist attraction during a festival season when the road leading to that particular destination is crowded; then AI can help the driver navigate an alternative path leading to that destination.

Benefits & Challenges of AI in Travel

Now that you know how AI is being used in the travel industry, it's time for you to understand one small thing. AI has both its benefits and challenges. When it comes to benefits, we have already discussed how AI can help both the travel websites and the traveller in planning, booking, and many other things. But let us understand the benefits of AI in the world of travel a little better:

Benefit No.1: We have already discussed it, but still, AI recognizes travelers’ preferences based on which it recommends locations, hotels, and activities to try.

Benefit No.2: It saves a lot of time. Earlier, what used to happen was you had to make plans: doing a background check of that destination, the flight tickets, hotels, then you planned what tourist spots you could cover, the activities that you could do. Oh, God!! I used to do that, and man, is it an exhausting process or what!! Thank god for AI; the time and effort it cost us to plan the entire trip now costs us nothing no time, no effort. We just give our preferences, and it recommends places and makes a proper schedule for us to follow to enjoy that place.

Benefit No.3: Faster customer service. Earlier, if you had any doubts, you used to contact the travel websites’ customer team,m asking them your doubts. Sometimes they answered you within a few minutes, but most of the time it stretched to long hours of just waiting. But now, with AI, It has changed drastically. It takes a few seconds at max, to get the answer to your query. It also helps in planning without taking much of your time.

Benefit No.4: Now this is a benefit for the travel industry. These companies, with the help of AI, can find out when their bookings, customers, and demand for a particular place might increase. AI analyzes all the previous data and gives them the exact time their website will be filled with bookings and the particular location that will attract the most number of travelers.

Benefit No.5: Earlier, the employees of the website had too much on their plates, their daily duties alongside answering questions from travellers. Now, with AI chatbots, the traveller can simply ask questions to the chatbots, and the chatbot will analyze the question to see if it was a repeated question or not; then, after analyzing all this data, it will provide the travellers with a response. And it only takes a few seconds, it allows the employees to focus on work that demands human interaction.

Now that you know the benefits of AI in travel, let us understand its challenges. See, AI has been created by the most flawed being in the universe: humans. So, it just makes sense that the technology (AI) that has been created by these flawed beings (Humans) will have some kind of flaw of its own. Now AI is getting better and better, but it still has some flaws. Let’s talk about those flaws or the challenges one could face while using AI for their tour.

Challenge No.1: Starting off with one of the biggest challenges, AI CAN make mistakes. AI can sometimes hallucinate and recommend places like hotels that have been closed for a few months. Sometimes, in response to a traveler's query, the AI can provide an outdated response; for example, you ask it the price of staying at a particular hotel,l and it might give you a price that is outdated and has since doubled.

Challenge No.2: Another challenge is privacy concerns. AI collects your personal information, So, naturally it raises many eyebrows. Nowadays, information can be used for many internet crimes, so it just makes sense that people will be worried with questions like “What information are they collecting? Who all can access my personal information? Why do they need this information?”

Challenge No.3: It is connected to the 1st challenge we discussed. We know that AI can make mistakes; this challenge talks about too much dependence on AI. If companies and travelers blindly follow everything AI is recommending, then they will face several unnecessary hurdles because AI can make mistakes.

Challenge No.4: Less Human Interaction is the next challenge of AI. Now this challenge is a lot more complicated. AI helps you make plans, book, and maintain a schedule to follow. But life hardly goes as planned. There will be some kind of mess you will find yourself in that will throw the entire plan into the dustbin. And now you might miss your flight; even if you make it, you are facing some difficulties in booking the recommended hotel, and these are still less complicated issues, and you will only come across these issues if you are that fortunate. Issues will get complicated, which the AI will find difficult to analyze, as it has been trained to handle regular issues, but for these complicated issues you will have to rely on a human to guide you through the mess.

Challenge No.5: The next challenge is changing jobs and skills. This is not necessarily a challenge, as change is the rule of the world, but it is a huge challenge for employees, as they have to adapt to this. They must learn new skills so that they can use AI in a more proficient manner and save their jobs.

How To Use AI?

So, now that you know how AI is being used in the travel industry, it is up to you to decide how you want to use it as a traveler. You can take its help with planning and booking, but don’t rely completely on AI. Thinking, “AI will manage everything; I don’t have anything to worry about; I can relax!” You can relax and don’t need to take unnecessary worries, but that doesn’t mean you don’t need to be careful while booking and planning. As we have already discussed, you will face some kind of issues which might be too complicated for a machine to comprehend.

You need to be prepared accordingly. AI can suggest and recommend a few things that you can follow, but you should carry some kind of backup just in case. No, you know how AI can help you and how you can use it. Go ahead and book your tickets and spend some quality time with your family at your desired destination.