Meta AI Says it Rivals ChatGPT We Tested it for Trip Planning

Business travel solutions provider Serko has partnered with digital human platform UneeQ to create Zena, an AI-powered digital travel agent. This innovative system integrates with ChatGPT and uses natural language processing to enhance the travel booking experience. Zena accesses a database of hotels, airlines and other travel content to suggest personalized itineraries, providing real-time pricing, availability and 24/7 support. Serko CEO Darrin Grafton emphasized in a news release that generative AI is essential for delivering these experiences, noting that travel’s personal nature is well-suited to interactions that mimic a human travel agent.

The company later plans to provide a consumer-facing AI tool for destination marketing organizations and other travel companies. It would essentially allow those companies to embed Mindtrip onto their own websites, integrating information related to those specific businesses. We’ve talked to a lot of users, and everyone complains about
booking travel because it takes a lot of time – you have to choose from all the
options, spend a lot of time finding the best flight. It’s a process – open your
laptop, find the right things – and that is something that can be fully
automated. You can talk to an agent and say, “Book me a flight to New York” and
the agent knows you enough and can make decisions for you.

As AI initiatives evolve, we may have to switch the underlying AI models and technology to improve results and relevance. The company’s two lead investors are Costanoa Ventures and Forerunner Ventures. Greg Sands, founder and managing partner of Costanoa Ventures, believes the winning AI trip planner will be one that makes a similar impression on users as the first time they used Uber or Airbnb. Sands, who had invested in Roadster, said feedback from travel industry experts leads him to believe that Mindtrip is on the right track. “It’s just very difficult for a very large company to change the interface that their users are very used to. Most of the products and engineering talent at a large company is maintaining what’s already there, as opposed to building brand new stuff.

At Your Service: Generative AI Arrives in Travel and Hospitality

PhocusWire reached out to travel industry leaders to gauge their opinions on the pace at which AI is changing the travel industry – some believe Chesky’s point is valid, others believe an AI-powered future is here. Mike Coletta, senior manager of research and innovation at Phocuswright, said there is a great dichotomy around AI that makes it difficult to wrap one’s head around the technology’s evolution. These AI-organized results pages for brainstorming searches are coming soon for dining and recipes, then expanding to later to include hotels and more.

Otto recently announced a $6 million seed round led by Madrona Ventures. The startup, founded by Michael Gulmann, former senior vice president of consumer products for Expedia Group, aims to serve the unmanaged business travel market with features that include booking hotels, flights, and more. travel chatbot Otto plans to launch a beta version in December and is working to refine its technology over the next few months. Travel booking platforms like Expedia, Kayak, and HomeToGo are advancing in their use of AI tools to enhance user experience, from planning and booking to customer service.

Meanwhile, Read shared that Sabre Hospitality is working with customers to “build foundations to understand their requirements and what we can do to solve for them”, adding that this effort is a “huge investment area for us”. Sabre is also using AI, and GenAI in particular, to improve customer care and boost innovation cycles with faster coding. Imagine a world where your hotel doesn’t just respond to guest complaints but anticipates and resolves them before they arise.

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AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants provide 24/7 customer support, resolving queries quickly, and offering tailored recommendations based on user interactions. This not only speeds up the travel planning process but also significantly improves customer satisfaction and loyalty. AI-powered predictive analytics tools are becoming essential in helping travelers make informed decisions. These tools use vast amounts of data to predict weather conditions, flight delays, and even crowd levels at popular tourist destinations.

• He believes Asia is where the growth is going to come in the next few years.
• While the tool can filter searches based on user prompts, it faces challenges in handling complex queries accurately.
• Most of the products and engineering talent at a large company is maintaining what’s already there, as opposed to building brand new stuff.

The AI trip planner is available to users in the U.S., UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore. It’s coming in local languages to users in Spain, Italy, Germany, France, Poland, and the Netherlands in the coming months. Large language models [LLMs] excel at providing general knowledge but struggle with specific, current business information.

United Airlines recently introduced generative AI to provide passengers with weather updates.

