While AI products haven’t yet lived up to their expectations, travel planning is an area where AI shows promise. There are even some new products available that try to use AI to automate the more mundane tasks and replace some of the drudgery of travel planning.
Imagine having a travel agent who knows your preferences perfectly, never sleeps, and can instantly analyze millions of data points to plan your trips. That’s what AI-powered trip planning may become. It’s not there yet, but all of the elements are here to make it easier to plan and book our travels, assuming the travel companies don’t muck it up with ads and kickbacks.
Here are some examples of what AI could do:
1. Predictive Pricing Intelligence – AI systems could analyze years of pricing data, seasonal trends, and events, and predict with growing accuracy when flights will be the cheapest. As an example, Google Flights can predict whether current prices are high or low. Apps like Hopper provide “buy now or wait” recommendations with confidence scores. Imagine being able to quickly find the least expensive business class flight from San Diego with a stay at a Marriot property using points for 10 days in Paris between April 1 and May 30.
2. Personalized Recommendations – AI will be able to learn from our past travels, our searches, and our calendar. It will look at our previous destinations, our length of stays, our preferred airlines and hotels, and our affinity memberships. It will be able to determine our budget preferences by looking at the class of services we use and the restaurants we go to while traveling. From all of this data it will be able to assemble a list of recommendations or even a detailed itinerary for an entire trip.
3. Smart Scheduling – AI algorithms can optimize multi-city routes to schedule our flights, and when we arrive, book transportation and suggest each day’s itineries and attractions to visit, accounting for opening/closing hours and the best time to go with less waiting. It can factor in travel time between locations, consider daily traffic patterns and seasonal weather and avoid common pitfalls like booking a museum that’s closed on Mondays.
4. Dynamic Travel Package Building – AI could be used to automatically adjust plans based on flight changes or availability, and suggest alternatives when first choices aren’t available or flights are canceled. It will be able to track pricing tracking of hotels and airfares across multiple booking platforms simultaneously and make a recommendation for where to book each part of our trip, or even do it for us.
–/–
While AI trip planning is going to become increasingly sophisticated, it’s now best used as a tool to enhance rather than replace our own judgment. I would want to review how well it does for a number of trips before I’d fully trust it. And it’s only as good as our past information. If we change tastes or decide to explore something new and different, relying on our past information may not be helpful. But the technology should be able to handle the data-heavy lifting of travel planning, hopefully finding that elusive business class seat to Europe that’s on sale for a few hours.
Currently there are a few sites that claim they can do the planning, such as GuideGeek and MindTrip. I tried them briefly and, while they have potential, some still hallucinate (make things up) or don’t always have the latest information. I’ll be trying some of these in the future. In the meantime, here is an interesting early review from one travel writer, Jen Murphy, trying several of these new AI services.
She concludes, “WIll I be using AI to plan future trips? If I’m heading to a popular place like Paris or London or even Moab, Utah, for the first time and don’t want to miss the star attractions, it’d be a something I’d look to initially. But I like to get off the beaten path when I travel, and I’m not convinced AI would get me to that less-trafficked trail or mom-and-pop breakfast spot that’s only advertised via locals in the know. For now, I’ll remain a luddite and stick to good old word-of-mouth travel planning.”
The downside to all of this is that we’ll need to give companies even more personal information than they have now, and it’s inevitable they will sell it to ad brokers and flood us with even more advertising.
