Personalization has been one of the promises of digital travel technology for years. The major spoilsport is IT systems and data flows that work alongside each other. Generative AI is finally going to bring that fragmented digital ecosystem together into a completely personalized travel experience. The rise of the hyper-personal travel assistant is just around the corner. The impact of GenAI technology in the travel industry is hard to overstate. After the internet and the smartphone, GenAI is causing the third major shift in the travel industry. This also means, for example, the end of the search engine, as we have used it for the past twenty years. With AI-driven search engines breathing down its neck, Google is working a ‘new search experience’. Google predicts a ‘massive impact’ of its new way of searching for the travel industry. The search engine’s ‘Helpful Content’ updates recently anticipated this. Websites of travel companies with an SEO strategy that has been successful for years suddenly saw their visitor numbers drop by sometimes tens of percent. The new search is interactive and multimodal. That last word stands for Generative AI’s ability to work with different types of data simultaneously. Image plays a much more important role in Google’s new Search Generative Experience . In this way, this new search model meets the needs of younger generations. Inspiring travel image Younger generations sometimes spend more time gathering travel inspiration than the holiday itself. The vast majority of visual inspiration comes from photo and video platforms such as Instagram, YouTube and TikTok. Travel parties that want to respond effectively to this will have to produce (even) more photos, videos and other ‘snackable’ image content. Thanks to AI tools such as Midjourney and DALL-E, the production time and costs of generating attractive and accurate images are rapidly reduced. Nowadays, a simple prompt is enough to produce images of inspiring travel experiences for well-defined target groups. This concerns the specific wishes of, for example, young people who frequently visit festivals or parents with young children. Breaking down data silos Travel parties that really want to be able to continue to distinguish themselves must be able to communicate exactly the information that the traveller needs at that moment for each travel moment. Here, too, GenAI’s ability to merge different data types and sources will play a crucial role, Google expects. For example, an average hotel can easily have ten or more systems that work with guest-related data. From this, they can distill interesting trends or insights: which type of traveller books a room or other service and why, at what time? However, analyzing all the different types of data in conjunction is not easy. Unfortunately, even with large language models like GPT4, this is no easy feat. Many of the hotel’s own datasets or other smaller travel parties are too small for that. The AI model then has too little ‘practice data’, and starts to ‘hallucinate’: it makes connections that are not there. However, thanks to new technology, this is now much more effective. Proactive travel advice The so-called Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) makes datasets suitable for much faster and more effective processing by an AI model. In this way, parties can quickly discover new traveller needs and other trends in their own datasets. At the same time, the same technology also makes personalized communication about needs much easier. For example, the German HomeToGo recently launched a GenAI-driven chatbot that proactively helps travelers find their ideal vacation rental. To do this, the chatbot asks them questions and then analyzes the specified responses – including photos of popular homes – in real time to sharpen the selection of holiday homes. The conversion rate among a first group of beta users was no less than 32 percent higher than among other customer groups. Hyper-personal travel assistant In line with this, experts from Google and HomeToGo, among others, predict the rise of the hyper-personal travel assistant. These are GenAI technology-based applications that focus entirely on offering the ultimate experience on a specific part of the trip, such as proactively providing travel tips for a special location. But it can also involve, for example, handling a damage report to a rental car personally and stress-free. The multimodal power of GenAI brings together all the necessary information, and ‘understands’ what is important to the user. Any travel professional who understands the value of GenAI should take the time to delve into the versatile application possibilities of GenAI. Stef Driessen is Sector Banker Leisure at ABN AMRO bank. As an expert in the field of travel and the hospitality economy, in the broadest sense of the word, he regularly writes articles for TravMagazine.
