Can Artificial Intelligence Make the Travel Industry Sustainable?

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Can ai unlock the traction we need in sustainbility in travel?

Billy Kavanagh writes in Impakter that ai might be the secret sauce to finally unlock some traction in what he sites as a “global imperative” when it comes to action around sustainability (and I agree).

Kavanagh theorises that we currently have a data collection and analysis problem. “..email, Excel, and online surveys” plus a highly fragmented eco-system are choking progress on getting important data measured and communicated. He has pegged this as an $8B opportunity but writes hotels “cannot benchmark progress, set goals, or effectively communicate successes to customers. Manual data collection, processing, and analysis demand human resources that many hotels lack, and even if available, the staff might not possess the required training.”

He sees a time where “AI-enabled platform can offer automatic sustainability improvement suggestions across various parameters, enhancing operations, reducing water consumption, and meeting certification requirements.”

Bring it on. Here is a real problem worth solving.

If you know of someone working on this please let me know by either replying to this message or DM me on Linked In.

The Financial Times is running a free session on ‘The role of ai in helping achieve corporate sustainability goals’ - you can sign up here. Would be great to see a lot of travel people on there.

Airbnb start to roll out their ai products to combat parties and fake listings

A couple of different announcements this week from Airbnb. One was a story in CNBC profiling team member Naba Banerjee who is Airbnb’s official party pooper. The article talks to how the company is crunching certain data points to identify bookings which are most likely to be the genisis of a party house booking.

The criteria they mention includes “reservation's closeness to the user's birthday, the user's age, length of stay, the listing's proximity to where the user is based, how far in advance the reservation is being made, weekend vs. weekday, the type of listing and whether the listing is in a heavily crowded location rather than a rural one.” Whilst divulging that information should be enough to keep the party rolling, the company reports a 55% drop in reported parties from within the platform.

The other story was around getting “verified listings” and combatting the influx of fake listers and other various scammers. The role of ai here is to get hosts to firstly allow location tracking to prove the user was inside the house they were saying they have the right to lease out and then getting the host to take photos. ai then compares these live photos with those in the listing profile.

The Scottsbluff Star-Herald (a strange place to find this story - and the only one I saw reporting it) said Airbnb had already detected 59,000 fake listings this year. That doesn’t make me feel that great about my upcoming reservation in Amsterdam TBH.

They went on to report:

“Properties in the U.S., U.K., Canada, France and Australia that pass the test will get a “verified” icon on their listings starting in February. The company said it will verify listings in 30 more countries starting late next year.”

OneAir going the crowd funding route

I saw a post this week on Rahul Ramadoss’ Linked In about their going the crowd-funding route to raise mony on their ai powered flight deal finder at OneAir.

For a pure B2C app, crowdfunding makes a lot of sense. It’s hard to see how they can distinguish themselves from others in the space and what difference ai can actually make here, especially given Google has its own flight alerts - that seemingly come whether you want them to or not based on your previous searches.

Googles integration of Google Flights into Bard last week further muddy the waters here. Perhaps OneAir are gathering from sources not captured by ITA?

The OneAir business model is to charge customers a subscription fee which could be anything from $790 p.a. to “90% off” at $79 and for a short time that $79 figured was grandfathered forever.

McKinsey lays out the ai future for travel

Ever with their finger on the pulse, the analysts at McKinsey has spied a trend of ‘ai in travel’ 😀 and partnered with Skift to release a report telling the world how its going to be!

The full report is available to download for free from Skift and is well worth it if you are serious about learning or building a case for bringing ai into your business. In the reports own words: “It offers use cases and success stories that detail how technologies are being used, drawing from interviews with executives at 17 companies across five types of travel businesses”.

As usual with these lengthier pieces, we’ve set our ai podcasters on the case to dig into the details and give an audio summary of the report which you can listen to here. (Ignore the first few seconds where it talks about Notion)

Advice for hoteliers on ai

hotelmanagement.net gave a great report on a panel that discussed “How Hotel Operators Can Leverage AI Across Hotel Departments.” at the recent The Hospitality Show.

“Led by moderator Jordan Hollander, CEO of Hotel Tech Report, the panel was composed of Mike Chuma, VP/global marketing for IDeaS; Adam Glickman, VP/brand strategy, Actabl; Luis Segredo, co-founder/CEO, Data Travel/Hapi; and Richard Valtr, founder, Mews.” so it included some great people in the travel ai space.

Two bits really stood out for mine. The practical use case outlined by Adam Glickman “… in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, when the industry saw the departure of a number of veteran employees, AI can help fill the gap in operations knowledge that new-to-hospitality associates/managers may have.” I know this is not a hotel specific problem. Sales and other service teams across the travel landscape are all facing a similar issue. I hear it all the time.

