Airbnb-Backed Tiqets Talks AI, Profits, and Scaling Experiences

Michael Gulmann, Otto’s founder and CEO, brings over a decade of experience in the travel industry, previously holding senior positions at Expedia and Egencia. It responds with an interactive map with filters including for the airport of departure and trip length. It also includes a group of potential locations with airfare cost and an AI-generated description of each.

​​IHG Hotels & Resorts later this year is planning to release a trip planning tool powered by Google’s AI as a feature within its One Rewards mobile app. Earlier this year, Google released some new AI features in Maps to help users with trip planning. App users can now see key photos and reviews that summarize people’s favorite aspects of a specific restaurant or place. The AI can also help identify what a dish in one of those photos is called and then pull out the most notable reviews that mention that dish. Google most recently shared its work on trip planning capabilities for search and Gemini Advanced, its equivalent to ChatGPT Plus for paid members.

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While the feature is still in beta and has some bugs, demonstrations have shown its capability to complete tasks like finding directions and setting calendar events. A new wave of innovation in the travel industry is on the horizon, driven by advancements in generative AI. Research from Accenture reveals that nearly all travelers (97%) are looking for a comprehensive, all-in-one platform—a “super app”—that can streamline their travel experience. This demand stems from a growing frustration with current trip-planning tools, where users are often required to make separate bookings for flights, accommodations, and activities, creating a fragmented process. More than half of travelers express openness to adopting AI-driven solutions, particularly conversational tools, to ease these pain points.

Together, the companies have focused on using AI to enhance travel experiences, driving the creation of Sabre Travel AI, which powers new solutions like Sabre’s Offer and Order platform, SabreMosaic, and customer care improvements. Sundar Narasimham, Sabre’s Senior VP of Labs Technology & Platform, emphasised the growing importance of AI in travel. He cited estimates of AI’s potential to generate over $28 billion in global revenue, noting that 74% of travel organisations are revising their strategies to incorporate AI. He explained that AI is essential to delivering the seamless, personalised experiences travelers increasingly expect, with robust data sets being a key component of effective AI implementation.

All of them have proven to be clunky, however, often making it easier to search for bookings the traditional way at this point. Next, Booking.com is getting AI-generated review summaries, meant to provide key insights about a property without the user needing to browse through the list of reviews. Booking.com has made an update to the AI trip planner on its mobile app. If your website information and product descriptions are created, they would be well matched for this search and could be summarized, along with a link. Many or probably not what you’ve ever thought about optimizing for. “This capital raise is a testament to the growth FLYR has achieved thus far and we’re excited to continue supporting the world’s largest travel providers at pace,” said Mans.

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“(It is) now almost coming full circle where we are using technology to bring back a lot of that service level,” she said. Google and Sabre leadership said the partnership has helped to accelerate digital transformation in the travel industry. The partnership has so far resulted in the creation of Sabre Travel AI, which powers solutions such as the new Offer and Order platform for airlines, SabreMosaic.

As the social media influencer industry evolves and matures, destination marketing organizations are, in turn, taking them seriously as agents in their efforts to grow visitation. “She could partner with major hotel chains, airlines, or travel agencies to offer exclusive travel deals, experiences, or discounts. Through such partnerships, Emma will not only become the face of German tourism but also a global facilitator of unique travel experiences,” said a spokesperson for the board. Stippl, an all-in-one travel app, announced the raise of over €575k. Backed by Marbruck Investments from Australia and Volve Capital from the Netherlands, the technology company will develop its AI travel planning feature and aims to grow the number of users to one million by the end of 2024.

While HomeToGo has an “LLM agnostic approach”, said Andrae, with the company working out the different advantages of the various different services. The first version of the AI tool will focus on helping users with the “dreaming phase” of travel. “You should expect a lot more in the travel space,” Carrie Tharp, vice president of strategic industries for Google Cloud, told Skift in early April.

AI trip planners of various qualities have been popping up since OpenAI released the first generative AI model in late 2022. Many of those planners have already failed, and few have raised money. You could

have MultiOn built in on the website and you press a button and the booking automatically

happens in the background and then you don’t have to worry about anything.

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To answer property-specific questions, the AI scans the property listing, traveler reviews, and photos. Users can ask property-specific questions now through the general AI chatbot after asking it to perform a general search for hotels. Another version is coming to individual property pages soon, the company said. The company said on Wednesday that mobile app users can now ask the AI trip planner questions about specific properties, and there’s also an AI tool for quickly filtering results. With generative AI search, the live, structured product data that you feed to Google is exactly what the LLM struggles with. In Gemini (Google’s LLM), Google Travel results are already used in generative responses when it comes to hotels and flights.

