OK, I'll admit, sometimes I am a doomscroller.
Phew, now that I got that confession out of the way, allow me to tell you about an Instagram reel I came across as I was, ahem, doomscrolling the other night.
While a lot of the times I see useless posts, this particular reel about artificial intelligence and summer travel triggered the wires in my brain that are labeled "story ideas" and eventually land in my mental file tab labeled "reporter."
Give it a view below:
If you're unable to view the post, essentially a woman pulled up ChatGPT and entered criteria for a seven-day summer vacation through Italy.
"Plan a trip in Italy for seven days visiting Positano, Venice, Naples and Tuscany. Budget is $300 USD per day for hotel, recommend a three-star or better hotel, plan one activity per day. Include cost of activity and cost of lodging. Include one four-star or better restaurant recommendation per city and cost of dinner for one. Put into a table," the user wrote on ChatGPT.
The tool created a complete spreadsheet answering those questions.
This post has garnered 3.3 million views. While some people found it useful, the post was also flooded with a variety of comments such as "Agreed, ChatGPT can be really handy for certain tasks, although I would say that sometimes it's the planning phase and the research you do for yourself [that's] the most exciting part" and "It may be a good starting point, but you can't beat having an actual travel advisor. Also, the data is from 2021, so you miss out on any new restaurant, activities, etc." or "I tried this the other day and ChatGPT doesn't have up-to-date listings past 2021. So it's really not that accurate or useful when a lot has changed in the last two years." and "ChatGPT doesn't have access to live prices, including flights FYI ..."
That's fair. I agree with the comments of those users saying there are kinks in the product. But as we know, technology evolves, and I suspect those kinks will be resolved and many travel companies could soon integrate their systems with various AI chatbot providers.
ChatGPT as of now doesn't have the capability to pull information from the internet, and it instead uses information learned from training data to generate an answer. And who knows, that could soon evolve.
With that said, I want to focus on the thought that hotel companies should consider partnering with an artificial intelligence chatbot vendor to ensure its hotels do have up-to-date visibility through the software's data. Or, should this be an option, consider integrating your brand's mobile app with products like ChatGPT.
Online travel agency Expedia, for example, announced this year it will be adding ChatGPT features to its mobile app "to provide an interactive experience," Forbes reports.
Once users open the Expedia mobile app, they will be greeted with the words: “Planning a new escape? Let’s chat. Explore trip ideas with ChatGPT.”
Expedia admits the integration is still fresh, "and it cannot plan an entire trip (yet) as Expedia doesn’t want to provide false details or low-quality information," the news outlet reports.
Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky said during his company's recent first-quarter earnings call that Airbnb is using OpenAI's ChatGPT4 as the basis for its own AI efforts. Granted, the company's primary focus now is to use AI as the entry point to customer service, so this could just be the start of bigger effort.
"I think AI can level the playing field from a service perspective relative to hotels. Hotels have front desks; Airbnb doesn't. But we have literally millions of people staying on Airbnb every night. Imagine they call customer service. We have agents that have to adjudicate between 70 different user policies. Some of these are as many as 100 pages long. What AI is going to be able to give us is better service, cheaper and faster, by augmenting the agents. I think this is going to be something that is a huge transformation," Chesky said during the call.
A recent study found that more than half of American Gen Z adults have taken three or more leisure trips in the past year, which has likely been spurred by the fact Gen Z is more exposed to travel inspiration through social media, said Lindsey Roeschke, travel and hospitality analyst at Morning Consult.
“In short, they’re being raised in a society where travel is more prioritized than it was for past generations,” she told CNBC, adding that “brands need to pay attention now.”
If this is the trend going forward, which I think is very reasonable to assume as we see how millennials and Gen Z are starting to dabble in AI for planning their leisure trips, this will play a fairly significant role in the shift of digital sales and marketing strategies for hotel brands and companies.
Hoteliers, are you planning to take action on this? If so, what are those action steps? Are you worried, excited?
Send me a note via email, Twitter or connect with me on LinkedIn.
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