How Is Artificial Intelligence Helping Tourism
In today’s day and age, it’s hard to spot an industry that’s not been impacted by Artificial Intelligence. From banking to agriculture to retail, all the fields have been radically transformed by the wonders of Artificial Intelligence. Another industry that’s leveraging the transformational benefits of AI is the tourism industry.
As per Statista, the travel and tourism industry is one of the world’s largest industries with a global economic contribution of over 7.6 trillion U.S. dollars in 2016. Also, the direct economic impact of the tourism industry, including accommodation, transportation, entertainment and attractions, amounted up to approximately 2.3 trillion U.S. dollars that year. So, it makes sense for such a growing industry to use technology as groundbreaking as Artificial Intelligence.
As Artificial Intelligence brings along with it the power of automation, it is helping make travel experiences more niche and targeted towards travellers. AI can help travel agents analyze travellers profile by looking at their preferences, budget, location, eating habits, and choices, thereby, helping produce personalized and tailor-made suggestions for travellers. There are many companies in the market that use AI to enhance travel experiences too.
In conversation with Mashable India, Vice-president for global experiences, Ram Papatla, Booking.com, talks about how AI makes it easy for travellers to plan their trip.
We think of AI as the core of what we do. And it’s really hard to say that we do it only for a specific market. But what is interesting is that we’re looking at patterns and anti-patterns in sort of every market and sort of learning from that and figuring out. At the moment, there is no specific plan for India.
There are many ways. The journey starts with what we call as an ‘unknown state’ which means we don’t know where you are going. There will be three states – we don’t know where you are going, we know you are going, and we know you are there. SO depending on those three states, we can really reflect the right content for the user. So when you register for the time, there will be a lot we know about you, and a lot we don’t.
Possible. If you log in from an iPhone, or from India or a particular bandwidth and perhaps there are cohorts of very similar people like you, who can start to understand it. With the help of Google and Facebook, or any other signals who know a little bit more about you from the ad portal too. So I think that’s what we start from. We start really broad, and then we can see it become very narrow. The moment a user makes an account with us, and do their first booking, of course, we get to know a lot more as we get to know a little more about your price affinity and the kind of travel you’d like.
