ai powered virtual travel producer is one of 5 jobs of the future - Amazon

Amazon this week took a glance into the future as part of their promotion of the free courses they offer to help those interested in taking on ai as part of their future career pathway. According to the article, “Amazon aims to provide free AI skills training to 2 million people by 2025 with its new ‘AI Ready’ commitment.”

When describing what type of work people might themselves being prepared for, the team at Amazon “partnered with Tracey Follows, CEO of Futuremade, to predict AI-enabled careers that could be on the horizon” who came up with “virtual travel producer”.

What does a virtual tourism producer do? “Imagine being able to plan a summer vacation with a virtual reality preview. Virtual tourism producers will create immersive virtual reality (VR) experiences using AI to showcase destinations and activities. They’ll curate and update VR content to highlight the latest news and cultural developments in different regions, while partnering with tourism boards to market travel experiences.”

Amazon actually have some form in this realm as they pioneered a version of virtual tourism with their own branded virtual experiences for Prime members.. Whilst at Urban Adventures I got a front row seat as one of the selected partners for this initiative.Many of the things they did were quite impressive and our operators & guides (after a bit of a learning curve) really enjoyed the product. In this instance the guide took a high quality video camera and was also plugged into communications with the virtual customers so they could ask questions about what they were experiencing or even direct the guide to go certain places (like into shops to browse).

Most curious though was that it ultimately failed and was shuttered. This is doubly so because it was all set up in and operating well in the 18 months prior to the pandemic and in the pandemic itself it could have become one of the main forms of tourism - but instead Amazon pulled back and turned it off!

Trip.com moves first on Apple Vision Pro as app builder

If you thought that the Amazon story was science fiction, then another piece to the story dropped this week with Trip.com being the first to move on declaring they are building an app for the Apple Vision Pro app store.

History has shown that being a first mover into these app stores can deliver a huge windfall, so this is a pretty smart move. Named Trip Vision “upon donning the Apple Vision Pro headset and entering the app, users can immerse themselves in the beauty of global landscapes through 360-degree panoramic videos. Detailed attraction information and engaging voiceovers contribute to a powerful and educational mixed reality experience, bringing the world's top travel destinations right into your living room.”

In essence, exactly the experience that Amazon predicted will be a job to create….. in the future. Seems the future is now in some places.

Bo Sun, Chief Marketing Officer of Trip.com Group, the app will redefine the way we think about travel: "The Trip.Vision app revolutionises the travel experience by allowing users to virtually immerse themselves in renowned destinations, enhancing their itinerary planning. This marks a whole new approach, where the exploration begins before the booking, and every destination becomes a story waiting to unfold."

Whilst we might not hear much about Trip.com in the West, they were also one of the first to move on a GenAI powered conversational interface in the ecommerce app and show a great appetite for innovation and rolling out experiments loudly and publicly.

A few (FREE) tickets still remain to the AI Summit brought to you by Travel Trends

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One year on, how are those who jumped first into ai going…

Speaking of first movers, a nice round up this week in Phocuswire of a few of the companies that moved first and fasted into the new capabilities that the new GanAI revolution offered.

The article spoke to 3 early adopters, Christian Watts from Magpie, Matija Marijan, the CEO and co-founder at Turneo & D3x co-founder and CEO Jason Noronha. Their reported results i’d categorise as well above average.

Watts told Phocuswire “We haven’t stopped. It [the past year] has been about just tweaking that first product.” That product which helps tours and activities providers up their game on the product descriptions now includes “adding translations for more than 80 languages, along with a level of data analysis that would have been impractical when humans were responsible for poring over the material.”

Turneo which is “an e-commerce platform for hotels and other travel brands that want to offer experiences to their guests.s an e-commerce platform for hotels and other travel brands that want to offer experiences to their guests” started with a chatbot to provide concierge type services “offering hotel guests bookable recommendations of local experiences”

Speaking to Phocuswire ““In the early days, we and our clients were all blown away with the first results from generative AI products,” Marijan said. “But once the novelty factor wore off, it boiled down to a simple question: Is this AI-feature solving a problem I have, and doing it in a way that is overall better?”

The answer wasn’t always yes. The company discontinued its chatbot“ The reason? “..creating itineraries with precise scheduling, are really hard for GPT”.

Its a problem a lot of the early ai powered trip planners have faced as Jeff Kischuk talked about on the Everything ai in Travel podcast recently. (Hint: Jeff my have a solution). Working with the team on the yet to publicly debut CustomisedTrip product, we’ve found that it can work for some types of travel customer but not others. We have the solution for those looking to book an entire multi-day itinerary where the traveller can add their own personalisations and customisations to a route that is easy to both quote fast and run well on the fulfillment side (by a DMC). It took us more than 6 months to figure out how to do it.

Last up was Jason from D3x who seems to have the greatest success in working with hotel and hostel owners. The insight they had was to “convert guest messages into API calls….“Seeing what we could do with ChatGPT, we thought, ‘Well, that changes everything.’ That changes all of the previous systems we always built with workflow.”

The tech got answers back to guests faster and in most cases as accurately as a human because now the questions were no longer just queued sequentially or prioritised in some other way - they just got answered.

“We have numbers,” Noronha said. “It was an idea and a vision we were selling, but now we’ve actually installed it in probably 200 properties, and we’ve had some very large clients. So we’re able to tell you the efficacy of the software.”

Numbers rule!

Hostelworld gather people around the ai campfire

Really enjoyed this case study from Sendbird on their client Hostelworld.

The problem being solved here was different to the one being solved by D3x above. Hostelworld know the reason people choose a hostel has more to do with than just a cheap roof above your head. People are willing to put up with the snoring, foot odour and 5am bag rustling of their 8 room dorm because they want to meet other people.

