Serko and UneeQ Unveil Zena the New AI Digital Agent at Global Business Travel Association

• By naim naim
• January 25, 2024December 4, 2024
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Trip com Group highlights revolutionary powers of AI

One of the other interesting parts of the comparison to Google is where the results come from. Right now, I think a lot of people are reevaluating the deal Google gets, which is to index all the websites and then show the results, and then AI has made it so that Google might read the results for you. There’s just some recalibration about where Google gets its results on, what it’s allowed to scrape, and in particular, what the AI companies are allowed to scrape. Do you think of those core functions, like marketing or, more specifically, technology, as things that you share? Because that’s a pretty big cost across any sort of web property or service property like you run. Having duplicative tech stacks is often the biggest cost.

“In under four months, we’ve reduced average handling time by 20% for one of our TMC customers on a single account. As we roll out our full suite of products, including enabling non-GDS-trained agents to manage complex requests, we can achieve a 70% cost reduction. It’s time to bring travel operations into the 21st century—AI is the key to making that happen,” said Henry Chen Weinstein, Co-founder and Executive Chairman of Acai Travel.

The AI system, which specializes in natural language processing and predictive analytics, generated images of travel destinations and created personalized trip itineraries for event attendees, per the release. While the move positions Greece as a pioneer in AI tourism technology, it also raises questions about the changing landscape of travel planning. Greece implemented an AI-powered travel assistant named Pythia, according to a Sept. 3 press release. The AI was developed using GuideGeek AI technology from U.S.-based Matador Network. It is now available on DiscoverGreece.com and WhatsApp. The global travel agency market is projected to grow by $156.7 billion by 2028, per Technavio.

MasterCard – Trends and Innovations in Tourism

Gulmann said that, for instance, if you need a hotel with a rooftop bar, you won’t find that as a filter on Expedia or Booking.com. He said that Otto is leveraging various hotel data providers and airline schedule databases to provide better customization for users. Gulmann added that Otto automatically looks for changes in bookings and schedules.

So the gains are visible all across – externally and internally. The GenAI technology is already delivering and creating impact. We, ourselves, are getting ambitious in taking up more complex features where GenAI can create significant impact in easing the lives of the travelers.The technology, ChatGPT App itself, is evolving at a very rapid pace – on all fronts. The capabilities are getting better every month, the costs are coming down, and the accuracy/latency is getting better. The tech is here to stay, and will deliver on all promises – mostly within this decade, as I see it.

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Hilton experienced record room growth but has lowered its revenue forecast due to decreasing domestic travel demand. Boeing reported a significant $6 billion loss in the third quarter and plans to delay its 777X deliveries, facing challenges in rebuilding customer trust. AI’s data analysis capabilities let travel companies offer dynamic pricing packages based on factors such as demand, competitor pricing and availability of flights or hotels. Dynamic pricing is a win-win for travelers and businesses — it can help travelers on a budget find the cheapest options for transportation and lodging, and it helps maximize profits and revenue for businesses. His company competes with offline travel agents, and several Booking Holdings brands, including, Priceline, Booking.com, and Kayak have launched a variety of generative AI products, including trip-planners. Seamless integration of AI and human support will be crucial.

Another way to say that is, the customer is just one click away from somebody else. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. Yes, I’ll ask questions, and I’ll listen to the answer and see how confident that person is speaking, that person really knows what they’re saying, and that it makes sense what they’re saying. Well, Kayak actually being very different, being a meta [search engine], they actually go across all… A better example would be Priceline, Agoda, and Booking and making sure that we are concentrating on the areas you want to concentrate.

Given the right data, AI algorithms can identify patterns and make predictions in seconds. AI can also analyze lesser-known data points, such as social media posts or images. “Once again, the OTAs are predicting the decline and fall of the travel agency industry,” Fora Travel co-founder Evan Frank said via email. In contrast, we’ve onboarded more than 5,000 active advisors since our launch three years ago, the vast majority of whom are brand new to the industry. McCarthy, though, said she might think about using a travel agent if she takes her young daughter to Disney. He said Booking Holdings has to figure out how to differentiate services for its top customers.

There’s a company in travel called Navan, which is a corporate travel company that manages corporate travel for large companies. And they estimate that about 80% of the queries — low-level queries that people want to just rebook their things — can now be taken care of through an AI chatbot that they have. And the 20% that are more complex is where humans will come in. So that’s an example of where a lot of the inefficiencies will be taken care of from a labor perspective. Which seems very counterintuitive to, in general, how technology progresses, where there’s new ways of accessing information, booking, etc…You can only search in very specific ways because that’s what these boxes are.

The question is, how will we come up with what the fair way is so that we can best decide on how we handle all the different stakeholders in travel? Because it’s not just the suppliers, it’s not just the travelers, and not just people like us, who are helping to arrange it all; it’s the people who live in these neighborhoods. So, we have a lot of things to think about, ChatGPT as travel continues to increase in popularity, which it will. We’ll have to think about those consequences and, hopefully, think long enough ahead that we can come up with the smart ways to handle it in a fair way. Of course, there are some natural monopoly type things that people think they should… I’m not sure that Europe’s any better at this at all, though.

