Hello all, welcome one more time to my blog. This time will be talking about those trends and new technologies that will shape the tourism industry for the next years to come.

When we think about future, we inmediatly think about humanoids, flying cars, lunar expeditions, clones, bioprosthetics, teletransportation and many more revolutionary invents that will change the way we live. If we think about it, those ‘invents’ are not far from being part of our daily life, car manufacturers are way ahead on planning the launch of self-driven vehicules, better know as smart cars. Some companies are also working on lunar expeditions and return trips to the moon which were unthinkable few decades ago. It is only a matter of time before we start seeing robots in our daily life. In other words, the future is here and it will bring a relentless progress to our world.

The Tourism and Travel industry will also benefit from the advances in technology that are soon happening. Starting from the way we think about travel to the way we travel itself. In a few years from now we will have even more access to information about destinations around the world, the booking process will be simplified and more secure by using facial recognitions or our biometrics to identify us. Imagine being at a resort sitting next to the pool with your friends and having a robot delivering your drinks, cool right? And what if I tell you that they are also thinking about “Multi-lingual brain implants”? Yes, you will be able to travel the world without having to deal with the language barriers that each culture and country presents.

The Online version of The Guardian, published an article called “The future of travel: what will holidays look like in 2024?” The article, based on a Skyscanner Travel Report, mentions a few ideas of how tourism will look like in the future. I will be listing some of the most interesting ideas below:

• Virtual rooms: they mention that hotel rooms will be digital interactive spaces that will basically do everything for us, from pillows waking you up in the morning to smart showers that will let you know you when you are clean and ready to step out from the bathroom. I personally prefer the traditional way of doing things but I guess we will all adapt.
• Lunar trips: specialists are currently planning on what could be the next dream trip of all times, vacations at the moon. They are even thinking on building a hotel so they can actually send people for a trip t the moon. I mean, why not, right?
• Virtual reality destination testing: as I have mentioned on my pasts posts VR is a great tool for travelers to feel a little bit more what their next destination looks like. They came up with this idea of virtually traveling to the destination, looking around and “testing” it to basically know if you will like it before you actually travel. So, no risk of wasting your money.
• Become polyglot in a day: this is perhaps the most crazy idea they came up with, however, it is also one of the most attractive ones to me. They say that you could become fluent in many languages with a multi-lingual brain implant! Yes, It sound a bit crazy right now but if it actually becomes real I wouldn’t think it twice

Seems to me like our future is going to be full of new possibilities and new experiences may come knocking on our doors, how ready are we for them? How long must we wait? How much fun we could have? I’ll leave it to you to answer those questions because I have no idea, all I know is that I am excited!

Thanks for reading!

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.

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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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9EClKA1VeQ

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!