Consumer Uses
While the interfaces for research, shopping and booking are the center of attention, several other use cases stand out on the consumer side.
Review Summaries
Summarization is one of the most powerful uses of GenAI, as it can quickly read text and summarize it with high accuracy. Tripadvisor, with its vast trove of travel reviews, is using GenAI hotel summaries to help travelers extract the information most relevant to them. Other companies that have implemented review summaries include Expedia, Home2Go and MakeMyTrip.
Accessibility: Multimodal/Translation
While there are other methods for voice-to-text and translation, travel companies are beginning to include GenAI in the mix. MakeMyTrip is in the early stages of implementing voice-to-text translation, as well as hybrid interaction using voice and visual options, which they say is increasing conversion.
Corporate Travel
To date, leisure travel companies have been faster in integrating GenAI technology compared to corporate players. The caution among business leaders is likely due to the added responsibilities, including data confidentiality and duty of care, that come with hosting corporate clients. A couple of notable developments: In August 2023 Lufthansa launched Swifty, an AI assistant for business travel. And CWT added generative AI capabilities to its messaging service in January 2024, allowing users to have unscripted conversations with their virtual assistant. In March, SAP Concur incorporated GenAI search capabilities, allowing users to type queries in natural language. Expect to see more corporate applications in the coming year.
Internal Operations
Automating business operations can save both time and money, but travel companies are wrestling with which tasks should be trusted to AI, and to what extent. Internal use cases do not appear to have evolved drastically in the past year – they’ve mostly been refined. According to comments from Priceline CEO Brett Keller at the 2023 Phocuswright Conference, travelers’ chatbot conversations often reveal traveler concerns and needs that the company otherwise might not know.
Customer Service
Customer service has proven to be one of the top use cases of GenAI. For around a year, Expedia has been using GenAI to automate customer service call summaries, reducing costs, and Airbnb has been helping customer service agents navigate 70 different user policies. DataArt introduced a GenAI-powered chatbot as a first level of support for its client, an airline contact center. The chatbot resulted in a 30% reduction in the number of calls as well as minutes handled by agents per month, with average requests handled by the chatbot being resolved in only three minutes.
Productivity
The general productivity gains of GenAI tools should not be ignored by any company. There are many areas where employees can be easily trained to use GenAI to speed up internal processes.
Coding
A major area of increased productivity, however, is coding. Airbnb estimates that its employees, led by developers, could be 30% more productive in the short-to-medium term. Booking.com has reported early signs that using GenAI improves the productivity of its developers and is focused on further increasing efficiency. The potential impact is so great that Deets.com founder (and Kayak co-founder) Paul English argued at the November 2023 Phocuswright Conference that “Code is no longer the moat,” suggesting that a company with 10 engineers can now compete with a company with 1,000.
