Generative AI Poised to Reboot Travel Marketing

25.08.2023 - 14:39 / skift.com / Justin Dawes / Sam Altman / Elon Musk / Generative Ai

Imagine being able to create travel marketing campaigns, social media posts, and television ads in a matter of seconds with the click of a button. 

That is exactly where the travel marketing industry is headed, and soon, as the latest developments in artificial intelligence (AI) prove that computers can encroach into something that has been seen as distinctly human: creativity. 

Computers creating market campaigns and assets is just the first step. Experts believe that one day, travelers could walk through an airport or fly in an airplane designed by AI.

The specific subset is called generative AI. While AI historically has been about using existing datasets to draw conclusions and make predictions, this is a fundamentally new development that can generate a new, unique product based on specific rules it’s given. 

“This is what has set the world on fire in 2022 because it feels as though AI now is encroaching on something we felt was uniquely human and was never going to be touched by machine intelligence, which is creativity. The ability to create. That is something fundamentally new,” said analyst and author David Mattin in a Skift podcast episode in December. Mattin has been diving into generative AI in his tech and trends newsletter New World Same Humans.

The global generative AI market was worth $7.9 billion in 2021 and is projected to reach $110.8 billion by 2030, according to a report in late 2022 by India-based Acumen Research and Consulting. 

Talk of this phenomenon has blown up just in the past couple of years, particularly in late 2022 when the company OpenAI released a chatbot, ChatGPT, powered by the latest available generative AI technology. OpenAI is a San Francisco-based AI research lab founded in 2015 with $1 billion from former Y Combinator president Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and others. Microsoft invested $1 billion in the company in 2019. 

The chatbot itself, when prompted, said generative AI has a number of implications in the travel industry: personalized travel recommendations and itineraries, virtual simulated tours of real-life places, improvement of travel-related search engine results, and generating content for travel websites. 

In travel marketing, it could generate personalized advertisements, predict customer behavior to inform the best marketing strategies for targeted demographics, and provide personalized customer service. 

Marketing agencies are experimenting now with AI software platforms dedicated to generating marketing copy and marketing campaign ideas, as well as marketing campaign assets and images. Google is working on its own technology that uses text prompts to generate art and video as well as edit images. Ultimately, innovators want to be able to generate a