Airbnb-Backed Tiqets Talks AI, Profits, and Scaling Experiences

Small businesses and startups often lack a dedicated travel desk, forcing executives and founders to rely on human assistants or consuming and cumbersome travel apps. Ask Maxx, built on the AI tool Maxx Intelligence, was designed for advisors to quickly retrieve information. It analyzes data within proprietary Cruise Planners’ systems in addition to public data online, making it a more bespoke tool for franchisees. The same way I bet that people in the 1890s could never envision that in 30 years, there’ll be these manned machines in the air flying around. I think we limit ourselves sometimes to the possibilities.

In the U.S., we’ve doubled the team in the past year. The market is growing really fast there, so we’re expanding. So now we are looking into, okay, what are the next 400 destinations that we’re going to bring to full maturity? We were lucky in that sense and we’ve not wasted the crisis. We invested in a lot of things that were already on the roadmap, but I guess we accelerated that. There was just more focus on finalizing things with a little bit less pressure, like fully automated page search, fully automated creation of landing pages.

• Travel agents are still big and thriving and growing in parts like the cruise industry or complex booking.
• It was one of many examples I saw of how innovations in generative AI are impacting corporate travel.
• Over time, more people got involved and pitched in, but it was never a business-oriented thing with specific goals and timelines.

In the past couple of years, we’ve pared it back and focused on the top 200 destinations. We’ve made the model work right and proved that it’s a profitable and sustainable model. We made use of intelligence like AI and machine learning and got more productive based on that. The user can either ask the chatbot a question or select one of the suggested prompts on the right. To provide a deeper understanding of the transformative role of AI in the hospitality and travel sectors, please explore the highlights from the recent presentations at the BAE event below. For those interested in delving into the specific case studies and expert discussions, all presentations are available on demand through the event platform here.

And then over a certain period of time, some of these human functions will be taken over by tech/AI, whatever you want to call it. I don’t know if actual physical robots will come in there. Some experiments (with) hotel robots, whether it’s concierge or cleaner for the room, etc.

Meet Otto: The AI Agent Redefining Business Travel

Add in the power of GenAI, and they become industry leaders when it comes to tailoring individual trips for their clients — plus, this technology makes it easy for them to broaden their reach. This kind of unique nimbleness simply can’t be matched by larger travel companies or new travel technology startups, and it also allows them to pivot much more quickly to new market demands. Booking.com, Expedia, and several other big companies released simple chatbots powered by ChatGPT about a year ago. Those chatbots have generally existed as independent interfaces, doing little to really transform the travel planning and booking experiences as industry experts have touted. Anthropic has unveiled AI technology that could simplify travel planning and potentially disrupt online travel agencies.

And then we’re also thinking how

can we build some sort of digital ID, especially for the agent. Suppose your

agent is going and doing things, it can’t have a fingerprint about you, so if

it’s communicating with a website can it say, “This is Div’s agent or this is

Mitra’s agent,” so the website knows whose agent this is. So can you

communicate an identity to websites … and agents can chatbot for travel agency interact with one another. Our look at the most important tourism stories, including destination management, marketing, and development. Anthropic, a generative AI startup, has unveiled new tech that indicates how an AI-powered travel agent would look, writes Travel Technology Reporter Justin Dawes. Booking sites that use AI in travel booking might also see an increase in users.

Reimagining the user interface, but what about the human attention span?

And of course, they are separate companies, so they all have their own design, their own technology, their own CTOs, their own chief product… No, we are far and above where we were in 2019, before we went into the pandemic. As I mentioned, $151 billion of travel, that is a very large number. In the $130 billion market capitalization, these are enormous numbers for most companies, but it’s compared to the scale of the opportunity because travel is so big.

This method allowed us to generate tangible benefits from Al while honing our skills until we were ready to implement it for our customers. For generative Al projects in particular, we’ve found that they follow a similar cycle. It’s often pretty easy to create a basic prototype but very challenging to make it good enough for production. Ensuring the application consistently produces high-quality output can be tough, as the underlying technology is unpredictable.