The platform is currently available in seven languages (English, Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese, French, Italian, and German). We add new destinations and attractions to our databases weekly, and we’re on track to have more than 250 destinations to choose from by the end of this year. We’ve secured partnerships with industry powerhouses like Booking.com. We’ve shrunk the amount of time it takes to generate an itinerary to one minute.

• The AI provided useful but sometimes outdated recommendations for activities and restaurants in Vancouver.
• ChatGPT, Perplexity, Apple Intelligence, Bing and Meta are some of the obvious large sources.
• Each tool optimizes just one department — revenue, guest services, or operations — leading to isolated gains without solving inefficiencies across the whole organization.
• They are often surprised to learn that I bootstrapped Speakspots for nearly five years before securing our first pre-seed round.
• Users can access the chatbot individually or in groups on Whatsapp, text message, or the Expedia app.

YGO Trips’ proprietary AI revolutionizes travel planning by combining natural language and visual elements. The AI can customize trips individually and, thanks to an extensive network of partners, handle complex bookings in real-time based on prices, availability, and user preferences. According to its founders, YGO Trips’ innovative AI offers an intuitive and user-friendly experience, free to use, and ensures fair travel prices. Booking.com has enhanced its AI trip planner on the mobile app to allow users to search for properties and ask specific questions. While the tool can filter searches based on user prompts, it faces challenges in handling complex queries accurately. Future plans include expanding the tool’s availability, introducing AI-generated review summaries, and enhancing trip management capabilities.

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However, the complexity of existing apps and websites remains a significant barrier for many. A majority of travelers (61%) find it difficult to navigate these platforms, while over half (56%) report that a lack of customization and filtering options prolongs decision-making or even deters them from finalizing their plans. Otto’s mission is to provide an AI travel assistant that plans, books, and supports users throughout their journeys. The service learns travellers’ preferences, including favourite airlines, specific flights, and preferred hotels, to create a tailored experience.

You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. Gen Z and Millennials want cultural engagement, not checklist sightseeing. So with some help from AI, Tiqets has recently quadrupled its sales without adding staff. Trip.com Group said it believes artificial intelligence “stands to revolutionize the travel industry” as it delivered second quarter 2024 results.

The article discusses the debate between Booking Holdings CEO Glenn Fogel and ASTA CEO Zane Kerby on the future of traditional travel agents in the face of advancing AI technologies. Fogel believes AI will accelerate the decline of human travel agents, while Kerby argues that the personalized service and trust provided by human agents cannot be replicated by AI. The article also includes perspectives from Skift staffers and highlights how companies like Fora Travel are integrating AI to enhance their services without replacing human advisors. The index includes companies publicly traded across global markets including online travel, booking, and travel tech companies.

Groupize Pro uses AI for venue information acquisition, helping event planners track what’s important at venues. The AI-powered feature aims to quickly gather and present relevant, up-to-date information about venues to platform users. Groupize, a maker of software tools to help small businesses book meetings, released a new product last week that showed a novel use of AI. For now, the voice interaction is available for queries about hotels and destinations, but Priceline said it will be expanded to flights, car rentals and vacation packages soon. But the appeal of Thailand’s spiritual tourism isn’t just for domestic travelers. The country also gets visitors from neighboring countries like Laos, Vietnam, Malaysia, and China.

Imagine a world where your hotel’s ability to thrive doesn’t depend on competing for the same slice of pie but on creating an entirely new pie. In 2024, the hospitality industry stands at the brink of a technological revolution—one where AI doesn’t just automate processes but transforms the guest experience, creating value in ways previously unimaginable. This isn’t about playing catch-up; it’s about leading a wave of innovation that redefines luxury, convenience, and personalization. It did, however, provide a link to a Bing search that showed options for a week in the middle of September. But at that point, it makes sense to just begin the flight search in a traditional search engine. Executives of top travel companies continue to emphasize that AI will transform the industry — even if it’s taking longer than expected.

