NEW YORK, March 30 — From recommending destinations to suggesting hotels and flights based on custom criteria, artificial intelligence looks set to revolutionise the way we plan a trip. Above all, it should make life easier for travellers who aren’t in the habit of calling on professional agents to help work out their travel plans.
Unless you opt for the services of a travel agency, organising a trip can take a lot of time and commitment, from checking the various guidebooks and searching blogs and websites for the right hotels and must-see tourist sites, to deciding which places to visit to see the essentials. So for travellers planning trips from scratch, the development of artificial intelligence tools could be a great help. Trip.com, for example, is an online travel agency that operates in 39 countries and regions with a network of more than 1.2 million hotels. It now incorporates a chatbot that can generate itinerary ideas based on the user’s specific criteria.
Powered by the same artificial intelligence used by OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, this tool, named TripGen, answers very simple, direct questions such as “where should I go?” or “what should I do?”. You can even ask how much a particular leg of a trip will cost. Concretely, everything happens via the mobile application of Trip.com. For the moment, travellers can interact with the chatbot in English, Korean, Chinese and Japanese, but other languages are to be added over time. “In the future, we will consider other NLP model alternatives and continue on our journey to provide the ultimate product experience for travellers,” Schubert Lou, the online travel agency’s chief operating officer, said in a statement in February.
AI at your service
AI could also be a solution for travellers who haven’t yet got to the stage of planning their itinerary, and who are short of destination ideas. That’s the aim of Expedia, which is one of OpenAI’s partner companies currently integrating plugins into the ChatGPT environment. The travel giant, which has many tourism brands such as Hotels.com or Trivago, plans to inspire consumers in search of new getaways and to do so, it will tap into its 70 petabytes of data. According to a tweet posted by the Expedia Group, users will get freshly updated information on everything from hotel and flight prices to room availability and car rentals.
With our new AI Plugin, a traveler can start a conversation with #ChatGPT to plan their next trip–complete with access to up-to-date information on the availability & price of flights, hotels, vacation rentals, activities, & car rentals across the world. https://t.co/cVgLL6qln9 pic.twitter.com/YAIaj9zrEd
— Expedia Group (@ExpediaGroup) March 23, 2023
A major technological revolution, the use of artificial intelligence seems to facilitate the relationship between travellers and tourism professionals. In the case of Kayak, another travel platform that has partnered with OpenAI to build a plugin, the idea is to compare flights and means of transportation to reach a destination according to many criteria, such as travelling with a pet.
But this is just the beginning, because many travel companies are now only too keen to become partners of OpenAI in the future. Moving forward, there are many ways in which AI could be useful to simplify the definition of a travel project. “There’s nothing to say that artificial intelligence won’t one day replace travel agents in designing and building trips and packages that are relatively simple. At least, at first,” the French tourism industry news site TourMag wrote a few weeks ago.
And for travellers too, the vacation experience is sure to be turned upside down by AI, if only when it comes to finding a restaurant. Reservations giant OpenTable has also been integrated into the ChatGPT environment so that consumers can get restaurant recommendations to meet their specific requirements. — ETX STudio
