Journey of A Digital Traveller: How AI Transforming Travel Business

By Utpal Chakraborty, Head of Artificial Intelligence, YES BANK LTD., AI Researcher

Utpal Chakraborty, Head of Artificial Intelligence, YES BANK LTD., AI Researcher

The typical journey of a digital traveler can be divided into five major phases. And artificial intelligence & digitization has already been transforming many aspects of all those five stages significantly. These stages are loosely termed as Dreaming stage, Planning stage, Booking stage, Onsite experience stage and Feedback & experience sharing stage.

I personally believe that every travel plan starts with an amazing dream and the source of that dream could be anything. In this dreaming stage people usually looks for some kind of an inspiration for bringing that dream into reality. So, they normally start going to the internet to get ideas about their dream travel destinations and the adventures & activities to do there. While searching so in the internet they may find a banner ad at the extreme right hand site of a web page or in an online travel magazine. That’s basically an ad rendered by a travel company which encourages the user to click on the ad, go to their site, select a travel plan and then do the bookings. It’s a long process and there is a possibility that the user may lose his/her interest in between and simply go to some other site and start a fresh search.

Now with the increasing proliferation of Artificial Intelligence and intelligent conversational interfaces, the travel companies has replaced that banner ad with an Artificial Intelligence Chatbot within that ad unit. This enables user to directly talk to the Chatbot and get ideas about different travel destinations, information pertaining to cost and logistics and can finally book the flight and hotel tickets in a very natural & conversational way. And if you use the Chatbot couple of times for your vacation planning and booking, it is intelligent enough to automatically register your preferences and can directly recommend you the right travel plan next time in a very personalized manner which suits your requirement. This personalization of offers is extremely important today for any business because as per some studies, approximately 70% of the users want personalized and tailored information as per his/her preferences and not the generic ones.

Travel sites like Kayak and few other sites are providing similar conversational interfaces to their customers for planning and booking travel where customer can interact with a Chatbot in natural language either through text or voice and can do planning and booking.

Normally people spend more time in planning a holiday trip than the actual trip. Here you can see AI is been used in many channels where the customer is engaging. Most of the popular travel sites and mobile apps uses Chatbot as their interface with the customers. Channels like Facebook, Slack and Skype; travel sites like Booking dot com, Sky Scanner have already implemented Chatbots in these channels not only for FAQs and queries but also to help their customers for searching, booking and getting help on other aspects of travel. There are also other advanced AI applications that are capable of reading your email and calendar and recommend you travel plans proactively like travel site Hip-munk.

Now let’s come to the most exciting phase, the onsite experience stage. Use of AI is widespread here too. There are couple of travel companies which provides predictive analytics of different events which may happen and the travels may experience during their travel. For example, flight delay is now being predicted by applying machine learning techniques into different data sources which may include air traffic control data, weather data, booking information or even some news or flight maintenance related data to provide meaningful insights and predict any delay in the flight. Google Flight can predict a flight delays with a high probabilistic confidence.

Many of the airlines are also now investing on predictive maintenance. So, using machine learning and other techniques like IoT to predict when an aircraft needs to go for maintenance.

Every travel plan starts with an amazing dream and the source of that dream could be anything. In this dreaming stage people usually looks for some kind of an inspiration for bringing that dream into reality

So that it can also help avoiding delays and cancellations due to maintenance related issues if the same can be predicted well in advance.

Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality and Simulation techniques are now extensively used in the Travel Industry. Most of our digital experiences till now has been experiencing everything and interacting with a screen or a device from outside. That screen could be an interactive screen of your mobile device, your laptop screen, iPad or even a voice receiver. But the capability of Virtual Reality to put you right at the middle of that experience and you interacting with those experiences all around is mind-boggling.

Pre-Travel Experience with Virtual Reality includes providing an experience of the places that you are planning to visit and inspire you to be there. Hotel Marriott in US, was using Virtual Reality provided pre-booking experience to their customers of tourist places just to give them the feeling of the location and inspire them to plan a vacation there. Travel companies are already adopting this in many areas. For example, Thomas Cook in UK uses it for up-selling seats just to give customers pre-booking experiences of difference of an economy class and an economy plus class seat so that customer can just experience the difference of that extra six inches of leg room in advance before making a booking choice.

Quantic airlines has implemented Virtual Reality for entertainment of their first class passenger in the long distance flights by giving them a new and different experience while they are in a long distance tiring and boring flight. It’s kind of immersing someone into a completely different experience while in actual he/she is in a completely different environment or place altogether.

AI Facial recognition is also pretty interesting technology used by couple of airlines. Delta for example has leveraged this technology for baggage check-in. They use the facial recognition to identify the person and compare it against his/her photograph in passport or driving license used during the booking to make sure they are one and the same. ZetBlue is using the similar AI technology for their passenger boarding on to the flight. Similarly Dubai airport uses identity tunnel to identify the person while he/ she is walking through the tunnel to the security checking. These technologies contributes a lot to reduce the overall friction in the travel.

Now when you reach the destination in your hotel, here also AI is used to enhance your experience, like identifying you automatically in the hotel lobby and do an auto check-in into the hotel. Knowing you have arrived at the hotel lobby, automatically turning your lights and AC on in your room, allowing you to interact with a Chatbot for room service or for any queries and concerns during your stay at the hotel. For example, Radisson uses a Chatbot for room service. Just imagine all the devices and amenities in your hotel room are connected devices and can be controlled remotely from your smart phone app provided by the hotel. Providing personalized menu cards in the restaurants for Food & Beverage only of your choice.

Now during your travel and sightseeing around the places, AI enabled devices gives you the opportunity to explore local places and the culture. AI applications like Google Translate can help you translate anything to your own language during your travel. Also, AI enabled digital technologies are changing the way the tourist exploring different places. Using “Times Traveler” App visitor can explore how the Berlin Wall used to look like in the past. To do that, they simply have to direct their smart phone to the landmark, the app recognizes the spot with AI and plays respective historical footage.

Coming to traveler safety, Simulation techniques are used to train the rescue staffs to give them an experience very similar to the live scenarios during conditions where rescue operations need to be performed.

The Self-Driving car in future going to revolutionize the travel industry. Just imagine, a self-driving car picking up a customer from Airport to the hotel or dropping him to a meeting. Let’s wait for that day when a self-driving car comes for your pick up at the airport, that’s going to be an amazing experience.

The last stage of travel which is your feedback after you come back from your dream vacation. The feedback could be in many different forms like sharing your experience with your friends and relatives and encourage them to plan for similar vacations. Some people will share their travel experiences in social media by posting images, videos and comments. Some people may provide their good/bad rating on the travel site. And someone like me may like to write a blog on the amazing vacation they just had. For a travel company it’s extremely important to collect such feedback as much possible from their customers which is going to give them valuable information on how they can improve their services further and Artificial Intelligence can be of great help here too. All the service providers whether it’s the travel booking company, airlines, hotels etc. in the entire value chain of travel & tourism are trying to collect those valuable data and process those using Artificial Intelligence and capture meaningful inferences and subsequently predict customer preferences and proactively offer personalized and better services to them.

So, that’s probably gave some idea on how Artificial Intelligence is transforming travelers journey and how different entities involved in this whole chain are getting benefited. It’s all about enhancing the experience of the travelers and transforming the travel & tourism business with the enormous potential that Artificial Intelligence provides.