AI in Travel Became Very Real This Weekend

If you’re a game-enthusiast, you should continue reading to find out some of the best destinations you should visit when you travel to Canada.

No, you weren’t just imagining your social media timelines full of all your friends posting from Istanbul and Turkey this summer. It happened to be true.

The first tremors of economic slowdown are beginning to be felt in the travel industry: even though Disney Parks had a record quarter, the overall parent company had a disappointing quarter in its other businesses and is now planning a hiring freeze, job cuts and other expense cuts. As part of that, CNBC reports that in a memo sent by Disney CEO Bob Chapek today, the company is cutting back on business travel as well as travel for events and internal meetings.

Something shifted in the last two weeks on the zeitgeist about the use of artificial intelligence in our daily personal and professional lives.

Good morning from Skift. Somehow it’s already Friday, January 20. Here’s what you need to know about the business of travel today.

Dubai will play an outsized role in the United Arab Emirates aim to attract 40 million visitors annually by 2031, so what can it do to improve its tourism industry? Four panelists — Dubai Airports CEO Paul Griffiths, Kerzner International CEO Philippe Zuber, Emirates Airline Chief Commercial Officer Adnan Kazim, and Dubai Corporation for Tourism and Commerce Marketing CEO Issam Kazim — discussed at the recent Skift Global Forum East in Dubai what local tourism officials need to do to continue to attract visitors.

It gets harder and harder with each year to put a label on the kinds of travel that Skifters love the most. We hired a bunch of new people last year and, as you will see, that has meant we are dreaming much bigger.

The annual Global Risks Report, from the World Economic Forum, is here as Davos starts, and this summary chart below of top 10 short-term and long-term risks is fascinating, almost all of them have direct implications in travel, for many of these the travel industry is, in some part, one of the underlying causes of these risks. Read or download the full report here.

India is projected to surpass China as the world’s most populous country later this year, as China begins to decline and India’s population growth shows no sign of slowing until 2064. That shift carries huge implications for travel across the globe, and has the potential to rewire the race for attracting global tourists around the world. Skift addressed this in its Megatrends 2023 package in the story India Becoming the New China in the Reordering of Asia Travel.

The Microsoft-owned also-ran search engine Bing has relaunched around conversational chatbot technology powered by ChatGPT, the new sensation owned by OpenAI. In an event today, the CEOs of Microsoft and OpenAI gave a demo of the new Bing, and it will be open to all in coming days. The refreshed Bing provides a chatbox with annotated AI answers — powered by ChatGPT– to the right side of traditional search results. 

The boom of conversational AI is making so many new possibilities dreamt of for decades finally possible. The technology today is 100 percent there, what matters is whether, or when, large companies will adopt it for product development.

Ever since the launch of ChatGPT in late November, Skift has been on top of what this new generation of generative AI could bring to various parts of travel.