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The transformative power of generative AI in travel
5-MINUTE READ
December 10, 2024
BLOG
5-MINUTE READ
December 10, 2024
I am an avid traveler. Whether traveling internationally for business, to client locations on a weekly basis, traveling to watch my favorite teams play away games, play golf or major sporting events, my journey from inspiration to booking is unique to the moment. Some of my favorite experiences occurred when I traveled to the same location weekly for 4 years. The hotel that I stayed at knew my preferences well, and treated me like family. It felt like home. Another favorite was when I traveled to Brazil for the World Cup, where my home-share host organically began serving as my local tour guide and concierge. The thing that made both experiences special, even though they had drastically different contexts, was that the experiences became personal and unique to me. To keep existing relationships with travelers and create new ones, travel companies will need to find new and creative ways to connect with consumers.
I have written extensively about the ‘experience’ of travel and how new technologies have vast potential to reinvent the travel experience. Every traveler’s experience varies according to the kind of travel and is dynamically built before, during and after the journey. When I travel with my family, I enjoy planning. Planning the journey builds excitement and anticipation for what’s to come. I want to be involved in making the trip plan — to find the best restaurants, activities and hidden gems in the destination. At other times, when I travel on business, I am looking for a totally different experience. I prefer that the booking take as little time as possible. My preferred airline or the hotel should know exactly what I need from them, making my pre-travel experience effortless.
However, today, the experience across the three stages of travel — inspiration, planning, booking and travel experience, can best be described as rigid, siloed and often frustrating. Accenture’s recent report—The travel industry’s new trip—surveyed over 8000 travelers around the world. The report found that the overall experience of travel inspiration, planning and booking is time-consuming, stressful and disjointed.
Let me dive into a few of the challenges that travelers face across the three stages. Travelers draw from a wide variety of sources to get inspired to travel to a destination, undertake an activity or a trip. However, they often face an enormous amount of information flowing from sources, such as social media, marketing campaigns, reviews and other sources. To decipher the cacophony of noise across these channels can be tiring. And once you make the ultimate decision to travel, the planning stage is no less exhaustive! A lot of effort is expended in navigating multiple websites and apps through multi-tabbed browsing sessions, bookmarking websites, offline spreadsheets and detailed notetaking. Our report found 68% of travelers use up to 10 sites to plan their trip, and about 25% visit between 11–20 different sources for information. Lack of options for customization or filtering content adds to the time required to decide.
No wonder then, almost half of travelers (45%) start planning one to two months in advance, and more than a quarter (26%) start three to six months before their trip. And if you survive the planning stage, the challenge of booking faces you with equal overwhelm. A highly siloed process: booking your travel requires arranging each part of an overall trip—from hotels, flights, activities, restaurants and car rentals. Each requires separate payment and reservation processes. The report suggests that almost two-thirds (64%) of travelers feel that a lack of bundling options to create a seamlessly connected trip is their biggest challenge.
I believe that travel is about storytelling. When travelers are effectively inspired, they are more likely to commit to taking their trip. Clearly, travelers are not enjoying the current experience of travel inspiration, planning or booking as much as they could. They want something that is simple, can offer one-stop, integrated access to a whole range of travel-related services, including personalized, inspirational destination ideas, flights, dining and everything in between. Put simply, they want to take the “work” out of the travel experience.
Generative AI, as a technology has the potential to create that needed disruption. It will change the landscape of the travel journey, by enabling a new type of highly interactive, engaging and personalized trip planning and booking. And this will be possible soon!
Imagine a gen AI powered agent who you can trust for your travel needs. On your command, it can create immersive content in context, with multi-modal interactions and hyper-personalized recommendations as per your unique travel profile. When it comes to planning, long-anticipated features such as theme-based itineraries, collaborative group planning, multi-model and immersive research and multi-experience planning (hotel, flight, experiences, etc.), fluid travel planning can become a reality! The agent can help with booking, which now can become far simpler, offering a more centralized view of options such as payment, offers and rewards. Travelers can now create a trip and book it with one click through the use of AI Agents. Even while you are traveling, the agent’s personalized journey management can track, understand and plan each part of your journey. This gives you real-time, custom experiences across all points of contact! And the good news? Travelers are ready to adopt AI-powered solutions! A related Accenture study, The Empowered Consumer, found—over half of consumers are open to using conversational AI solutions.
The era of gen AI agents (Know more about harnessing the power of AI Agents here) in travel will be a fast-approaching reality. What is even more exciting is a network of agents working for the traveler to offer the best experience throughout different travel stages. Imagine a team of AI agents, working much like bees in a hive. They have different purposes, ranks and roles—but together, toward a common goal to offer the best travel experience! They do more than just automate tasks; they can serve to choreograph and orchestrate experience throughout the travel journey — they work together in harmony, autonomously, enhancing quality and efficiency for travelers, and increase productivity of the organizations that support them. I believe this future is not too far!
Clearly, the sphere of travel search will change, driven by the traveler’s needs and enabled by gen AI and its agents. The potential for a new, more expansive type of aggregator with an even broader and comprehensive role in the travel journey is imminent. This would mean that travel ecosystem players will need to reinvent themselves and define their near-term and long-term strategy.
But are travel players ready to grasp this opportunity? The report found that globally, almost three-quarters (73%) of travel leaders are focused on adopting gen AI for cost savings and greater efficiency. However, most players are finding considerable challenges when it comes to scaling initiatives. These include developing strategies and assessing potential deployments, assessing tech readiness, responsible adoption and governance processes.
The first step for executives is committing to a few principles, which underpin a human-centric and organization-wide approach to gen AI that delivers lasting value. It will mean deciding between moving up the funnel, creating more differentiation in their current role; becoming more creative in how they engage in the travel ecosystem, and/or more actively identify ways to monetize the full value of their data. This will be critical to the next generation of digital and physical travel experiences. For example, Online Travel Agents (OTA) will likely begin to use scale, inventory and marketing budgets to attempt to move up the funnel. Experience suppliers, such as Cruise Lines and Resorts and inventory suppliers, like airlines and hotels may attempt to provide a broader retail experience selling beyond their primary inventory model and move up the funnel through new products and services.
A good place to start is with assessing every move in the context of the value chain. This can include looking more closely at various functions and identifying quick-win opportunities to apply gen AI. Areas such as improved booking experiences, conversational trip planning, dynamic pricing strategies and so on can be good starting points. Mapping all these cases will facilitate an integrated approach and maximize gen AI’s impact, ultimately supporting a phased implementation and establishing a base for a planned future strategic bet.
It requires to be prepared on all technology fronts and building a strong AI and data management foundation. The mix includes a robust enterprise platform and agentic architecture, integrated enterprise data and Applied Intelligence — across multiple business units to integrate multiple data streams and provide greater contextualization — with a solid plan for data and knowledge governance to keep your data accurate, available and secure. The idea is to foster a culture of forward-looking AI governance that helps the organization proactively adhere to regulations and mitigate risks of data breaches or misuse, building trust with travelers. And don't forget, things like messaging services, blockchain tech and systems for emails and alerts are all part of the mix, keeping the data flowing fast and furious when it counts.
And importantly, it is crucial to identify skills gaps for the new roles that technology will create. Collaboration across multiple teams, including domain, product, engineering, cloud, marketing and others, will be essential to make sure all teams are familiar and comfortable with using data.
The transformative power of generative AI and a network of AI agents in travel is undeniable. Travel executives are keen to embrace this future and prepare their organizations to address the associated challenges. Adopting and scaling AI will help them to seize this opportunity to redefine travel with personalized experiences, seamless and unforgettable adventures.