AI has been promised to replace human judgement and even replace a large part of our workforce, but it’s been disappointingly slow to realize most of these promises. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be helpful to to more mundane tasks and replace some of the drudgery of travel planning.
Imagine having a travel agent who knows your preferences perfectly, never sleeps, and can instantly analyze millions of data points to plan your ideal trip. That’s what AI-powered trip planning can become. It’s not there yet, but all of the elements are here to make it easier to plan and book our travels. Here are some examples:
1. Predictive Pricing Intelligence – AI systems can analyze years of pricing data, seasonal trends, and events, and can predict with growing accuracy when flights will be the cheapest. As an example, Google Flights can predict whether current prices are high or low. Apps like Hopper provide “buy now or wait” recommendations with confidence scores
2. Personalized Recommendations – AI will be able to learn from our past travels, searches, and our calendar. It will look at our previous destinations, our length of stays, our preferred airlines and hotels, and our affinity memberships. It will be able to determine our budget preferences by looking at the class of services we use and the restaurants we go to while traveling. From all of this data it will be able to assemble a list of recommendations.
3. Smart Scheduling – AI algorithms can optimize multi-city routes to schedule our flights, and when we arrive, book transportation and suggest each day’s itineries and attractions to visit, accounting for opening/closing hours and the best time to go with less waiting. It can factor in travel time between locations, consider daily traffic patterns and seasonal weather patterns and avoid common pitfalls like booking a museum that’s closed on Mondays.
4. Dynamic Travel Package Building – AI will be used to automatically adjusts plans based on flight changes or availability, and suggest alternatives when first choices aren’t available or flights are canceled. It will be able to track pricing tracking of hotels and airfares across multiple booking platforms simultaneously and make a recommendation for where to book each part of our trip, or even do it for us.
While AI trip planning is going to become increasingly sophisticated, it’s now best used as a tool to enhance rather than replace our judgment. The technology will excel at handling the data-heavy lifting of travel planning, leaving us travelers free to focus on the experiential aspects of their journey.
Currently there are a few sites that can do the planning for you such as GuideGeek and MindTrip. I tried them briefly and, while they have a lot potential, some still hallucinate (make things up) or don’t always have the latest information. I’ll be trying some of these for a future column. In the meantime, this is a decent review of one writer trying several services.