Katie King • November 21, 2022
After a challenging few years, travel is back on the agenda for nearly all major destinations worldwide. While this comes as good news for travellers who have been grounded for far too long and for economies that depend on the capital that tourism and hospitality bring, it does put some pressure on businesses in the industry.
According to the World Travel & Tourism Council, before the pandemic Travel & Tourism’s direct and indirect impacts accounted for 1 in 4 of all new jobs created across the world, 10.3% of all jobs (333 million), and 10.3% of global GDP ($9.6 trillion USD). Global lockdowns and travel bans majorly impacted the industry, with the number of jobs falling from 333 million to 271 million. While the industry managed to recover slightly in 2021, 2022 has presented its own set of challenges.
While guests and passengers enthusiastically returned to travel, staff did not. During the peak of travel season, we saw flights cancelled, chaotic airport queues, and baggage piled up due to staff shortages. But the troubles don’t stop at the airport. Hotels, bars, restaurants, and entertainment venues have all faced their own staffing shortages. Competition for talent is fierce and these shortages cause disruption. For businesses still working to recover the capital they lost during the pandemic, this is a particularly difficult hurdle.
These challenges also pose a threat to guests and customers’ overall experience. Some guests may be understanding about understaffing or any resulting hiccups, but their overall expectations have changed. Managing these expectations is a challenge for travel and tourism in normal circumstances. Meeting—or exceeding—these expectations with limited resources adds another layer entirely.
AI is an incredibly powerful tool for helping businesses overcome their hurdles to gain a competitive edge, and organisations around the world seem to agree. In IBM’s Global AI Adoption Index 2022, 35% of companies reported using AI in their business and organisations are 13% more likely to have adopted AI in 2022 than in 2021. An additional 42% of companies reported that they are exploring AI. However, travel was ranked as one of the industries which is adopting the least.
Does that mean AI has nothing to offer hospitality, tourism, and travel? Absolutely not. In fact, quite the opposite. Here are some of AI’s top use cases across tourism, travel, and hospitality that may be exactly what businesses in these industries need to overcome to get ahead:
Chatbots and Virtual Assistants
Chatbots are one of the most popular forms of AI used in Travel and Tourism today, and for good reason. These solutions are easy to adopt yet effective and can be massively helpful for improving customer experience with little to no human intervention. These tools have also improved in recent years thanks to advancements in natural language processing (NLP).
Most airlines, hotel chains, travel agencies, and booking providers employ this technology in their business to help with tasks such as answering questions, providing personalised recommendations, sharing important updates related to the customer’s itinerary, cross selling relevant products (i.e., rental cars and experiences), making reservations, and more. AskSuite is one such tool and is already in use by over 2,000 hotels. Their AI-powered assistant provides an automated service on desktop and mobile websites, social media, and WhatsApp that can answer relevant questions and help guests any time of day. In room, SuitePad’s smart tablet devices engage guests through personalised push notifications, the ability to answer their queries, and booking capabilities.
In addition to creating their own bots, many hoteliers and airlines have partnered up with two of the most well-recognised and most used Virtual Assistants on the market: Alexa, Cortana, and Siri. SONIFI is the largest in-room technology provider in hospitality and is used by top global hotel chains including Hilton, Marriott International, IHG, Hyatt, Wyndham, and Radisson. Their interactive solutions and smart room technology is what powers many of the Alexa and Google devices which guests interact with to control their environment, receive recommendations and make in-room purchases. US-based carrier United Airlines offers an app on Amazon’s Echo that allows travellers to book flights and check in. Before heading off to the airport, passengers transiting through Heathrow can ask their Alexa for an update on their flight status.
With many reliable vendors already in this space, the barrier to entry is low for businesses in these industries looking to integrate these smart assistants into their website, social media, or mobile apps.
Robot Staff
Virtual Assistants aren’t the only ‘bots’ making their way into hotels, airports, bars, and restaurants. Many are introducing physical robots as part of their teams.
