Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become a staple of our day-to-day life. From Netflix and Spotify recommendations to Alexa, Siri, Google Home, and other intelligent assistants, it is an integral part of our lives that we barely notice anymore even though AI is changing the way we live.
But, that is not all AI can do for your life and your business. If you are in a travel-related field of work, read on to find out how AI is changing the travel industry at the moment and what exciting new things the future will bring.
AI and customer service
Many hotels and online booking services are already using an AI bot platform to provide quick and precise customer service 24/7.
AI-powered chatbots on social media business pages and dedicated instant-messaging apps can respond to questions and provide helpful information to customers even when there is no human service staff available.
Using chatbots also increases the response rate, which in turn brings up sales and customer service satisfaction.
Personalized customer experience
Today, customers tend to lean more towards those brands and services that offer a more personalized experience.
With the right personalization strategy in place, travel and hospitality businesses can optimize the customer experience while offering hyper-relevant content to boost customer loyalty.
You can rely on AI and machine learning if you want to bring personalization to your service.
Use advanced AI tools to analyze the user behavior during the buying journey to understand their behavior and tailor your content to provide them with a smooth flow and a unique experience.
Also, you could combine best-in-class tools with your marketing and get deeper customer insights like their needs and requirements, pain points, and more to leverage targeted marketing.
AI and traveling by train
Machine learning (ML) can analyze vast quantities of data to create a contextually rich, highly personalized, and fully predictive journey.
One of the areas this tech is already in use is traveling by train. In the UK, online rail booking service BusyBot for Trainline relies on crowdsourced data to create a bot that advises passengers where they’re most likely to find a free seat, depending on their specific journey’s location and direction.
A critical feature of this bot is price prediction. BusyBot tries to predict a passenger’s demand for specific tickets and shows how long a ticket will be available for a particular price.
It also tells the users how many tickets there are at that price and the cheapest available ticket each day.
Meanwhile, another part of this AI-powered tool crowdsources data from passengers to notify others about how busy a specific train section is.
Smart website creation
All of the offers and traveling opportunities you have on your website are pretty much useless unless potential customers can reach them.
Believe it or not, this is one more area where AI can help you, particularly when it comes to Search Engine Optimization for travel websites.
Marketers today use AI-powered SEO tactics to meet the requirements of search engines and boost their online rankings.
AI and machine learning can help search marketers identify current search trends, automate keyword research, and create content that ranks high on the search engine results page.
Users tend to search for advice, insights, product recommendations, or information about a business. Using AI to identify what the users are looking for can tell you what type of content your site needs to answer those exact needs.
That way, your site will become and remain relevant and high-ranked in the sea of many websites in the same business you are.
Fewer travel disruptions
Thousands of trips are disrupted every day due to natural disasters or a plethora of other reasons. It causes inconvenience but can also cause enormous losses for business travelers.
AI and Machine Learning-based solutions can garner information about weather, current delays, strikes, and more from various systems, identifying possible causes of trouble. This information with alerts of potential disruptions can be communicated to the customers while offering automated solutions.
This way, AI helps travelers and tourism operators. Travel service providers can develop the best possible response to data they get and provide alternatives to maintain customer service satisfaction despite the delays and disruptions.
Dynamic pricing
In these modern times, you have to be competitive with pricing since users can easily compare ticket and hotel prices through various platforms. Intelligent tools can monitor fluctuating prices and send out timely alerts with hot deals to clients.
AI can also help predict future prices based on historical data it has gathered in connection to a user’s search. It can even predict price fluctuations by combining vast amounts of historical information and events tracking and predictive analytics via sophisticated machine learning algorithms.
AI can also estimate hotel availability and prices, knowing the busiest times at airports, or even suggesting itineraries based on the weather forecast.
