“Businesses that ignore how technology is going to change the way people behave will fail.”

That’s an opening statement from our Vice President of Travel and Digital Solutions, Joel Brandon-Bravo, at Travolution’s 2020 European Summit.

In his presentation, Joel explained the current trends of artificial intelligence (AI), how they’re developing, and why it should be part of every business’s strategy – especially the travel industry.

According to Joel, successful companies will leverage AI to optimize their companies. The most successful will be the ones that seamlessly combine AI with human experience and judgement.

Here are Joel’s top five AI trends for the travel industry to follow.

Content Creation

The current AI text-generation tools aren’t perfect. Then again, neither was machine translation (MT) a few years ago, but it has since improved immensely.

Text-generating tools for AI are sure to get better at creating content. The sooner you give them a chance, the faster they’ll learn how to understand your content.

AI learns what is given to it, and the more it learns, the more it improves. Over time, this means better content with less human touch, which means less money spent.

AI Voice Search

The early stages of voice recognition were geared towards white males and focused on numbers, not words.

Clearly, a lot has changed as we now have Siri, Alexa, or Google within range at all times.

These changes are still developing and extremely important to take note of. Just as mobile search toppled desktop, voice search will dominate text.

In the travel industry, voice assistants are now in guests’ rooms and on ships. This means the area around content and search needs to be refocused so results mimic the spoken request, not the written one.

Voice search is also more crucial now than ever, since the pandemic has sent contactless communication soaring.

Search Results/Conversion

When it comes finding what you want on a travel website, most are still fairly rigid. When a user is using the search box, they have to know exactly what they want to get the best results.

However, Travelzoo is ahead of the game. By changing their search function to be more semantic, they allow a more inspirational approach to searching.

Instead of users needing to know exactly what they want, they’ve enabled more freedom. For example, someone could type something like “winter sun” or “beach holiday,” and get search results for a variety of places they may not have even have ever even heard about.

AI will soon be able to improve search results by analyzing data, such as bounce rates and user behavior.

Chat for Customer Service

When the pandemic first broke out, flights around the world were grounded. Expectedly, airlines customer support teams were scrambling to keep up.

Having a chat bot to help filter the requests could have aided in managing the chaos.

In fact, 80% of the questions from customers could have been solved with just 12 answers. That means only 20% of the calls needed human interaction to solve whatever issue was.

With the help of a chat bot, customer support teams could have saved a lot of time, money, and stress. It also would have improved the customer experience with shorter wait times and quick responses.

Review Analysis

To help businesses fix problems in real-time, there will be a shift in the review process. Guests will be more likely to review their trip while present at the destination rather than after they get home.

AI will categorize these reviews by sentiment to establish which department to filter the review to and respond accordingly. This process will lead to happier customers, better reviews, and more business.

If you’d like to learn more about how TransPerfect can bring your business up to speed with AI-powered solutions, email us at travel360@transperfect.com.

You can also watch Joel's entire session at the event below.