How AI is set to radically transform the way we holiday

When it comes to AI in travel, films like I, Robot, and Blade Runner make it seem like we’ll soon be roaming the world in self-drive hovercrafts while humanoid robots man our hotel reception desks. Considering this future, most people fall into one of two camps: those excited by the thought of unlocking alien experiences, and those gripped by existential fears of AI’s threat to humanity (or perhaps just the human essence of hospitality).

Though we’re still a way off replicants ruling the world, we’re certainly on the precipice of something. Machine learning is becoming more potent and widespread by the minute. And while doomsayers are petitioning against a potential apocalypse, technology is already discreetly transforming nearly every aspect of tourism.

While the fantasists dream of robot hotels, in reality, the travel industry has been using AI for a long time in ways you might not suspect. In that artificial intelligence is just a sophisticated system of making predictions based on vast data, this technology is already widely employed by hotel chains for dynamic pricing strategies and efficient resource management. Similarly, travel search engines like Kayak have been using AI to suggest things like “best times to make a trip” or “hacker fares”, helping people find cheaper alternatives to standard round trip prices, for a while.

open image in gallery

The era of AI holiday planning is also officially upon us. According to a study by Marriott Bonvoy, one in five adults is using ChatGPT, or Google’s equivalent Bard, to help them research a trip, and a whopping 93 per cent of these users report that AI chatbots have influenced their travel decisions. This revolution is being accelerated by user-friendly apps like Wonderplan, Roam Around and Tripnotes, which harness ChatGPT’s tech to provide hyper-personalised itineraries based on individual preferences.

“I believe tech is the great equaliser,” says Shie Gabbai, the CEO and founder of Roam Around. “Consider how the affluent family travels; they have a personal travel agent that knows their dietary restrictions, budget and interests, whereas the average traveller visits 30+ websites during planning a single vacation. Roam Around puts a personal travel agent in each person’s pocket.”

Like it or loathe it, so much of modern tourism is about the kudos of showing off where you’ve been. Whether you’re visiting Montmartre’s La Maison Rose because it featured on the Instagram feed of a favourite influencer, or intriguing your TikTok followers with a never-seen-before cenote in Mexico, travel online often revolves around “content”. And AI is already hard at work, making sure your #travelgrams are picture-perfect. Google’s new Pixel 8 Pro, for example, has integrated AI specifically for this purpose, including features like “Best Take” technology, which amalgamates a series of your holiday photos to create one perfect final shot in which everyone is smiling, the sky is a vivid cerulean and the sun’s angle is just so. Or the phone’s “Magic Eraser”, which with the tap of a finger can remove undesirable objects like rubbish bins from your otherwise pristine picture of the pyramids.

Never made it to the pyramids? No problem. Just a casual stride beyond this, generative AI image programmes like DALL-E and Midjourney are helping people fabricate travel snaps from scratch. As an experiment, professional photographer and Midjourney expert Cooper Naitove prompted it to create the kind of images that rank highest on social media’s #Wanderlust lists, with some relatively inspiring results. For the people at the back shouting out their ethical concerns, consider that this kind of practice isn’t all about pulling the wool over people’s eyes; in the pandemic, we encouraged “virtual tourism” to inspire, delight and deliver people from the monotony of lockdown. This latest technological venture isn’t a million miles away from that – sometimes travel is a journey of the mind.

If all of that is already in motion, where is AI taking travel further into the future? “We’re actually not that far off from robot hotels,” laughs Paul Armstrong, the man behind popular substack What Did Open AI Do This Week?. “There’s obviously this fear that the robots are coming, they’re going to take our jobs (and eventually kill us), but there’s a great argument to say that human servitude shouldn’t exist anymore in the hospitality industry. We could really disrupt traditional ideas of class and caste systems by ditching people as demi-slaves. If you like being doted on hand and foot when you’re on holiday, that’s fine, but you don’t need a human person to bring you some toothpaste.”

open image in gallery

When asked to dream up some possibilities, ChatGPT’s answers are both logical and profound. It suggests building better cultural bridges by having AI translate, in real time, the subtleties and nuances of local customs. It also proposes using wearable tech or implantable devices to manage sensory input, curating our own, totally personal, travel experience. “Don’t like the noise of a crowd? AI could dampen it. Want to see historical figures come to life at a landmark? AI could use augmented reality to make it happen,” says GPT-4. “This could extend to adjusting scents, temperatures, and even the ambience of a location to match the visitor’s mood.”

As with any rapidly developing technology, there are always going to be dangers and drawbacks. At the more alarming end of the scale is our fear of giving machines too much power. Gretta Duleba, at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, says bluntly: “We are focused primarily on the risk of total extinction of humanity, at which point there will be no travel or tourism.” Perhaps if the robots take over, we might go back to hotels with human room service.

In less catastrophic scenarios, we’re mostly worrying about being sent to a dud destination or losing out on hotel careers. “Hallucinations are a problem,” says Gabbai, referring to when AI makes something up completely. “When we first launched, users searching for things to do in Tucson, AZ, were being recommended the Pearl Harbour museum. That museum is actually in Hawaii, but because the ship is called the USS Arizona, the AI hallucinated that it was a popular activity in Tucson.” The lesson here is probably just to double check the chat-bot’s work when it gives you travel tips and recommendations.

As for the robots coming for our jobs, there is certainly a high risk of automation. It’s not all bad news, though. A study by McKinsey Global Institute suggests that plenty of new jobs will be created by AI, celebrating the economic potential, especially for the tourism industry in poorer parts of the world. Automation has already yielded incredible results for farming, with machine learning poised to optimise it even further; there’s no reason why travel and hospitality couldn’t follow suit.

open image in gallery

From curating experiences that exactly meet your preferences to exploring fantasy destinations, the possibilities are potentially exciting. But as we stand at the crossroads of an AI-driven future in travel, the key will be in striking a delicate balance. The challenge for the hospitality industry is to embrace AI’s efficiencies while preserving the human interaction and warmth that have always been its hallmark, ensuring that the soul of travel remains intact amid the digital transformation.