One travel firm is leading the charge in revamping its services to make trip planning easier and more personalized than ever.
A travel marketplace wishing to enhance customers’ trip planning experience so that they can ask open ended statements and questions such as “What are the best cities for cultural tours?” or “For a vegan traveler what are some obscure but hidden destinations worth visiting in Europe?” has succeeded by leveraging on Generative AI (GenAI).
The system also includes a variety of ideas ranging from “Birthday trip” to “Short flights next weekend” to “Foodie city breaks”, generate travel ideas and recommendations, as well as links to the best flight options for each.
Skyscanner’s marketplace platform offers imagery combined with rich destination descriptions to highlight the unique characteristics of each suggestion. Upon choosing a suggested destination, travelers are taken straight into the system’s search funnel to choose their flight.
Currently still in the beta, the AI-powered search and marketing features have been launched in Australia, India, and Singapore, with other markets set to follow.
According to the firm’s Chief Product Officer, Piero Sierra: “Generative AI is such an exciting technology that we as a travel industry are only just beginning to apply. Around 56% of travelers are coming to Skyscanner for inspiration, so with this beta launch we are looking to understand how it might help travelers in the discovery phases of the travel planning journey, and importantly how they engage with the technology versus existing tools. This one of many experiments we are running to see how generative AI can be incorporated to help travelers plan and book their trip with ease and confidence — in the future.”
The beta phase will allow Skyscanner to gather feedback, engagement, and conversion data to optimize and enhance future traveler-first product development.
The GenAI features are powered by OpenAI’s large language model chatbot ChatGPT, proprietary destination data, but other system-specific data that can be used to generate query-driven travel ideas and personalized promotions.
