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What makes a holiday wonderful is those family trips that can help you refresh and spend time with your loved ones, while for travel businesses, this means Gold!

With the market flooded by millennials today, customer tours are on the high. Custom tours are those tour packages that are specifically designed for consumers according to their preferences and schedule. That is the sole reason, consumers search for experiences than the actual hotels.

Today, travel businesses around the world are building experiences rather than tours and travel packages. This has led to the acceptance of intelligent technologies like Artificial Intelligence into the design structure of these experiences.

Intelligent Travel Agents(ITA):

Intelligent Travel Agents or ITA is the amalgamation of ML(Machine Learning) and the travel-purchase behavior of the consumers. This is considered as a radical innovation as it ensures consumer engagement through “Smart Services”.

For example, you are at the airport, waiting for your flight and suddenly your entry gate to the flight is changed, you are instantly notified through an ITA regarding the same, without you even leaving your Social Media site.

ITAs uses machine learning techniques to identify the optimum pricing, comfort, and relevance to any particular traveling activity through real-time data analysis and processing through an algorithm trained for the same.

Take an example of the “Virgin Trains Alexa Skill”, launched in 2018, it allowed the passengers to book their tickets directly from Amazon’s Alexa device. This is a prime example of an ITA operating through an intelligent voice bot.

Travel Intelligence-The Personalized Learning:

Artificial Intelligence technologies have a wide acceptance in the business of tours and travels, due to their ability to learn from the real-time data and come up with unique and relevant solutions for the consumers.

There are three different learning models in the Artificial Intelligence that needs to be explored for designing algorithms that can use real-time data to learn specific travel knowledge and use the same to provide more personalized experiences to the consumers.

These three models are:

1. Supervised Learning
2. Unsupervised Learning
3. Reinforcement Learning

Supervised learning uses the data available to train the machine under human supervision. The unsupervised learning model helps machines to learn on their own without guidance or human intervention. But, reinforcement learning targets a particular dataset for training the machine for specific scenarios.

When it comes to travel intelligence use of any of the above machine learning algorithms can be used based on the type of personalization required.

Real-Time Preferences:

In the travel and tourism business, the necessity of real-time preferences have gained traction. Especially in the costing and expenditure aspects of the business, real-time preferences have played a huge part.

Just take an example of online taxi-booking services, transport is an important aspect of any travel and tourism business and this has been revolutionized through the on-demand business models equipped with ML tools that help dedicated app developed through a mobile app development company to predict the total fare of a ride by taking into account all the real-time preferences of the riders.

Self-Optimization:

Once these intelligent machines account for real-time preferences they tend to self-optimize making the very consumer searching for the right experience to be their travel agent. They provide a bouquet of product bundles in the most optimum possible way.

These machines can convey their bundled packages through a mobile interface, voice assistants or other intelligent means. They also impact the consumer’s travel behaviors and purchase behaviors.

Value-Added Services:

A concierge of services is offered by the tours and travel businesses these days like in-flight support, luggage support, lounge access, hotel transfers, medical support during tours, etc. With travel intelligence, these services can be further enhanced.

As these intelligent machines, use real-time preferences as the reference data to train the algorithm for self-optimization and provide enhanced value-added services.

The Role Of Virtual Personal Assistants:

VPAs or Virtual Personal Assistants are the new revolutionary technology that is changing the fundamentals of the purchase behavior of consumers. Current VPAs in the market are Amazon’s Alexa, Apple Home, Google Now, etc. These VPAs understands the natural language voice controls and processes knowledge acquisition.

With the intelligence in their algorithms, these VPAs can be leveraged by the tours and travel businesses to recommend products and activities related to travel. Many enterprises and businesses around the world are already using such technologies for marketing and even sales of the travel business.

Chatbots and Travel Businesses:

Chatbots have become quite useful in the current market scene, as many consumers and travelers always need real-time assistance with their issues during the travel. Chatbots can provide real-time assistance during the travel and also recommend personalized packages to the consumers.

One of the important aspects of intelligent systems is collecting important user’s data, this can be achieved with a series of questionnaires that occur during a chatbot-to-human conversation that almost replicates the natural conversation. Chatbot often excels at natural interactions and collect user’s data that can help the chatbot’s algorithms to learn from them.

Top AI travel companies:

• Hopper-Boston & Montreal
• Pana-Denver & Colarado
• Baarb Inc.-Los Angeles & California
• UTrip-Seattle & Washington D.C.
• Claire-San Carlos, California
• Amtrak-Washington D.C.
• Hipmunk-San Francisco, California
• Instalocate-Palo Alto, California
• Mezi-Sunnyville, California

Signing Off:

The cycle of travel intelligence leading to the integration of real-time preferences and further self-optimization that leads to enhanced value-added services certainly leads to revolutionary change into the travel-distribution and travel-behavior of the travelers. Artificial Intelligence has truly transformed the travel business into something more than a regular business activity.

There are concerns around the data protection and regulation in the adoption of Artificial Intelligence and machine learning technologies that can expose the user’s data to data risks and identity thefts.

But, many regulatory bodies around the world are in the process of developing data regulations for data collection, mining, and analysis in the most secure manner to ensure proper adoption of such intelligent technologies with security and safety. So, if you are into a travel and tourism business, just go for an AI-based model to rip the fruits of intelligent labor!