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 let’s me”snip” verbal bookmarks for future reference (and see what others have verbally bookmarked). Here’s a free Snipd month (I don’t get any free months or any other compensation for sharing this link).
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 on December 22, 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. If you’re actively looking for funding, I’ll direct you to “Request Funding” part of my day job.
Travel Will Come To You (Future Blog Post)
On a related note, I foresee a future with the bulk of travel offerings will predominantly and AutomatIcally come to the traveler (across travel products) rather than being consumer initiated, but that’s for another post.
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