“The company’s research shows that 72% feel nervous ahead of their trip, and 30% dread introducing themselves to strangers first. Overall, 80% of users were seeking some sort of chat functionality.”

Utilising the Sendbird product, Hostelworld created a series of chat rooms that kept users phone numbers etc private but allow them to communicate digitally (first) with those who were in the hostel now, read about those who had been out experiencing things recently and help people make connections for their own outings. For the brand, they want guests utilising their app on a daily basis, not just as a place to book but as an indispensable place to make connections that are the true essence of travel.

The company “expects the monthly active user count to climb to hundreds of thousands during peak travel season” and it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see where this can go from here. In a submission I scoped for a community led business in the same demographic over a year ago, we had a bot that would both lead the group each morning with a bit of info about what the day ahead looked like weather wise etc and suggested a couple of activities that matched, to get the conversation going. If those suggestions were picked up on, then the bot would drop links of preferred supplier matching product into the chat for those in the conversation to seamlessly book. I’d expect this next from Hostelworld. Otherwise it would listen and drop links for whatever the group ultimately came up with.

81% of travelers say they will carefully check any suggestions made by AI before making their final travel decisions.

That was the finding published in this release by Bookretreats. Other stats (unfortunately unattributed to source) were “61% of consumers are now looking towards generative AI tools to plan their trips.” Add these together and the productivity gains look more like just a different workflow for the user. Get ai to do a quick plan and then go and check that plan is right. This is probably bad news for the planning tool unless the checking piece is integrated because wherever you are checking is more likely to be he place you end up booking.

In a nod to the Hostelworld piece above the report also found “solo travel has been on an upward trajectory since 2015. “Solo vacation packages'' spiked +200% in the US in the past 90 days alone, with female tours topping the searches. However, the past year has seen more travelers in their 20s and 30s seek out solo adventures with other solo travel has been on an upward trajectory since 2015.”

People generally want to travel, a lot. But many don’t have people in their inner circle who can or will go with them. I covered this topic extensively for Skift in an article back in 2022. Not at all surprised to see this market growing.

The limitations of ai

Travel Weekly this week had a special article that looked at the limitations of ai. I liked the way Fadi Fahes, chief commercial officer of travel tech company Journey Mentor, broke down ai into its different categories. We all use ai a broad term but there is a lot of nuance in it.

Fahes broke the categories down like this:

There are six basic types of AI:

• Interactive: chatbots, natural language processing etc.

• Functional: includes the Internet of Things

• Analytical: includes data assessment and sentiment analysis.

• Textual: includes new generation spell-checkers.

• Visual: augmented reality (see above!!), picture searches, ‘deep fakes’ etc.

• Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI)

Part of all my consulting with clients on how they might approach ai and build their strategy is knowing both what GenAI is great at and what it is not so great at. On surface it looks like it can do anything, in reality when you scratch a bit, not so much. I covered this extensively in my recent chat with the Singapore Tourism board on building an ai strategy. You can listen in here.

Hotels running ads on Google.. you are now using ai (whether you like it or not)

This seemed like a huge story but I didn’t see it getting covered in many places, so maybe it isn’t.

Google is no longer going to base its automated bidding strategy on “commissions” - you know, paying a little bit of your guaranteed result to instead an ai black box based around “tROAS & Expanding Performance Max.”

The cynic in me says it is just moving from one confusing black box to another so 🤷 

In the statement Google said “A bidding strategy anchored in AI will make it easier for you to market at the speed of consumers,” the announcement stated. “And in an ever-evolving privacy environment, it will bring you one step closer to meeting people’s expectations and multiplying your results.” I’m betting it doesn’t hurt their bottom line either?

All I could think about reading it was the automated stock buying and selling software that nearly ended the world in the past financial collapses. I’m sure ai wouldn’t go haywire like that……………. nothing to see here.

More seriously though - this is beyond my area of expertise and I’d love to know if this is actually a big thing or not - please tag me if you see some deeper (proper) analysis of this on Linked In

Finnish ai company Reveel raises $650K

It was reported this week that more money has come for ai startups, this time in Finland!

Reveel is using ai to drag attractions and DMO’s into the new world by swapping out old paper maps and the like for their snazzier digital equivalents.

It feels like a problem that has been being solved for quite some time (especially during the mobile boom) so with many having partial solutions that are maybe good enough already, I’m not sure that in this case, ai itself is going to make a big difference.

ai is “the biggest opportunity for business”

That is the opinion of Omri Morgenshtern CEO of digital travel platform Agoda

Speaking at the ASEAN Tourism Forum 2024 in Laos as reported by Web in Travel, Morgenshtern said he “sees the short to medium term developments in this field as the most exciting.”

It is in the areas of “enhancing operational efficiency and customer experience” that Agoda are going after. What about in your business?

Here is where I may be able to help:

• consultancy services to help you with your own ai strategy & other growth challenges (check my Linked In bio for reviews of those I’ve helped out already),

• HandbookFM.com for those looking to up their training and onboarding game such as DMC’s who want to show prospective customers how they will train their teams on the customer brand values and safety criteria &

• Customised Trip which is an ai that mimics the human travel agent to build out a bespoke itinerary for a client before the human sales team gets involved. It comes also with a fulfillment option so the whole process from conversation to travel experience is taken care of. Great if you have an engaged audience and looking for something to really add some big value and big revenue.

Most clicked last week was the link to the FREE tickets to the AI Summit. More available this week above! Great to see so many people dipping the toe!

That’s it - you’ve made it to the end of this edition. I’ll be putting the result of the most clicked post in next week’s edition so you can see where others are focussing. If I’ve missed something, you’ve got a tip or any feedback at all - you can simply reply to this email and it will come straight to me. I’m doing this for You so please don’t be shy to tell me what you think