Developments in artificial intelligence (AI) are already changing consumer behaviour in travel with an even greater shift predicted over the coming year, according to a Google industry manager.
Speaking in a presentation at the 2024 Travel Weekly Future of Travel Conference, Ailish O’Brien said AI is changing how people search and plan their holidays online.
“They’re now going to be looking for a deeper experience,” she said. “They’re going to be thinking about it in different ways, so it’s something that we need to think about to make sure that we’re giving them the experience that they’re after to win those bookings.”
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O’Brien added that over the last six months, people have been making longer and more complex queries on the search engine because of AI.
Queries using more than five words had increased 1.5 times over the last six months, and 15% of daily searches had never been seen before, according to Google research.
Outside of consumer search behaviour, AI has also had impacts on travel businesses, such as addressing challenges in marketing, consumer experiences and operations, O’Brien added.
She cited examples including travel companies embracing travel AI assistants that can provide dynamic itineraries and chatbots offering “personalised, bespoke responses”.
Another area where AI application has been “really transformational” is aviation. She said AI has been used to reduce fuel consumption, tailor supplies brought on to planes and predict when components needed to be switched out to avoid faults and flight cancellations.
O’Brien revealed that AI had changed Google’s core product more in the last year than it had changed in the previous 20 years, and urged travel businesses to think about how they were “meeting this AI inflection point” in 2024.
She said: “The AI revolution in the travel sector is underway, and I think what’s going to happen in the next year is going to be even more substantial than what’s happened this year.”
This was echoed in a subsequent presentation as Simon Powell, chief executive of Inspiretec, urged the travel industry to “engage now” with AI as it was “not going away”.
Powell said: “The speed of change is massive, and we need to engage whether it’s from us or somebody else, because if we don’t, other people will enter our industry and overtake it.”
However, he stressed the industry needed to engage with AI “in the right way”, with the agency community rather than exposing it directly to consumers, to avoid “getting things wrong” and people “losing faith in AI”.
He said: “It’s really important that we harness the power and understand what we’re doing with it. AI solutions aren’t perfect, but neither are we as humans.
“Our view on the world is if you engage with the advisor and Gen AI, you can start to generate trust, and that’s the biggest word in this new technology, in this new world, trust.”
He showcased his agent platform which offered AI-powered functions including dynamic suggestions for itineraries for clients, automated call summaries, email responses, task management, and training notes for managers.
Powell highlighted AI technology needed to be “trained” on industry or company-specific and secure data to come back with the right results and avoid GDPR issues.
“It’s massively important that we wake up and see just by letting our teams use OpenAI or other publicly available systems, it’s not good enough. We are going to get ourselves into one hell of a mess at some point,” he warned.