Despite the barriers, 41% of respondents said they already have budgets in place to implement the technology. In addition, 46% cited it as a “top priority” for internal use in the coming year ahead of other technologies including data management and cloud architecture. Data security and a lack of expertise around generative artificial intelligence are hampering the implementation of the technology.

Despite a bumpy rollout with the infamous glue-on-pizza incident, the generative web is already reshaping the travel UI. This shift holds promising implications for hotels and media outlets. In the coming years, AI will replace traditional PMS ChatGPT App interfaces, accessing property data via APIs through voice commands, text, and future AI-driven touchpoints we can’t yet imagine. Voice assistants already offer hands-free convenience, simplifying UIs and reducing communication channels.

With the new funding, FLYR has raised more than $500 million as it seeks to advance the technology the travel industry is built on. “Over time, we were making the system more and more flexible, and making it more and more standardized. So today we are able to use this, what we call, things to do template, to basically have the customers book anything as a trial. Practically, rapid reskilling is needed for the workforce to work with the new tools to ensure their jobs are not displaced. And while there was much talk about AI replacing skills, not jobs, the reality is, many tasks will be taken over by the machine and humans will have to figure out our place in the value chain. The company has also announced a partnership with Google Cloud’s Vertex AI as part of the bid to become fully AI-powered.

The use of artificial intelligence in the travel industry has grown significantly in recent years. However, the industry still has a lot of work to do to get the most out of AI. Vivek Bhogaraju, advisory partner of data and AI at Skift, provides travel companies with ideas on how to develop AI strategies. The Expedia app is also getting an itinerary builder and a tool for users to compare destinations.

We have special, very early morning or late night entry with small groups. There’s still the Louvre if you visit Paris for the first time, but on the second, third, fourth, and fifth trips, the experience desire is getting more and more diverse. That’s why we’ve been expanding our curated offerings to more local, more culinary, and more off-the-beaten paths. “Once again, the OTAs are predicting the decline and fall of the travel agency industry,” Fora Travel co-founder Evan Frank said via email.

Therefore, the all-in-one travel planner becomes the ultimate travel community, where users can not only plan their adventures, but share and exchange experiences as well. Google and Sabre hosted a virtual event to showcase new developments in their four-year partnership, highlighting advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) and generative AI (GenAI) aimed at reshaping the travel industry. The event featured key leaders from both companies, who provided insights into AI’s potential to personalise and streamline travel experiences. The long-term vision is that the chatbot will be able to answer general and specific questions, and there could be integrations from third-party travel companies for products like events and attractions bookings. AI isn’t advancing in our industry as quickly as it could, even though hospitality was one of the early adopters of AI, particularly with revenue management systems, which have been in use for decades to optimize pricing and inventory.

If you are looking for anything more substantial than a chatbot in the long term, temper your expectations and dig in. Successful data and AI projects take time, iteration, and — most importantly — persistence. And we’ll have to evolve data and AI initiatives as the underlying technology matures. That means successful data and AI execution requires urgency and efficiency.

It reminds me of the dot-com boom and bust — everyone was eager to sprint before we even learned to walk, and the industry and technology needed time to catch up. There is a lot of investment in AI, but it’s crucial to remember that these models will only be as effective as the data that drives them. What’s important ChatGPT now from an industry perspective is building solid foundations—organizing internal resources and data to be future-proof. If we can then apply AI in a meaningful way to address what guests need by simplifying and personalizing their travel experiences, one use case at a time, then we will accelerate its adoption.

Innovation also needs to be funded and backed by investors, but the same investors are often motivated by returns, and proprietary tech might best serve that purpose. There is always going to be a healthy debate about the clash between innovation and commercial interests when it comes to making data available for emerging technologies. It is already clear that AI models are proficient in changing between text, speech, and vision as needed to be effective and relevant — hence, they are multimodal. It is also possible that different AI models will excel at certain tasks better than others. Following the inaugural Skift Data and AI Summit in New York City earlier this month, I am hopeful about how the whole travel industry can embrace AI. It was great to see common themes emerge throughout the day, both on stage but also in the conversations among the attendees.