Relay Robotics is the top provider in this space, and their robot butlers are already in use by IHG Hotels, Marriott, Hilton, Wyndham, Mandarin Oriental, Millennium Hotels and Resorts, Hyatt, and various independent hotel brands. These automated butlers can deliver room service and other items to guest rooms, assist with housekeeping, and alleviate pressure on restaurant wait staff. Similar robots created by CTRL Robotics are in use at Hotel Sky in the Sandton district of Johannesburg, South Africa. The hotel employs 3 robot concierges named Lexi, Micah and Ariel that can deliver room service, provide travel information, and can drag up to 300kg of luggage from the lobby to guests’ rooms.
These bots are helping handle hospitality’s staffing shortages as well. Cecilia.AI is a robotic bartender that mixes and serves cocktails and uses artificial intelligence to talk to customers, while F&P Robotics’ Barney bartender can mix dozens of cocktails, disinfect itself, and even tell jokes. Italy’s Makr Shakr offers two bartending bots that have been installed on nine Royal Caribbean cruise ships. Nala Robotics has developed three fully automated chef robots, capable of making hundreds of different dishes from various cuisines. Their proprietary AI chef hardware and software can adapt and create dishes precisely as customers request them, ensuring their food is customised to their preferences and dietary requirements.
However, this doesn’t always work out, as demonstrated by Japan’s Henn’Na Hotel, which I featured in my first book. The innovative hotel was fully staffed by robots when it opened in 2015, but in 2019, it cut its 243-robot workforce in half after the experience failed to reduce costs or workload for its employees. The failure stemmed from the robot's inability to deliver on basic functions, signalling that the algorithms were not adequately trained. Some robots were retained in the areas where they proved effective, and today humans and robots work hand-in-hand at Henn’Na.
If trained correctly, these bots have major potential to help alleviate some of the pressures on human staff across tourism and hospitality.
Management and Operations
Beyond introducing robot staff, tourism and hospitality businesses can help lighten the load of human staff and maximise their effectiveness. AI can assist with various time-consuming activities such as booking management, marketing, and property management.
Siteminder is the industry’s leading service provider for this, offering tools that enable hospitality businesses to sell across platforms, market their properties, access real-time insights, manage bookings and guests, keep track of payments, and more. Actabl’s ALICE platform helps connects all departments of a hotel to improve their communications and help save time. The full ALICE suite includes tools for front of house, housekeeping, maintenance, service delivery, and guest relations. These tools help to maximise the effectiveness of understaffed teams and provide real-time insights into what’s happening on the property.
Businesses in the travel industry are turning to AI to streamline their operations and maximise their resources, especially airlines and airports. For example, the Netherlands’ Eindhoven Airport is currently undergoing a pilot programme through 2023 using an AI system called BagsID to streamline the process of moving and tracking passengers’ luggage. Instead of using physical bag tags or RFID, travellers upload a photo of their baggage through a BagsID-connected app, which automatically links the bag to their flight information for easy check in, tracking and pick up. When travel resumed amid the pandemic, Etihad Airways used AI and automation to screen passengers for any visible symptoms of coronavirus to prevent any potential transmission on board their flights. Delta Airlines developed and built a full-scale digital simulation of its operations, which an AI system uses to suggest ways pilots can manoeuvre the aircraft during bad weather to cause the least disruption to passengers onboard. Air France uses AI to analyse flight data to assess fuel efficiency of journeys and reduce emissions, and British Airways uses AI to improve its operational efficiency and maintenance, and to predict on board food uptake.
While technology may not cure tourism and hospitality’s woes overnight, it can help to alleviate some of the pressures on understaffed teams without sacrificing guest experience. The examples here are just a few of the ways in which the travel, tourism, and hospitality industries can benefit from the use of AI, and it is likely that these use cases will expand as more businesses adopt.
If you’d like some more examples from tourism as well as other industries such as manufacturing or retail, check out AI Strategy for Sales and Marketing.
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