We can highlight different elements on the page based on what we think the customer would find most important. Once we had these internal and support systems in place, we began making more visible changes on our platform. We started with less interactive features, like generating hotel content and review summaries, and later moved on to more interactive features like our property page Q&A bot. Progressing incrementally and responsibly is crucial; this journey will take time, but the cumulative impact on companies and consumers will be revolutionary. For example, consider filters in online travel agencies like Agoda. We have filters for price, location, size, type, etc.

What Is Otto?

You mentioned the idea that you’re going to help people with all of their travel needs, basically, wherever they are. There’s a lot happening in travel that I want to talk about, but I’m curious about the big picture. As I say, I hope a lot of people in the US — I think a lot of people in the US — know about Booking.com, and throughout the world.

A lot of people have

been using it for a lot of e-commerce. Flights has been a big one, shopping,

people have been using it for event invites, communication, LinkedIn outreach. Travel is one that keeps popping ChatGPT App up as a

big use case when we have asked users, and so that is something we are also

starting to focus a lot on. We are also thinking of launching a mobile app so

you can use the agent from your phone.

My suggestion is to first use it to streamline your operations — from initial drafts of itinerary creations to data and opportunity analysis. Kopit reports early signals from hotel earnings suggest signs of a second-half slowdown, adding the picture will be clearer when IHG, Hyatt and Hilton, among other companies, report this week. However, cruise executives said they haven’t seen any slowdown in bookings and guest spending. “Overall, the short answer is no cracks, no deterioration,” said the chief financial officer of Norwegian Cruise Line. Travel executives see activities and experiences as increasingly lucrative, and here’s what the numbers say about how travelers are spending on them.

Start with a clear goal that translates into a metric. This will give you the time and guidance to focus on what you do best — serving travelers. The next thing you need to know is where in the travel process to use GenAI.

Whether written or verbal, AI can translate any language into another without manually inputting any text. Translation apps — such as Google Translate — can also use augmented ChatGPT reality (AR) to help translate text. When a device’s camera is pointed to a block of text, trained AI can quickly translate the words into the user’s desired language.

Learning new things and transforming business operations always means a series of challenges and issues, but GenAI also represents an amazing opportunity that goes well beyond the simplistic “innovate or die” aphorism. This technology simply can’t be ignored, and that’s especially true for smaller businesses — they need to embrace GenAI early and make sure they do it the right way. In the airline sector, Delta and United have gotten a boost from the rise in premium long-haul demand fueled by travelers more willing to spend freely. As of the second quarter, that support was still there. But if there is a recession, it could benefit low-cost carriers since they do well when budgets are tight.

MasterCard – Trends and Innovations in Tourism

Chatbots and virtual assistants have become an essential part of the customer service world and can often help improve customer satisfaction. According to a study from Tidio, 62% of customers say they would rather use an online chatbot than wait for human assistance. While the technology is still evolving, McKinsey advises business leaders to begin exploring how AI agents could enhance their operations. McKinsey’s recent “State of AI” survey found that 72% of companies are already deploying AI solutions, with interest in gen AI rapidly increasing. Businesses should prepare by codifying key workflows, planning their tech infrastructure, and implementing human-in-the-loop control mechanisms to manage risks and validate AI outputs. But Booking Holdings CEO Glenn Fogel thinks that growth will fade fast and that AI will accelerate a decline in traditional travel agents.

I feel like in AI, we are in that phase — only more exponential. But we are still in the initial promises phase and actual changes are still to come. To simplify booking and sell more Round the World tickets, Oneworld turned to Elemental Cognition, an AI startup founded by David Ferrucci, a computer scientist who led the development of IBM’s Watson computer. Expedia also said it would launch a cross-date price comparison tool, an AI-powered help page, and guest review summaries as part of its spring update. Compared to Europe and the United States, Asia is much more diverse across its different regions and countries.

