There are five stages in the travel booking process: dreaming and getting inspired, searching and planning, booking, experiencing and sharing. Thanks to the development of Artificial Intelligence tourists now have several tools that allows them to have a more satisfactory experience while planning their vacations. Today, I will talk about how can tourists use Artificial Intelligence on each of the stages.
The first stage and probably one of the most important ones is the dreaming and inspiring stage. This stage of the booking process is going to determinate the type of travel and destination where the travelers will be going to. For this reason, clients tend to search for creative and interesting ways of seeing a destination. A good example of this could be Virtual Reality and Augmented reality. It is very common to see these types of posts or images on social media with more frequency nowadays, destinations’ official Instagram profiles, travel inspiration sites and similar pages are sharing these types of posts so the viewers can see destinations from a different perspective other than just pictures and regular videos.
Following the dreaming and inspiring stage there is the searching and planning stage. On this stage travelers will basically start organizing their trips, searching for reliable information about their future destination and plan their whole itinerary according to their preferences and interests. Utrip, is an app that creates tailored itineraries following the preferences of the clients, the system asks the client for basic data and interests such as preferences between types of travel, types of accommodation, past destinations and so on. With all this data the app is able to find or create the itinerary that best suits the client providing a personalized and exclusive service.
Next stage, booking. On this stage they will materialize their dreams and actually book what they have planned on the previous stages. There are several tools that assist clients on the booking stage. Either for hotels or flight tickets, resorts or car rentals, there is already an app created to provide the service using AI. Most booking websites are currently using chatbots to assist the visitors on their booking process. As we have mentioned before, chatbots are simulation chats created to provide on-time assistance by using artificial customer service agents. Besides this tool we also have actual booking apps that use data analysis and learning to provide real time responses, Hopper and Booking.com are good examples. These apps collect data and give recommendations of best prices or best choices according to the information the client provided and the data previously collected.
Once travelers have dreamed, planned and booked their travel plans, the next steps are more tangible than the previous ones. On the experiencing stage, it is time to explore and discover new destinations. After the completion of their trips clients usually like to share and comment about the destination, places and attractions they visited. They leave comments about the service and the quality of products and also give a rating if it’s possible.
As you can see from all the mentioned above, Artificial Intelligence has positive effects on the booking process and assists travel providers give a customized service in order to create unforgettable experiences. Thanks for reading!
Touristech 