This is how AI will make our holidays better
Opinion
AI is capable of data-crunching on a colossal scale to identify patterns and anticipate demand. Imagine this scaled across entire transport infrastructures, reducing delays, cutting wait times and smoothing the movement of people.
While the marketing community continues to be excited about AI’s ability to enhance creativity and gain deeper insight into the consumer, candidly, AI’s impact on marketing means less to those outside our industry bubble.
Here’s the reality: the general public is largely unaware of AI’s advantages, even at a broader level. One study has even estimated that 64% of Americans did not know they were using AI in products they relied on daily.
The reason behind this lack of awareness is simply that, when it comes to AI, customers don’t want technical spec or sci-fi verbiage, but straight answers to fundamental questions.
Namely:
• Does it make product or service recommendations that are actually practical or useful?
• Will it make things quicker, slicker and more seamless?
• Will issues or challenges be addressed and solved immediately?
That’s the true test. Or to put it another way: they care not for the thrust output of the jet engine, only that the plane lands on time.
This is an appropriate analogy because, notably, there’s one sector where AI has the potential to transform an entire industry for consumers by relieving pressure points, increasing seamlessness and decreasing friction.
It’s travel and tourism.
Five evolutions in the travel industry
In OMG Futures’ latest report, Destination AI: How Artificial Intelligence Will Impact the Travel Industry, we have documented five AI-led evolutions changing the travel and tourism industry. They are:
• Refined recommendations: where AI decodes even the subtlest traveller desires
• Personalised planning: where AI assembles and adapts entire travel itineraries on the fly
• Supercharged services: where avatars, ambient assistants and real-time translation empower human teams
• Optimised operations: where AI smooths queues and predicts demand
• Maximised marketing: where AI mines deep-linked consumer signals to make hyper-relevant creative
Then there’s emerging tech such as virtual travel agents that “playlist” elements of your vacation, real-time language translation via wearables and profoundly connected decision-making that gets us to the absolute heart of a traveller’s desires.
For now, I want to concentrate on just one of the five evolutions: optimised operations.
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Making things work better
For the everyday traveller and holidaymaker, the idea of optimised operations is a great example of how AI could make things just magically “work better”, without drawing attention to itself. In this case, its invisibility is its advantage.
Here are some examples. We’re now seeing AI deployed to manage flows of people and reduce crowds at theme park rides. We know it’s being used to predict engineering malfunctions and maintain spare parts inventories. It’s also positioning and repositioning fleets of vehicles to reduce carbon emissions, as well as forecasting extreme weather events.
This is all essentially the same thing: data-crunching on a colossal scale for identifying patterns, anticipating demand, spotting linkages. The output is a form of “digital grease” that makes the travel engine run at maximum efficiency.
To illustrate further, Uber processes millions of arrival predictions per minute, using spatial-indexing and deep neural networks — a platform it calls DeepETA — to pair drivers and riders efficiently.
Elsewhere, Gatwick Airport’s partnership with tech firm Veovo gives real-time predictions of wait times in security, enabling on-the-fly resource allocation to cut congestion during peak hours.
Imagine this principle scaled across entire transport infrastructures of nations: reducing delays, cutting wait times and smoothing the movement of people.
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Building brand frictionlessness
In the future, I think we can expect more of this. You will experience AI’s impact on your trip not just as a turbocharged layer of customer service but also in the very optimisation of your movement through physical space.
Most importantly, this is a fantastic opportunity for brands. Now, they can fashion solutions for travellers that pivot on real-time changes — and then communicate those solutions in rapidly updated, dynamic creative messages.
For instance, if the security queue is projected to exceed 20 minutes, automatically push a “fast-track upgrade” offer.
Or when the local weather suddenly predicts rain, trigger an indoor experience from a partner supplier at a nearby attraction.
Or when traffic along the route to the theme park is building, push a “Next Gen Fast Pass” to help skip queues for rides once you’ve arrived.
Communicating this AI-led frictionlessness could become a central part of a brand’s narrative: faster, easier, more relaxing holidays. In delivering that lies one of the best forms of marketing: the happy customer.
Beyond raw travel logistics, with many major travel companies — from ecommerce sites to airline groups to hotel chains — announcing the integration of AI into their services, we may be about to witness the transformation of an industry from search bar to sun lounger.
This journey has only just begun.
Phil Rowley is head of futures at Omnicom Media Group UK and author of Hit the Switch: The Future of Sustainable Business. He writes for The Media Leader about the future of media