One day soon, in the artificial-intelligence-powered
future, a vacation might start by telling your smartphone something like this:
“I want to take a four-day trip to Los Angeles in June, whenever airfares and
hotel rates are best, using loyalty rewards points. I want to hit a history
museum and an amusement park, and then I’d like a 7pm dinner reservation near
the hotel at a restaurant with vegan options and a great wine list.” And your
phone spits out the perfect itinerary.
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But for now, travelers using ChatGPT — the
powerful new AI software that is already offering creative cocktail recipes and
writing college papers — may have to temper their expectations.
Oded Battat, general manager at Traveland,
a travel agency in Bridgeport, Connecticut, asked ChatGPT for outings he might
offer his clients going to Tuscany, Italy, to see if it could help him with his
work. He got a list of 14 activities, including winery tours and museum visits,
with a stop for gelato in the town square of the medieval hill town San
Gimignano.
“I knew of all these things,” Battat said,
but he added that ChatGPT saved him the hassle of collecting all the
information and delivered it in a format he was able to email to one of the
clients.
Already, travelers can “converse” with the system, sharing information like a destination, time of year, and interests, and getting back a personalized itinerary festooned with vivid descriptions.
ChatGPT, the service Battat has begun
using, burst onto the scene in November, and it has already begun to shake up
tech-driven industries, including travel. Unlike the AI that is already
familiar to most consumers — think website chatbots — ChatGPT is “generative”,
meaning it can analyze or summarize content from a huge set of information,
including webpages, books, and other writing available on the internet, and use
that data to create original new content. Its advanced natural language
capabilities also mean it understands and responds in a more conversational
way.
Many uses, and limitationsThe travel industry may never be the same.
Already, travelers can “converse” with the system, sharing information like a
destination, time of year, and interests, and getting back a personalized
itinerary festooned with vivid descriptions.
A reporter’s recent request for a two-day
itinerary to Whistler, British Columbia, yielded ideas like snowshoeing with a
guide who will point out the local flora and fauna, and taking a dog-sled ride
“with a team of beautiful huskies” for a winter trip. Given additional
parameters, ChatGPT will update its suggestions, so adding a preference for
Thai food to the Whistler conversation prompted the system to give new
restaurant suggestions.
But ChatGPT does have limitations. First,
its information base currently does not go beyond 2021, and it does not have
access to important travel-related data that can change from moment to moment,
like airline schedules and weather forecasts.
New versions are being developed, including
a major upgrade released last week, and are expected to keep improving. Also,
the software does not always know the difference between reliable and
unreliable information on the internet, so it can offer answers that are
untrue. ChatGPT’s maker, OpenAI, also warns that the software may occasionally
produce “biased content”.
Only a human can tease out what travelers say they want versus what they really want. The software gets “70 or 80 percent — but we’re not aiming for a C grade”
Anyone can use the software, which is free
and accessible via the OpenAI website. Tourist bureaus can ask ChatGPT to write
marketing copy describing must-see sites, and travel advisers can use it to
compose emails to their clients and create social media posts. Airline, hotel,
and rental car companies could use it to help their virtual agents answer a
wider variety of questions.
A ‘significant new step’Some in the industry worry that as systems
like ChatGPT improve, they might put travel advisers out of business, said Chad
Burt, a co-president of OutsideAgents, a Jacksonville, Florida, company with
8,000 advisers in its network. But, he said, “the imminent demise of travel
agents has always been predicted, and each new technology is a tool to be
used.”
He recently gave a tech tips seminar to his
advisers and is compiling a list of prompts his advisers can use to make the
most of the software.
Burt, who has been experimenting with
ChatGPT, has used it to create more than 100 itineraries. The result is a great
starting point and “can save some basic legwork”, he said, “but a good agent
still needs to fact-check and enhance it”. For example, he explained, only a
human can tease out what travelers say they want versus what they really want.
The software gets “70 or 80 percent — but we’re not aiming for a C grade,” he
said.
Expedia, one of the world’s largest online
travel companies, has been using AI for years to personalize recommendations
and program its online virtual adviser, but ChatGPT is a “significant new
step”, Expedia CEO Peter Kern said.
His company is looking at the new
technology as a possible way to give customers a more conversational way to interact
with Expedia, Kern said, for example, by speaking or typing questions instead
of pointing and clicking. Expedia could also work with ChatGPT to personalize
recommendations better by combining its data with the two types of data his
company tracks: customers’ purchase history and the most current pricing and
availability of airline tickets, hotel rooms and rental cars.
Aylin Caliskan, a University of Washington
professor of computer science who studies machine learning and how society
affects artificial intelligence, predicts that other travel companies will go
the same route, adding their own data and programming to generative AI systems
like those being created by Google, Amazon, and OpenAI, to accomplish specific
tasks.
The systems take an enormous amount of
investment, data, and human work to create, she said, so it will be more
efficient to build on top of them. A travel insurance company, for example,
could build a system using the natural-language capabilities of software like
ChatGPT that would help travelers choose the most appropriate policies or guide
them through the process of submitting claims.
“Interacting with people is an important part of travel,” he said. “And hotels can differentiate themselves through those connections.”
Generative AI could also improve
foreign-language translation, potentially helping travelers conduct
conversations with local people, Caliskan said. And combined with virtual
reality technology, it could also allow travel companies to give customers a
preview “visit” of a destination using a virtual reality headset.
Fearing an ‘AI junk land’Jeff Low, CEO of Stash Hotels Rewards, a
company that awards loyalty points for staying at a set of independent hotels,
worries about the effect new AI like ChatGPT may have on the lodging industry.
If one promise of artificial intelligence is automating routine tasks so that
workers can personally connect with guests, “the reality is different”, Low
said. Hotels have been more likely to cut jobs when AI was introduced, he said,
for example reducing front desk staff when automated check-in became popular.
“Interacting with people is an important
part of travel,” he said. “And hotels can differentiate themselves through
those connections.”
There are other potential downsides as the
capabilities of generative AI are used by more travel providers. A
natural-language answer sounds authoritative, “so people will believe it more
than they should”, Burt said. And because Google loves fresh content when it
comes to ranking search results, companies that want to raise their internet
profiles may start using ChatGPT-like software to write an ever-larger raft of
blog and social media posts.
The internet “might become an AI junk
land”, Burt said.
But for all the potential problems, an
AI-powered future could still be a boon to travelers: If ChatGPT or other
generative systems gain access to up-to-the-minute information, a sudden change
in one plan could automatically ripple through the rest, said Chekitan Dev, a
professor at the Nolan School of Hotel Administration at Cornell University. If
your flight is delayed, for example, the system could postpone your car rental
and send the restaurant where you plan to dine that evening a message to rebook
your reservation for a later time.
So will the future bring an autonomous vehicle
that “knows” to pick you up at the airport when your delayed plane arrives,
then takes you sightseeing and ends up at a place with the best pad thai in
town? Or maybe AI and virtual reality engineers will someday team up to bring
us a “Star Trek” holodeck experience that feels almost as real as a vacation,
and we will never leave home.
“This is uncharted waters for all of us,”
Dev said.
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