As I continue to strategize, observe, and ponder the impact of AI on travel, I’ve struggled to find a significant consumer-initiated Travel AI use case — take note of the very important ‘consumer initiated’ scope of this blog post. There are some use cases, but nothing groundbreaking yet. However, I have thought of one potential example that I’ll separately share with you.
B2C
I argue that Travel AI will have a negligible impact on consumer-initiated travel products and services. The CEO of Booking.com echoed this sentiment on stage at SKIFT when comparing the usage of their AI search offering to traditional search modalities. I suspect this is the case for other companies as well.
In its current and near-term manifestations, AI, in relation to consumer-initiated travel, is a shiny new toy: we all want it but lack a logical reason why. The key phrase here is ‘consumer-initiated’ travel.
AI does have consumer-facing use cases, but these are nowhere near the hype surrounding its impact on consumer-initiated travel products and services.
Current Use Cases
I’m a fan of AI bots, as are 73% of people typically. Who wouldn’t want to know the top 10 restaurants in Paris, have an itinerary automatically built for them, or generate a 750-page blog post for their travel blog? Of course, these use cases have value, among many others too numerous to mention.
I believe AI on the ‘front end’ (consumer-initiated) has considerably more impact for other industries and use cases — content creation, summarizing, identifying, analyzing, and so on. Multi-modal searches via Gemini (Google) takes these benefits and adds an entire dimension of new ones (aka: 1D search to 2D AI search to 3D Multi-Modal…).
There is tremendous value in these consumer-initiated AI offerings, and I often use them (never to create a blog post but I do have it revise my grammar which I used to think was proficient).
Snipd, one of my current favorite AI powered tools, summarizes and deep dives what’s discussed on popular podcasts (Huberman, All In, Lex Friedman..), provides a topic list beyond anything in the show notes, ability to listen to the specific sections (topics) I want to focus on and lets me “snip” verbal bookmarks for future reference (and see what others have verbally bookmarked).
The skepticism I describe today is purely for consumer-initiated travel AI specific requests using the current capabilities of AI (as of December 22, 2023).
Travel Startups Can Fill The Gap
I posit, as I write this in December 2023, that the majority of AI’s power and impact in a travel context will be behind the scenes in what AI enables, empowers, accelerates, enlightens, replaces, and invents across every aspect of travel in some form or another; not substantively in a consumer-initiated context.
The only exception to my pessimistic viewpoint on B2C consumer-initiated AI is the innovation brought by AI travel startups. I never underestimate a travel startup’s ability to transform an industry, no matter how powerful the entrenched interests they’re up against. This includes the potential for a significant consumer-initiated AI travel offering — I have yet to see it but I’d love to be wrong.
AI Startup Founder?
If you know of a travel startup I should be keeping an eye on, drop me a note. I’d love the intellectual back and forth on AI’s impact on travel, I can share thoughts on a business model, mentor an early stage company with clear traction (we don’t invest in early stage..) or at the very least “I may not have the answer, but I will have the question” as I’m prone to saying.
Travel Will Come To You (Future Blog Post)
On a related note, I foresee a future with the bulk of travel offerings predominantly and automatically coming to the traveler (across travel products) rather than being consumer initiated, but that’s for another post.
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