The other which was more scary but mired in reality was from Mike Chuma “Two months ago I was at Cornell [University] on a panel and we were talking about the likelihood of hoteliers adopting AI in their operations. And two months ago, they were like: ‘No, we're not going to do it.” The story didn’t end with him being inundated with changes of mind….

Maybe a good segue to remind everyone of the poll….

I couldn’t find a recording of the panel but will keep looking.

SANDEMAN’s New Europe go for digital tipping with an ai twist

Travolution reported this week that SANDEMAN’s New Europe which run the largest network of “FREE” tours in the world have a new digital tipping supplier in TipDirect.

The ai twist? Seems TipDirect also have an ai application that can seemlessly write the guide (and trip) a review. One less job for the traveller to worry about!

Most excitingly these ai produced reviews will be “keyword-rich chat transcripts that are indexed by search engines, reviews will also improve the company’s ranking on Google and Tripadvisor.”

I continue to predict that these services will be totally disrupted by actually free (ad supported) ai applications that will disperse the crowds in both time and geography. Hopefully the reviews of those will be human written with lots of mispellings to capture the authenticity of the reviewer.

A big week for Microsoft, ai (& travel?)

Microsoft this week announced the rollout dates for its CoPilot tool which will interface with other products in the 365 suite and across Windows 11. This article by ZDNET covers off all the basics including what it will cost enterprise customers.

What does this mean for the evolution of ai? Slate spells it out when it reports “And Microsoft is putting Copilot inside Windows, where it will be hard to miss. “Having it in Windows, and having it naturally appear when you need it, is going to trigger average people to try it and use it a lot more than they do today,”. We’ve reported here previously that only 18% of Americans were thought to have used a GPT product. The Slate article went on to pull out this zinger which will have some followers of this publication updating their slide decks:

“But as we get familiar with these tools at work, their utility will likely enter our personal lives. We might go from planning a meeting with A.I. to planning a vacation with it.”

The announcements kept coming with Accenture building on the Microsoft announcement to say they’re working with both Microsoft and Amadeus to build a plug in for the CoPilot for their Cytric Easy platform, as reported by Business Travel Week.

This is basically a business travel managment platform that will now have a chat bot style interface to make planning within your corporate travel policy more simple. It will sniff through your Outlook and Calendar and piece things together.

Hopefully they’ll build a sense of humour into it so that the “interactive conversational interface powered by ChatGPT” says things like “Haha, nice try! There is a Holiday Inn Express 8.3 miles from your chosen hotel that we recommend! Shall I book that for you?” or “Keep working hard for that promotion and you might be able to grab that seat one day! I’ve got you all sorted in Row 78K.”

Expedia releases more detail on its ai program

FastCompany jagged an exclusive with Expedia where CEO Peter Kern gave more details on the company’s ‘Project Explorer’. According to the article Project Explorer is “an updated version of the original chatbot experience that gives users more guidance. Project Explorer will curate trips based on different budget tiers, location, time of year, and interest.”

The company also announced it is using generative ai to sift through user reviews in order to find the right answers to customer questions when it comes to specifics around a certain property or experience. According to the article this means “pulling specific answers to questions consumers need in order to make their booking decisions” due the difficulty of digging down into the amenities lists provided on the site to get the right level of detail.

(I have a theory about reviews and what Airbnb might be up to around personalisation which I might write a post about in the next week and put on Linked In).

There is also a group booking feature where “groups can vote and comment on itineraries including hotels, activities, flights, and car rentals” which actually sounds pretty good and potentially similar to what the Bach App has been doing for some time.

I need buy Nitesh Malviya a beer. In his article on Geekflare Nitesh not only gives great examples with screen shots to compare ChatGPT vs Bard when it comes to Trip Planning but he then also evaluates 10 of the best known of those building their own versions with different features, generally on top of the LLM Platform API’s.

Included in Nitesh’s round up you’ll find:

1. Aicotravel

2. Roam Around

3. Wonderplan

4. YaatriAI

5. PlanTripAI.com

6. Wayfind

7. Curiosio

8. Tripbot

9. Live The World

10. PlanTrip

Thanks also to GPT who produced this numbered list in one second. This might mean I take 10 weeks off from this subect. 😅 

To understand why this has become a bit of a chore I submit exhibit A from a tool I looked at this week that promised to give me exciting stories of historical places near me:

Most clicked last week was the link through to to try Google Bard! Great to see people getting curious and wanting to know what this ai stuff is all about, for them specifically.

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