Good engineering always begins with understanding the problem. Generative Al opens so many new doors that it requires a re-evaluation of where technology can be helpful — you need to remap your problems to solutions. For example, scanning legal contracts for specific concerns at scale was something we wouldn’t have considered using technology for in the past, but now it’s possible. Technology has always been a foundational priority at Agoda, no more so than since the ascent of Omri Morgenshtern as CEO two years ago. Mogenshtern and Zalzberg were co-founders of Qlika, which specialized in online marketing optimization and was acquired in 2014 by Booking Holdings.

Software + Service

It just seems strange to me, and that’s a rule that’s not good. Of course, politics plays a big role in a lot of this. But if you want a home, we can provide you with a home, too.

For all the promise of large language models, they are ingesting a lot of the garbage created in the past 20 years from SEO-driven travel content and bad writing, then regurgitating it back to us with hallucinations and all. Colin Nagy is a marketing strategist and writes on customer-centric experiences and innovation across the luxury sector, hotels, aviation, and beyond. Can we make use of existing systems so the agent can also focus on that.

It only showed general information about destinations and their events. Ideally, it would show specific information about when those events would occur and then show flight and hotel information based on those dates. While the business models for Despegar and Kayak are different, the new tools give us a better understanding of how the future could look. Altour’s new product, AI Transform, is a tool meant to help with travel program compliance.

‘There’s no price’ Microsoft could pay Apple to use Bing: all the spiciest parts of the Google antitrust ruling

Otto has been designed as a virtual travel agent for planning and booking business trips, with the ability to provide support during trips if flights or plans change. Powered by the latest generative AI models, users will be able to prompt a search with natural language. Anthropic, a generative AI startup and competitor to OpenAI, has introduced a new AI feature designed to mimic human travel agents by performing tasks such as moving a cursor and typing. This technology has the potential to automate travel planning, potentially bypassing traditional online travel agencies and transforming how travel bookings are made. While the feature is still in beta and has some bugs, demonstrations have shown its capability to complete tasks like finding directions and setting calendar events.

One’s a factor of us being bigger; one’s part of it because, as you point out, the world has changed a little bit, and it does take time. And it’s thinking these things through and dealing with lawyers and people who are [in the] public affairs field. We never had a public affairs department until relatively recently, and our legal department’s expanded a great deal. Part of the problem, though, is that we prefer to spend that money on hiring engineers and create better services.

Otto’s AI capabilities are at the forefront of what’s possible. I couldn’t be more excited to partner with the incredible team at Madrona Venture Labs and Otto CEO Michael Gulmann to bring Otto to the market. We predict a significant leap in AI applications, particularly in the travel industry. While chatbots have become commonplace, we foresee a broader spectrum where AI extends its influence across diverse travel scenarios. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. Beyond the conventional role of generating itineraries, TripGenie seamlessly integrates with on-site business operations like flight or hotel bookings. This means going beyond merely suggesting travel plans to facilitating in-site business reservations and integrating user travel needs from start to end.

At present, our inquiries can be broadly categorized into three types. The first category involves reservations for flights, hotels and other services, allowing users to swiftly book them after engaging with TripGenie. The second category pertains to itinerary-related inquiries.

So, I know there are going to be some soft times, there are going to be some great times. Like when we came out of the pandemic, there was that revenge travel surge, which is fantastic. But the truth is, I know that that couldn’t possibly last because in the end, we’re going to end up in a long-term run where travel goes slightly better than GDP. Now, on top of that, our job is to get a bigger share of that, and we have benefits of scale and capabilities that enable us to do that.

By leveraging your data on loyalty programs, credit card benefits, and insurance coverage, AI agents will be able to craft highly tailored travel plans, negotiate on your behalf and even decide which card to use to book to maximize points. Their role will extend beyond the initial booking, ensuring seamless journeys and swift resolutions to unexpected challenges. Whatever helps take the stress out of planning travel especially with groups or families and brings in more joy when things go awry is not only part of the experience but well needed relief. “The reason behind a large set of business travel being unmanaged is that services like Concur or other travel management companies are too expensive for small businesses. Typically, small business owners take the help of executive assistants for travel. That’s what’s good about Otto, it acts as your own executive assistant or a travel agent,” he said.