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Holiday with AI

CIOInsider Team | Tuesday, 24 September, 2019
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CIOInsider Team

Technologies have affected every industry and travel industry is no loner. However, of all the technology waves that has brushed ashore to touch the travel industry, artificial intelligence has swept the largest area of the industry’s land. Artificial intelligence, or AI, has started making huge inroads into the travel industry and, more specifically, helping travel agents better comprehend travel trends. The irony is, travel agents and travel agencies fear that AI might one day entirely take over the human role that they play. But these fears are born not so much out of AI itself, but the unawareness of artificial intelligence. AI is a compliment to the human factor rather than a replacement, and the responsible use of artificial intelligence can make a travel agent’s job easier, make them more efficient, and help them understand travel trends of their clientele better.

Dynamic Pricing
One of the easiest and most visible ways that individuals, travel agencies, and the entire travel industry have been benefited with AI, is through dynamic pricing. Every time a hotel books a room at a given time and date, an airline sells a ticket for a specified time or any other number of millions of data points, the data is collected and analyzed by AI platfroms. Such platforms are designed to

maximize money for their respective industries by changing prices to reflect a changing environment. This is dynamic pricing.

So now you understand why airline tickets and hotel rooms are often more expensive on the weekends than they are on the weekdays. For the same reason, during a big concert in town, rooms that are normally cheap are more expensive than they usually are. The dynamic pricing control by artificial intelligence knows or at least has a good indication, of the supply and demand for a given area under certain circumstances by observing travel trends from thousands or even millions of data points. This allows for pricing to be far more fluid than it was in the past which not only maximizes profits for the industries but also can score individuals some incredible deals especially when they use a travel agent.

Travelling Assistance
Artificial intelligence provides travelling assistance, which is a huge complement to a travel agent rather than a hindrance. Such travel assistance programs are available in a variety of applications such as Facebook Messenger, AI Travel Assistance, Slack, and others. The programs are designed with chatbots which answer simple questions, thereby making the traveler’s job far easier. We can say that this makes the mobile travel assistant an excellent first responder to simple questions that individuals need to know.

Evidently, this is not an indication that the travel agent will be replaced. It instead shows how it can compliment them because the artificial assistant can be on the clock 24/7 whereas human agents need time to rest even though they can be accessed as well 24/7 through solutions.

Recommendations and suggestions
Artificial intelligence has come a long way from simply recommending previous trips you have gone on to now offering and suggesting trips you may like to go to based on your previous trip history or user experience. By using your publicly available data, the places where you have done Google searches for, or where you spent time on vacation websites, artificial intelligence is then able to use these data points to try and find a destination that meets all of your needs. Oftentimes this will combine things like the best pricing, the best time of year, availability of hotel accommodations, and the best flight times as a part of its recommendation.

Long story made short, AI is for good, and not the other way round.

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