Despegar sells destination management company, boosts AI agent

This example barely scratches the surface of what GenAI can do, though, and the segment of the travel industry that’s best positioned to take advantage of it are Tour Operators and Destination Management Companies. These businesses already account for up to 40% of ChatGPT App global travel expenditures, which means they pack a lot of market clout. And GenAI is more than capable of multiplying that market power. If you’re in the travel industry, you already know that nearly everything you do is driven by the constant need to innovate.

• Recently, the Transportation Security Administration began using AI for facial recognition and ID verification in airports across the United States.
• And for travelers, AI might help alleviate some headaches.
• The exec, who also founded Concur, acquired Direct Travel (one of the investors in the round), with various other investors in April.

Add in the power of GenAI, and they become industry leaders when it comes to tailoring individual trips for their clients — plus, this technology makes it easy for them to broaden their reach. This kind of unique nimbleness simply can’t be matched by larger travel companies or new travel technology startups, and it also allows them to pivot much more quickly to new market demands. Booking.com, Expedia, and several other big companies released simple chatbots powered by ChatGPT about a year ago. Those chatbots have generally existed as independent interfaces, doing little to really transform the travel planning and booking experiences as industry experts have touted. Anthropic has unveiled AI technology that could simplify travel planning and potentially disrupt online travel agencies.

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We can highlight different elements on the page based on what we think the customer would find most important. Once we had these internal and support systems in place, we began making more visible changes on our platform. We started with less interactive features, like generating hotel content and review summaries, and later moved on to more interactive features like our property page Q&A bot. Progressing incrementally and responsibly is crucial; this journey will take time, but the cumulative impact on companies and consumers will be revolutionary. For example, consider filters in online travel agencies like Agoda. We have filters for price, location, size, type, etc.

You mentioned the idea that you’re going to help people with all of their travel needs, basically, wherever they are. There’s a lot happening in travel that I want to talk about, but I’m curious about the big picture. As I say, I hope a lot of people in the US — I think a lot of people in the US — know about Booking.com, and throughout the world.

Beyond Just Bookings

So it can create a profile for you and then automatically act on

that information. The tourism board’s influencer network generated 148 million impressions on social media last year, according to the organization. The German National Tourist Board responded on Instagram, saying it has no plans to replace human influencers because they create “authentic and emotional connections” and that Emma will “complement” and “enrich” their contributions. It’s Thursday, October 24, 2024, and here’s what you need to know about the business of travel today. At Madrona, we invest in and support the next generation of great companies, and Otto is a perfect example of the kind of transformative innovation that we are proud to stand behind.

However, Booking Holdings CEO Glenn Fogel believes AI will eventually lead to a decline in traditional travel agents, writes Executive Editor Dennis Schaal. Today’s podcast looks at the stock market slide, CrowdStrike’s push back, and travel agents and artificial intelligence. When it comes time to purchase a flight or stay, Kayak links the user to the relevant online travel agency for booking. For now, the tool can share information about a destination as well as flight options. The company plans to integrate all of its products into the tool next — including hotels, activities, and car rentals — followed by connections to third-party products like Uber.

Interestingly, the most valuable use cases for GenAl often aren’t the ones you initially think of when you see online demos. We’ll be in your inbox every morning Monday-Saturday with all the day’s top business news, inspiring stories, best advice and exclusive reporting from Entrepreneur. As laudable as that openness is, though, it also comes with some important caveats. It takes more than just an open mind; there’s hard work involved, along with the struggles that come with learning and deploying any new technology, especially one as powerful as AI.

One’s a factor of us being bigger; one’s part of it because, as you point out, the world has changed a little bit, and it does take time. And it’s thinking these things through and dealing with lawyers and people who are [in the] public affairs field. We never had a public affairs department until relatively recently, and our legal department’s expanded a great deal. Part of the problem, though, is that we prefer to spend that money on hiring engineers and create better services.

Otto’s AI capabilities are at the forefront of what’s possible. I couldn’t be more excited to partner with the incredible team at Madrona Venture Labs and Otto CEO Michael Gulmann to bring Otto to the market. We predict a significant leap in AI applications, particularly in the travel industry. While chatbots have become commonplace, we foresee a broader spectrum where AI extends its influence across diverse travel scenarios. Beyond the conventional role of generating itineraries, TripGenie seamlessly integrates with on-site business operations like flight or hotel bookings. This means going beyond merely suggesting travel plans to facilitating in-site business reservations and integrating user travel needs from start to end.

It seems the company is now working on integrating AI into its core feature set. The company is testing all these features with a limited audience through its EG Labs program, which allows U.S.-based users to try the new features. Second, it provided us with a learning ground to develop effective Al applications. By deploying Al internally first, we could afford to make mistakes and gather invaluable feedback. With our culture of learning and adaptation, we knew our employees would quickly embrace these changes.

The company announced net revenue of $1.8 billion for the quarter, up 14% year over year. Accommodation revenue was up 20% to $707 million for the same period.Transport ticketing revenue for Q2 increased 1% to $670 million. Meanwhile, revenue from packaged tours increased 42% to $141 million year over year. There’s always somebody on a Big Bus somewhere, any hour of the day. We needed a place to sit that volume of customer service requests in one spot so our agents could handle email and chat tickets.

