--- title: How AI Could Transform Travel–and How to Take Advantage of It description: In recent months, artificial intelligence, and how it stands to change daily life, has been at the center of public conversation. The travel industry is no exception. canonical: https://time.com/6290940/ai-travel-industry/ author: Simmone Shah article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2023-07-05T11:00:04.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T08:05:49.977Z og:title: How AI Could Transform Travel–and How to Take Advantage of It og:description: A third of travelers say they would use ChatGPT to plan their vacation. og:url: https://time.com/6290940/ai-travel-industry/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blta35677376ff500cc/698a3e3e47ca3887953bae81/travel-ai-help-01.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 2400 og:image:height: 1350 og:image:alt: travel-ai-help-01 og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: How AI Could Transform Travel–and How to Take Advantage of It twitter:description: A third of travelers say they would use ChatGPT to plan their vacation. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blta35677376ff500cc/698a3e3e47ca3887953bae81/travel-ai-help-01.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # How AI Could Transform Travel—and How to Take Advantage of It > Sponsored content. 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Find out why OpenAI was selected for the list_  by [Simmone Shah](https://time.com/author/simmone-shah/)  ## Simmone Shah Reporter Jul 5, 2023 11:00 AM UTC  Getty Images  by [Simmone Shah](https://time.com/author/simmone-shah/)  ## Simmone Shah Reporter Jul 5, 2023 11:00 AM UTC When Celia Quillian began planning her first trip since the pandemic in mid-March, she had a few criteria as she searched for the right destination— temperate weather in spring, not crowded with tourists, and within the U.S. With all that in mind, Quillian, who lives in Atlanta, G.A., decided to try something new and plugged her wish list into ChatGPT. “I asked it to give me ten recommendations, just to see what it could do,” Quillian said. The AI chatbot recommended several locations that fit the bill– including Puerto Rico, Charleston, S.C. and Palm Springs, Calif. Quillian, 31**,** had been to a few of the destinations before and knew they fit the description of what she had asked for. “I was like okay, this thing is definitely working.” She chose Puerto Rico and then used the chatbot to create a seven-day itinerary for her trip for the following month, prompting it to create a table describing potential activities and breaking them down by distance and cost. “It took me an evening to plan the trip versus weeks of research,” says Quillian, who shared her planning experience in a video that she says received over [2 million views](https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cqsj12erkts/?igshid=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ==) on Instagram. Quillian is a product marketing manager who created the social media account, @smartworkAI, aimed at teaching people creative ways to use AI programs. ChatGPT allows people to tailor their vacations based on who they’re traveling with or what activities they’re interested in—sourcing everything from activities for kids, to a list of top-rated coffee shops, says Frederic Gonzalo, a marketing consultant who specializes in the use of new technologies in travel. “Before ChatGPT and other \[generative AI\] tools, you’d have 50 people do the same 50 searches for a weekend in New York, and everyone would get the same results,” says Gonzalo. “Now it’s really going into this hyper-personalization and getting content adapted to everyone’s reality.” --- ### More from TIME --- In recent months, artificial intelligence, and how it stands to change daily life, has been at the center of public conversation. The travel industry is no exception—a third of travelers say they would use ChatGPT to plan their vacation, according to a tracking study by [Longwoods International](https://longwoods-intl.com/covid-19). Major companies are also beginning to use AI technology to provide destination suggestions to customers and streamline the booking process. **Travel Companies Utilizing AI** Major travel companies are getting in on the action. In April, Expedia launched a travel planner in their app powered by ChatGPT that recommends places to go and stay based on the conversations people have in the chat, and saves hotels mentioned during the chat for easy booking. [Expedia also launched its own plugin for ChatGPT](https://www.expediagroup.com/investors/news-and-events/financial-releases/news/news-details/2023/Chatgpt-Wrote-This-Press-Release--No-It-Didnt-But-It-Can-Now-Assist-With-Travel-Planning-In-The-Expedia-App/default.aspx) so travelers can start a conversation on the ChatGPT site and then select the Expedia plugin, which directs travelers to the company’s website to book the discussed trip. Other companies are interested in following suit. [Priceline](https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/06/priceline-signs-on-with-google-cloud-for-ai-to-help-travel-booking.html), [AirBnB](https://skift.com/2023/05/03/interview-airbnb-ceo-on-how-its-service-will-radically-change-with-ai-by-next-year/), and [Bookings.com](https://skift.com/2023/03/03/booking-com-is-wait-and-see-on-generative-ai/) have all signaled their interest in using AI to improve customer service or help plan trips as well. And while AI is already in use in the travel industry, as machine learning is often used to predict customer behavior or provide more personalized recommendations, Gonzolo says that conversational AI tools might soon make customer service operations more sophisticated. “Chatbots on websites are really dry, and if you don’t answer the three or four preempted questions that are there, you’re sort of on your own,” he says. “So I think we’ll see much more sophisticated customer service tools that will be integrated on websites.” **Could AI Replace Travel Agents?