10 AI Travel Trends for 2022 and Beyond

The travel and hospitality industry has long become digital-first. Buying tickets, booking accommodation, planning out routes and activities, renting cars—all this is usually done online via automated tools.

Now, as we’ve entered the new decade, the industry is on the verge of another major all-permeating disruption: travel AI.

In terms of matching and surpassing human intelligence as a whole, today’s AI isn’t very close to the sentient android navigators and omnipotent tech systems of sci-fi films we grew up watching.

A truly self-aware, creative, adaptive, multipurpose AI might still be decades in the future, but AI consultants have already found numerous real-life applications, benefiting businesses and consumers. Neural networks expand and evolve, machine and deep learning models excel at detecting patterns, and AI-based systems designed for highly complex specific tasks keep proving effective.

Travel is actively undergoing waves of digital transformation too, with big data, machine learning, and AI at the forefront of the technological change and logistics software development.

What do peak holiday seasons have in common? Apart from supposedly bringing joy and excitement into peoples’ lives, it’s undoubtedly scores of distressed travelers swarming in busy airports and stations.

As the number of flights and passengers increases, both during seasonal peaks and yearly in general, the level of stress, accidents, and travel-related frustration at airports rises.

What can be done about this? Some airports battle the stress levels by having an army of dogs in their employ, roaming the premises for passengers to pet. Others go for AI solutions, like Pittsburgh International Airport, one of the first airports to use real-time AI tech to estimate and report the times passengers spend in lines based on current and historical visitor data.

Additionally, using predictive analytics to forecast flight delays and evaluate cancellation propensity can also be of service. Demand forecasting data also comes in handy, providing alerts about spikes in reservations and potentially overcrowded roads and destinations around busy periods.

Hotel and flight booking is the most essential and most confusing step of trip planning at the same time. Travelers scout countless websites to find the best option, while being forced to enter the exact same information every time they visit a new booking website. Today, meaningful customer experience is what makes a difference, and AI-powered chatbots are here to help with this.

According to Salesforce, 86% of customers would rather get answers from chatbot than fill out a website form. In many cases, travelers tend to search for their perfect option on mobile, which makes form-filling even more daunting and uninspiring. AI-powered chatbots, on the other hand, can process all important information via today’s beloved communication method—messaging.

From the business standpoint, chatbots free up the valuable time of customer service reps. As Salesforce further discovered in their research, when aided with AI chatbots, agents can now spend most of their time solving more complex problems, while chatbots are successfully dealing with simple and repetitive user requests.

However, chatbot development goes far beyond booking. In air travel, chatbots are used to generate boarding passes, deliver announcements, and instruct travelers. Automated and personalized, they can remind your customers about the schedule, provide with wait time estimates, and answer any questions about in-airport navigation.

AI-powered chatbots can conveniently answer all the questions regarding your booking, but what if AI planned the whole trip for you? For example, Utrip uses machine learning algorithms to create highly personalized travel plans. Whether you are up to classic touristic sightseeing in Rome or prefer outdoor activities somewhere in the mountains, the Utrip app can book a hotel, choose a restaurant, and plan activities—everything based on your previous traveling history and tastes.

Watch the video below to see Utrip in action:

Helping travelers discover new destinations isn’t just about mitigating overtourism and getting true ‘local’ experiences. It is also about leveling off the distribution of tourists around the world, and about helping undiscovered and less-known destinations to get exposure. There are, in fact, still much more places around the world where travelers are welcomed rather than not.

The number of tourists and travelers on a global scale is only to grow, and it’s a matter of sustaining places of interest both less known and those too popular for their own good. It’s a question of creating better, more inclusive databases for travel agencies and personal-use recommendation services.

Car-sharing companies like Lyft and Uber have always been all about using AI and big data in every facet of their services. A continuation of their quest for convenience, cutting costs, and industry sector domination, self-driving cars are their next heavy investment.

Extensive testing going on for years now, a number of robot-taxi services are expected to launch in the early-to-mid 2020s around the world. It is possible that full automation of public transportation systems and moving on to driverless buses and trains will be soon to follow.

The almost-there rise of the unmanned vehicle will bring about a lot of complicated socio-economic changes and questions; but the major change that’ll be unequivocally for the better is a much higher travel safety, as AI is to ensure fewer crashes and casualties on the roads.

AI has been permeating every industry around the world. In many cases, companies still use AI as a means of raising brand awareness. In other cases, the presence of AI is already having a very real impact on business processes and customer satisfaction.

The 2020s are to become an era of many technological shifts. Internet of everything is likely to become truly omnipresent, quantum computing is to have commercial and real-life impact on the society and tech, hyper automation and distributed cloud are expected to be the major strategic technology trends of the next few years.

Society, on its part, is experiencing a cultural shift toward accepting the widespread adoption of AI as inevitable. As much as some don’t want to admit it, the culture of instant gratification is only flourishing, and AI plays huge role in this. People start to worry less about how machines get their information and gladly accept the convenience provided by them.

As the AI-first approach is changing the technological landscape, resetting the course of digital transformation and heightening the demands, more AI-related changes in the travel and hospitality industry are soon to follow.