AI and Travel: Year 1 Hype, the Reality of What’s Next

13.01.2024 - 15:19 / skift.com / Rafat Ali

It’s been just over a year since ChatGPT launched, and everyone gets that artificial intelligence will have a huge impact on businesses in every industry, including travel. Less clear is the timeline and where the changes will hit most.

Skift founder and CEO Rafat Ali joined entrepreneur and author Andrew Keen for the Keen On podcast to share his outlook. Here are highlights from his conversation. Listen to the full podcast here.

Ali: It’s been a little over a year since ChatGPT launched. As you know, since you’ve covered all these tech cycles for decades as much as I have, initial promise comes out — “it will change everything” — there’s a pullback, and then the reality of actual changes happen.

I feel like in AI, we are in that phase — only more exponential. And so yes, a lot of things will change.

The back-end processes that drive so (many) industries and sectors and the world. I feel like that’s where the real effect of AI will be.

I just don’t know if AI will change everything on the front end.

Chatbots are certainly the easiest, lowest-hanging fruit that everybody’s looking at. But the travel industry is just a gargantuan industry. And there’s so much friction, and so much human input in it. Travel is probably one of the world’s largest employers of people — just because there’s so many people that are required to deliver different parts of the ecosystem.

So I feel like that’s where a lot of the effect will be versus just a friend and chatbot type of business.

Ali: [The] search box has been there exactly as it is for the last 25 years.

Which seems very counterintuitive to, in general, how technology progresses, where there’s new ways of accessing information, booking, etc…You can only search in very specific ways because that’s what these boxes are. And so in 2015, I wrote this term called the tyranny of the travel search box. You are trapped into that search box. There’s only X number of ways you can search. And to break out of that tyranny of (the) search box, this was the first phase of Alexa and voice messaging apps coming. And the hope was that would take off.

It really didn’t take off, and this is the next iteration of how I’m thinking about this, which is: The interface that we’re so used to for the last 20, 25 years, if that becomes either a hybrid conversation plus this directed search…then what would travel search and booking look like? So I think, from a conceptual perspective, that’s what got me excited in the first place. 

Why am I not impressed so far? I think the thing we’re missing is that the burden of changing the interface can’t solely be put on the travel industry. If larger search interface changes – Google, Bing – if that changes in a radical way, only then can we