** For now, Gonzalo says the AI’s tool’s main strength lies in helping travelers plan their trip or find activities at their destination, but it is not yet sophisticated enough to help with things like booking a flight, which is where a travel agent may still come in for some. And for others, the value of human connection or the fun in the process of planning traveling is important, says Erika Richter, VP of Communications & Marketing at the American Society of Travel Advisors. “If you want a top 10 list of things to do or places to stay, it can spit out those answers for you. But can it tell you which of those experiences are actually authentic?” Richter says. Though some have been quick to turn to ChatGPT for travel recommendations, Richter notes that travel agents are still in high demand. “Almost 30% of our travel advisors are saying that over half of their clients are working with a travel advisor for the first time,” she says. “Travel is becoming more complicated. People are wanting that personal touch.” Richter thinks that AI will help automate simple bookings, like a trip home or business travel. “To that end, I think that it might make it faster and easier for those one-off bookings,” Richter says. For travelers simply looking to get recommendations, Gonzalo also cautions against over-reliance on AI, which might be programmed using old information. (ChatGPT, for example, still has [limited knowledge](https://help.openai.com/en/articles/6783457-what-is-chatgpt) of data after 2021.) Users run the risk of being directed to a restaurant that’s out of business or an attraction that’s closed. Quillian says that the tool remains useful because a city’s offerings don’t change much. “Sometimes \[a city\] will have something going on in the moment, but most of the time, the destinations and the attractions stay the same.” Quillian adds that specificity was key to getting the tool to provide unique ideas. “If you’re looking for ‘tourist destinations in Puerto Rico’, it’s probably going to give you a similar assortment of things that you would get searching on Google,” she says. “But if you say ‘I’m trying to find some off the beaten path or hidden gems within the city that most people most tourists don’t visit’, it’ll probably be able to give you that too.” Quillian found herself relying on the program throughout the trip, whether it was to help identify wildlife or better understand the local dishes on a restaurant’s menu. “I speak to it like a friend or like an assistant,” she says. “It’s my own pocket travel guide.” ## Transcript In a deep sense as the technology that the world society people have always wanted. So I can talk about this for a very long time. I think we can do a lot to really maximize to go to manage and mitigate the bad. But the scary part is just sort of putting this lever into the world will for sure have unpredictable consequences. Can't we think it's very important to our mission to deploy things like Chachi PT. So that people gain some experience of feeling of the capabilities and limitations of these systems. But as these models get to know you better and are able capable of more, you can really imagine a world where you have a fairly simple and short conversation with the model and a huge amount of things get on your behalf, pretty soon. I think we'll just expect all the products and services. We used to have some intelligence baked in, and it'll just kind of be expected like a mobile app is today. I think if this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong, and we want to be vocal about that. We want to work with the government to it, is our responsibility to educate policymakers and the public at large about what we think is happening. What we think may happen. Like we have in the future and to put technology out into the world so people can see it. liberation of deepening of societal inequalities. We have seen how algorithmic biases can perpetuate discrimination and Prejudice and how the lack of transparency can undermine public trust that voice was not mine. The words were not mine. And the audio was an AI voice cloning software trained on my floor speeches. The remarks were written by Kat gbt when it was asked how I would open this hearing with. So grown up in a world where we sort of trust someone's voice. We hear over the phone. This particular example, I think is going to be a problem and we need Society to adjust to it fast. So I think we just all need to start telling people. This is coming, you can't trust a voice to hear of the phone anymore in society is capable of adapting to his people are much smarter and savvier than I think a lot of the so-called experts Think. These systems are already quite powerful and will get tremendously powerful and we have come together as a global Community before 4 very powerful technologies, that pose a substantial risk, that one have to overcome to get to the tremendous upside. I think AI will contribute a lot to increase in the total amount of wealth in the world. However, it won't be sufficient on its own. And I still think we need much more public policy around. How we're going to divvy up access to these systems. How we're going to divvy up governance of these systems? That will be a matter for policy. Not the technology along with the effect that I have are going to be very different in the world than the effects that social media. And so I think it is difficult and dangerous to say, oh, it's going to play out like this. And I think of this like social media were going to think of this like nuclear weapons are not think of this like synthetic biology were think of this like, the iPhone. This is just a new thing and I think analogies from the past are going to particularly badly. 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