“Investing in travel apps means backing the journey of exploration and discovery of their community. Stippl redefines traveler’s experiences, turning aspirations into seamless itineraries. Volve Capital is very excited about the future of Stippl, and the opportunities offered by this new release, enabling a one-stop shop for travel planning and discovery,” said Joost Bijlsma, Partner at Volve Capital.

You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. Germany’s tourism board isn’t the first to try out an AI influencer. Last year, a marketing campaign from Italy’s tourism ministry touted bringing Botticelli’s Venus to digital life as a “virtual influencer” with the help travel chatbot of AI. (Literally, she’s now a two-dimensional illustration with an Instagram account.) Venere Italia now has 241,000 followers but her posts typically garner engagement in the single digits, and mainly in Italian.

Google is advancing its AI technologies with several initiatives aimed at transforming the travel industry. These include new trip planning capabilities in Google Maps, AI-powered tools for airline retail through SabreMosaic, and collaborative AI projects with companies like Alaska Airlines and IHG Hotels & Resorts. These innovations promise to streamline travel planning, enhance user experiences, and potentially boost industry revenues significantly. AI has been around for a while, and although the hype has surged since the launch of consumer-facing GenAI chatbots, leading to massive investments in the field, it’s important to keep a balanced perspective. But I also think it will take time to fully realize its potential in the market.

More recently, AI chatbots have also become common, enhancing guest experiences by automating tasks like answering FAQs and streamlining bookings. However, while these point solutions are powerful, they don’t fulfill the broader promise of AI. Each tool optimizes just one department — revenue, guest services, or operations — leading to isolated gains without solving inefficiencies across the whole organization.

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As part of the board, he will share his expertise in building and scaling as FLYR seeks to achieve global expansion. Tarai, who was involved in the first wave of AI 30 years ago, when he wrote his master’s thesis on AI applied to industrial robotic design, called this the “AI agent era”. He also said that of all the updates released earlier this month by the LLMs, he was most interested in the multimodal capabilities as well as the speed of development of conversational interfaces.

Second, the GPTs can be integrated into the chatbots of OTAs to enhance their users’ experience by making the conversations with the customers more humanlike. Optimizing organic and paid search will move beyond traditional SEM/SEO metrics like keywords relevance, core web vitals and quality score. Measuring and steering positive online sentiment through product reviews, customer ratings and user-generated content easily crawlable by AI engines will be equally important. HomeToGo also said last week that it’s using Google Cloud’s Vertex AI to build various products as part of a goal toward a reimagined marketplace fully powered by AI. Vertex AI gives software developers access to several third-party generative AI models in addition to Google’s, allowing the developers to select which model is best suited for each individual project. Users can access the chatbot individually or in groups on Whatsapp, text message, or the Expedia app.

The airline industry is currently facing a shortage of skilled aircraft mechanics and maintenance engineers. A recent study indicated that about one-fifth of aviation maintenance technician jobs may go unfilled by 2033. While these tools will not be physically turning wrenches, they can assist technicians in diagnosing and troubleshooting aircraft issues, offering potential solutions. Currently, aviation mechanics spend roughly 60% of their day troubleshooting, researching and preparing reports instead of performing technical work.

Users answer ten quick questions about their trip, and Speakspots generates an itinerary in less than a minute. These itineraries factor in the predicted weather, opening hours of attractions, the distance between attractions, ticket prices, the user’s stated budget, and so on. Itineraries are then sent to the user’s WhatsApp, and linked to an AI assistant to help with ChatGPT App any hiccups on the trip. Harris of Cloudbeds believes that hotel tech companies are heavily marketing AI tools that aren’t actually as impressive or unique as they promote. The projects we develop need to recognize this multimodal and multi-model approach. We have to be flexible in how users might want to interact because their behaviors might change over time.

Educating about travel policies

Our employees are using productivity tools for coding as well as analysis of data on a daily basis. We, ourselves, are getting ambitious in taking up more complex features where GenAI can create significant impact in easing the lives of the travelers.The technology, itself, is evolving at a very rapid pace – on all fronts. The capabilities are getting better every month, the costs are coming down, and the accuracy/latency is getting better.

• AI tools like GuideGeek can help you figure out where you want to go, where to stay when you get there, and what to do while you’re in a given area.
• Similarly, Gauvendi’s AI-driven solutions for personalized guest experiences and room inventory optimization have led to tangible benefits, such as increased direct bookings and revenue.
• “It’s just very difficult for a very large company to change the interface that their users are very used to.
• “In the following years, we really want to cement our position as the leading travel app.

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

that information. Narasimham explained that travellers desired the kind of seamless, personalised experiences that have become commonplace in other industries, such as retail. He added that the value of GenAI in terms of increased global revenue for businesses could be over US$28 billion. Artificial intelligence is seemingly becoming the solution to

everything – but I am skeptical, especially in travel. My

conclusion is that in the world of travel, AI is being overhyped. When opening a new conversation with Meta AI, the chatbot makes several suggestions for topics to ask about.

