AI comes to the travel industry
YOUR COMPANY’S FAVE AGENT MIGHT SOON BE A BOT
Anyone who watched IBM’s Watson defeat 74- game Jeopardy champ Ken Jennings will know that artificial intelligence has the capability to transform all aspects of our lives. Corporate travel is no exception.
Norm Rose, author of a report for PhocusWright and Egencia ( an Expedia company) says a new generation of “smarter” travel bots is beginning to arrive. Online travel agencies are increasingly exploring machine learning and natural language processing to make complex reservations and to provide a level of personalization and customer support that may have been available only to the biggest corporate clients in the past.
THE TECHNOLOGY
Most of us take natural l anguage processing – a bot’s ability to mimic human conversation – f or granted (think Siri or Alexa). But some travel bots have become amusingly chatty. When told you’re booking a flight to London, Cheap Flights’ Facebook Messenger bot may just respond: “Lon- don? I’m so jealous!” And Hipmunk responds to a request for the shortest flight time with, “Sweet! I love finding people the least agonizing flight.”
But those are just bells and whistles. The more important consideration is whether a travel bot uses machine learning to gather, analyze and react to data, adding personalization to the process.
The more sophisticated travel bots on the market aim to help you plan travel, come up with targeted recommendations for hotels and flights, and send you notifications and suggestions for rerouting if plans go awry.
HELP WITH PLANNING
If you send a message to, f or example, hello@ hipmunk.com asking for a travel plan, it will do its best to figure out where you’re going and when, and reply with hotel and flight suggestions to take the pain out of planning. If it needs more information ( maybe you didn’t include the departure point), it will ask for it.
Heck, if you give permission, it will even scan your Google Calendar for info regarding upcoming trips and then email recommendations on its own. It understands the context of your conversations as well. If you type “I’d like to fly Vancouver to Seattle next weekend,” it will fill in the dates.
On the negative side, it doesn’t remember your favourite airlines or hotel chains, so every planning session starts as a blank slate. And really, what sets the best travel agents apart f rom anonymous online agencies is their familiarity with your likes and dislikes.
PERSONALIZED SERVICE
Enter a new breed of travel bots. HelloGbye, still in beta testing, asks for information up front on which airline you like to fly, which fare class, preferred hotel chains and star ratings. It then provides targeted suggestions.
For a subscription fee of $ 19 for individuals or $ 199 for business teams of 25 or less, you get additional benefits such as no change fees, preferred hotel rates and cash back on hotel bookings.
Great so far. But when I ask HelloGbye to find me a room in Las Vegas for a conference at the Wynn Resorts Hotel, it tells me there are no rooms at the Wynn and offers up a single choice: the Days Inn Las Vegas instead at a reasonable US$ 50 including taxes.
“Is this hotel close to the Wynn?” I type. No response. I try again: “Why did you pick this hotel f or me?” Again, no response. So I look up the distance between the Wynn and the Days Inn and discover it’s three miles, which means I’ ll either be wearing down my s hoe leather or grabbing a cab.
Fair enough, but it would have been nice to get a few suggestions and to be told why they were chosen. That’s the kind of service you’d expect from a human travel agent.
COMBO MODELS
Other r ecent arrivals ( Pana, Mezi for Business, Lola, Claire and Carla) try to remedy those insufficiencies. They back up the data- gathering capacity of travel bots ( logging travel preferences and analyzing patterns) with flesh- and- blood travel agents, who can help with travel delays and rebooking and often answer questions that go beyond the basic booking process.
Ask Lola ( currently available by i nvitation only), launched by Kayak co-founder Paul English, about the security wait time at JFK Terminal 5, and she comes back with: “TSA is posting a 21-30 minute wait.” And both Carla (Carlson Wagonlit’s bot) and Claire (30SecondsToFly) can help business travellers book trips that comply with corporate travel policies.
The bad news: most of the new apps are still in beta testing and the jury’s still out on how well they work.
Ultimately, says Rose, “bots are j ust machines that can perform a task independently of programming. We’re not at the point where machines are smarter than human beings or have sentient thought.”