We work with everybody — everyone you’ve probably ever heard of and probably some you may not have. We may not sign a contract, but we’re always discussing possibilities. Look, again, we meet a lot of advances, but I believe we are still in the very, very early stages of what the possibilities are down the road. And I’ll bet there some of the companies that are going to come, the big winners, haven’t been invented yet. I believe she’s actually the President of the United States in secret — that’s my conspiracy theory. In the United States, the experience of buying Taylor Swift ticket was basically horrible.

A Growing Influencer Class Attracts a Larger Piece of Destination Marketing

It emphasized that because it uses different agents and models for different tasks, the number of hallucinations should be small. Otto is using its network of investors and advisors to get the best flight chatbot for travel agency and travel data — integrating with services like Direct Travel and Spotnana — to facilitate customized booking queries. Kayak was one of the first travel companies to announce a plugin on ChatGPT Plus.

The Labs team included Simon Tam, founding chief technology officer of Egencia, and founding leaders for the former Farecast company. That’s why the team is spending the next several months working out the kinks, Gulmann said, with plans to launch a beta version of the platform in December. However, a longer-term perspective can be useful to see what’s driving the company’s competitive position. As part of the agreement, BDExperience will continue to supply destination services to Despegar in Mexico and the Dominican Republic. Chatbots are relying on 20 years of bad travel writing, while travel advisors can be a real source of truth.

First, we need massive adoption of AI voice assistants by society. The issue is not for hotels to adopt AI, many of them are already actively adopting AI where they can. The gap is mobile related to the purchase and replacement cycle of mobile technology.

This is why all travel itineraries suggested by ChatGPT are powered by …OTAs like Expedia. As other AI-powered planners have shown, the tech is imperfect at this point. “So the concept is, if we can capture even just 1% of that, it’s a $1.6 billion market with $120 million in annual revenue,” Gulmann said. Much of the inventory is coming through a connection with ​​Spotnana, another Madrona-backed company with Singh as its executive chairman.

AJ Blanchet, another millennial Skifter, based in Salt Lake City, Utah, likewise has never used a travel advisor and expressed similar feelings about the fun of do-it-yourself trip planning. We’re still getting to grips with that technology, but you can start asking questions about what people say. It’s no longer just about trying to get the feedback, it’s now about trawling through the data and finding something useful to do with it.

With the power of generative artificial intelligence (AI), the Zeno computer travel agent from tech company Serko talked me through relevant hotel suggestions for an upcoming trip. Chatbots are a common AI-powered customer service tool for businesses to use instead of human agents — freeing them up for more complex tasks. Chatbots use natural language processing and machine learning to analyze user input and produce appropriate answers based on knowledge it has learned from different datasets. The global travel agency services market is projected to expand by USD 156.7 billion between 2024 and 2028, according to Technavio, with an anticipated compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 8.6% during this period.

This enables us to work with our partners to ensure we have the answers they need and to restructure filters, data points and badges to meet those needs. This kind of continuous learning flywheel, where insights from our free-text interfaces inform our structured views, is a very exciting way for us to keep improving the overall user experience. We have a variety of internal tools, from knowledge-assisted assistants to Al automations for surveying, and Al applications in security, fraud prevention, legal, finance, marketing and more.

The chatbot’s flexibility allows it to operate in various languages and currencies and adapt its tone to match the brand’s needs or reflect seasonal themes, shifting from formal to casual as required. TripGenie enhances the interaction with users by leveraging a natural language user interface and providing actionable results. Since its launch earlier this year, we have seen a doubled order conversion rate and improved user retention rates, resulting in enhanced user engagement and overall service effectiveness. But in terms of how the AI assistant is impacting overall strategy, Wei said TripGenie is helping the company to better understand travelers and improve service. The company is currently fine tuning off-the-shelf AI models using their own data. Gulmann noted that the cost of using these models will be far lower than what the company will earn from affiliate revenue per booking.

This helped us to learn more about user behavior and address our customers’ direct needs more efficiently and thoughtfully, covering both travel inspiration and travel-related questions. Otto leverages leading language models augmented with travel-specific models to enable a multi-modal service that allows you to book and manage your travel with simple voice or text prompts. Otto also leverages modern travel services such as Spotnana to provide the widest range of travel content to enable predictive and proactive servicing while you are on a trip. Whether it’s booking flights, changing hotel reservations, or managing travel policies, Otto’s conversational interface makes it as simple as speaking, typing, or texting a command. This allows individuals and small and medium-sized businesses to benefit from the same level of service that large enterprises enjoy at a manageable cost structure that can be up and running in a few minutes.

• So, just for example, at the very beginning, you had Priceline and Agoda have what’s known as a merchant model, in which case people would pay upfront for their reservations.
• One of the biggest places where AI is and will have immediate effect is customer service.
• Generative AI (gen AI) systems, like large language models (LLMs), have gained attention for their ability to generate content, analyse data, and provide insights.
• And I still believe, though, in the end, the best thing is to provide a better way to do travel, and that’s how you win in the long run.
• But we see flights are the major pain point right now.

It’s changing the way large and small companies do their travel business, and GenAI has supercharged an already hypercompetitive industry to a new level of overdrive. Change in the travel industry is constant, and AI is accelerating it beyond what anyone can imagine, even industry experts. Kayak did a good job of showing flight, lodging, and car rental options for a certain destination, along with other helpful features like tools showing the best times to fly and relevant destination info.