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The Gen AI technology within Amadeus Advisor allows for instantaneous collection of detailed insights, expediting the analysis of complex data and aiding in strategic business planning. Hotel revenue managers can easily obtain information on average daily rates, room nights, and revenue pipelines, streamlining the entire process and eliminating the need for manual data searches. The collaboration aims to simplify the data analysis process for hotel industry professionals, offering them an efficient tool to make informed, data-driven decisions. The Amadeus Advisor chatbot builds on the strategic partnership formed in 2021 between Amadeus and Microsoft to foster innovation across the travel sector.

Meta says the model is also “open,” which means its code is available for software developers to download and adjust as needed. All of the models powering ChatGPT by OpenAI, Gemini by Google, and Claude by Anthropic are closed. Meta AI last week released the newest version of its generative AI model, which it claims outperforms that of OpenAI in nearly every metric. Last year, the Airbnb CEO told Skift CEO Rafat Ali the company would be “rebuilding the entire app with AI at the center” by May 2024. Much of the inventory is coming through a connection with ​​Spotnana, another Madrona-backed company with Singh as its executive chairman.

We also need tighter integration across booking, payment, and authentication systems. First, we need massive adoption of AI voice assistants by society. The issue is not for hotels to adopt AI, many of them are already actively adopting AI where they can. The gap is mobile related to the purchase and replacement cycle of mobile technology. So even once “new-generation” smartphones are on the market with integrated AI voice technology across the board, we’ll still be looking at another two to five years before this tech becomes the mainstream in mobile.

Products include tools for airfare and add-on offers based on real-time information, software meant to reduce the impact of delays and cancellations, various payment options, market analytics, and more. The journey wasn’t smooth — we faced hallucinations, biases, and security challenges — but these obstacles fueled our innovation. We developed Navan Cognition, a game-changing process that combines the best elements of various large language models while eliminating error-prone functions. Ava now resolves more than 50% of support requests, rivaling human agents in satisfaction scores and saving us $1 million monthly.

• Skeptics who point to the excitement and disappointment curves of technologies like virtual reality or Web3 should be under no illusions about AI …
• With this vision in mind entrepreneurs Luuk Verhoeven, Omar Sheshtawy, and Robin van Rijn created travel platform Stippl in 2022.
• For example, if a user is searching for information about visiting Paris, Gemini may choose to offer hotel suggestions and will pull listings directly from the Google Travel hotel feed.
• Sabre entered into a partnership with Google in 2020 to leverage the latter’s cloud and AI expertise.

And I think agents will be

one of the biggest technology waves that’s going to happen maybe in the next

three years. Generative AI is revolutionizing the travel and hospitality sectors by offering innovative solutions that enhance guest experiences and streamline operations. From customer service to personalized marketing to operational efficiency, this technology is transforming multiple facets of the industry. AI algorithms are enabling dynamic pricing strategies based on real-time demand, traveler behavior, and market trends. This approach allows hotels and travel companies to optimize revenue while offering competitive prices to customers, enhancing the attractiveness of their services.

Meanwhile, Thailand has decided to scrap a proposed $8 tourist fee for international visitors, citing potential economic benefits. A recent survey found that 52% of hospitality customers believe generative AI will be employed for customer interactions. In addition, ChatGPT 44% think it will be used to improve guest engagement. However, experts caution that this technology should enhance rather than replace human interactions. Businesses’ overreliance on generative AI could lead to artificial-sounding messages that alienate customers.

For example, Mindtrip would earn a commission when consumers book travel through the website. There’s a

lot of things happening with passkeys these days, so we are also looking into

that. 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. Tharp remarked that the travel industry has “gone from having an individual travel agent to the advent of platforms where you could book it all yourself”.

Google is continuing to integrate new AI features into software for physical products, including laptops and mobile phones. A new capability on Android devices allows users to translate content, such as a menu, on the screen without switching apps. It’s part of the Circle to Search tool that was released in January, which allows Android users to initiate a Google search by circling text or an image on the screen. That’s what the CEO said during the tech giant’s latest developer conference, and we’re seeing it with the company’s own consumer-facing products, and also through partnerships with travel companies. Skeptics who point to the excitement and disappointment curves of technologies like virtual reality or Web3 should be under no illusions about AI … Thus, those who can move fastest, the early adopters, will have a more distinct advantage than ever.

That’s why startups typically do well in these sorts of markets,” he said. Steve Singh is continuing to build and fund an ecosystem that he hopes will bring about a more high-tech experience for the next generation of business travel. Otto will have to work out the rough edges of other AI trip planners to date. So, if you look at the scope of our distribution partners, it runs from big OTAs [online travel agencies] like MakeMyTrip and Expedia, to small travel media, blogs, and writers.