HomeToGo is testing one of those building blocks in a new customer service chatbot called AI Sunny, which repurposed the previous traditional chatbot. The company said that so far, AI Sunny has reduced the transfer of customers to human agents by about 40%. Well, no, we are making huge investments because you won’t be able to create these without working on it to make it happen. Some of our customer service stuff is already going through, so we’re able to do simpler things with that. And I imagine, boy, the rate of advancement is going so rapidly, maybe it’ll be sooner than I think. We’ll actually be able to achieve some of these things.

You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. Whether written or verbal, AI can translate any language into another without manually inputting any text. Translation apps — such as Google Translate — can also use augmented reality (AR) to help translate text. When a device’s camera is pointed to a block of text, trained AI can quickly translate the words into the user’s desired language.

A lot of people have

been using it for a lot of e-commerce. Flights has been a big one, shopping,

people have been using it for event invites, communication, LinkedIn outreach. Travel is one that keeps popping up as a

big use case when we have asked users, and so that is something we are also

starting to focus a lot on. We are also thinking of launching a mobile app so

you can use the agent from your phone.

Educating about travel policies

My suggestion is to first use it to streamline your operations — from initial drafts of itinerary creations to data and opportunity analysis. Kopit reports early signals from hotel earnings suggest signs of a second-half slowdown, adding the picture will be clearer when IHG, Hyatt and Hilton, among other companies, report this week. However, cruise executives said they haven’t seen any slowdown in bookings and guest spending. “Overall, the short answer is no cracks, no deterioration,” said the chief financial officer of Norwegian Cruise Line. Travel executives see activities and experiences as increasingly lucrative, and here’s what the numbers say about how travelers are spending on them.

Unsurprisingly, generative artificial intelligence was also a key theme at WiT Singapore this week where travel experts provided views on the most exciting applications of next generation travel technology. Honeebot, an AI-powered chatbot, integrates into travel websites to help customers make informed travel choices. Available as a SaaS and customizable white-label solution, honeebot ChatGPT can be tailored to feature a unique AI persona aligned with each brand’s identity. For instance, it serves as an exit-intent tool, engaging users about to leave a site with a pop-up, and it also features teasers and floating buttons to encourage user interaction. A pivotal aspect of our roadmap is to enable AI to predict and fulfill needs users might not explicitly express.

For travel companies, AI poses many new opportunities and advantages. According to a report from Skift Research, using generative AI in travel is set to be a $28 billion opportunity for the travel sector. And for travelers, AI might help alleviate some headaches.

Greece Introduces AI Travel Assistant

And then we’re also thinking how

can we build some sort of digital ID, especially for the agent. Suppose your

agent is going and doing things, it can’t have a fingerprint about you, so if

it’s communicating with a website can it say, “This is Div’s agent or this is

Mitra’s agent,” so the website knows whose agent this is. So can you

communicate an identity to websites … and agents can interact with one another. Our look at the most important tourism stories, including destination management, marketing, and development. Anthropic, a generative AI startup, has unveiled new tech that indicates how an AI-powered travel agent would look, writes Travel Technology Reporter Justin Dawes. Booking sites that use AI in travel booking might also see an increase in users.

And as people use our services, we learn more about what they really prefer. We’re able to personalize and provide better services to them so they then feel a need, a desire, to come back to us. One reason I ask it that way — and it seems like we’re going to end up talking chatbot for travel agency about AI… I thought I understood that trend, but Glenn’s view is that it’s actually an outlier. Even the biggest chains in the world, he said — your Marriotts and your Hyatts —  benefit from online travel managers like Booking because the world is so big and complicated.

For all the promise of large language models, they are ingesting a lot of the garbage created in the past 20 years from SEO-driven travel content and bad writing, then regurgitating it back to us with hallucinations and all. Colin Nagy is a marketing strategist and writes on customer-centric experiences and innovation across the luxury sector, hotels, aviation, and beyond. Can we make use of existing systems so the agent can also focus on that.

• We switched it on, and I was initially sceptical about how much usage we would get out of it.
• Kayak did a good job of showing flight, lodging, and car rental options for a certain destination, along with other helpful features like tools showing the best times to fly and relevant destination info.
• Yeah, the tech stacks are very different, and they’re built up differently.
• And as people use our services, we learn more about what they really prefer.

Good engineering always begins with understanding the problem. Generative Al opens so many new doors that it requires a re-evaluation of where technology can be helpful — you need to remap your problems to solutions. For example, scanning legal contracts for specific concerns at scale was something we wouldn’t have considered using technology for in the past, but now it’s possible. Technology has always been a foundational priority at Agoda, no more so than since the ascent of Omri Morgenshtern as CEO two years ago. Mogenshtern and Zalzberg were co-founders of Qlika, which specialized in online marketing optimization and was acquired in 2014 by Booking Holdings.

Small businesses and startups often lack a dedicated travel desk, forcing executives and founders to rely on human assistants or consuming and cumbersome travel apps. Ask Maxx, built on the AI tool Maxx Intelligence, was designed for advisors to quickly retrieve information. It analyzes data within proprietary Cruise Planners’ systems in addition to public data online, making it a more bespoke tool for franchisees. The same way I bet that people in the 1890s could never envision that in 30 years, there’ll be these manned machines in the air flying around. I think we limit ourselves sometimes to the possibilities.