What seems straight out of Hollywood – a 100% AI-driven flight travel assistant that “talks” to users in real time – is actually a real-life product called TARA that helps people change their travel plans if needed without having to talk to an actual person.
Presented by Rajnish Kumar, the CTO of ixigo, at the Launch during last week’s Phocuswright Conference, TARA is touted as a “fast, hyper-personalized, unbiased and available 24/7” travel agent of the future. Its premise is simple: provide real-time support to people in their native language (a challenge with offshore customer service) and have all of the travelers’ information at its virtual fingertips.
Such, then, indicates the rise of the digital assistants – which use AI to not only “learn” about the end user, but also to store information and deploy it as necessary – in the travel experience, which is all a part of a greater industry-wide trend that suggests that today’s traveler is much more comfortable with artificial intelligence, and sacrificing privacy for a greater travel experience, than in previous years.
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But digital assistants are nothing new in the travel industry. Earlier this year, KLM Airlines began deploying digital assistants – specifically, through Facebook Messenger – to allow passengers to request boarding passes without having to “talk” to a real customer service representative. This, then, allowed the KLM customer service representatives to be freed up to handle more complex processes, such as load control and flight delay issues.
And it’s not just airlines that have deployed the use of digital assistants. Metasearch engine Kayak has deployed Amazon’s Alexa – which uses voice-activation – to offer hotel search and book functions.
For its part, the hotel industry is also doing beta testing on digital assistants: Marriott has begun testing out general-use assistants, and – following in the trend of TARA – other hotels have begun using signature, proprietary digital assistants. Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas recently unveiled its new AI concierge, “Rose,” which – like TARA – is available 24/7 and offers guest experience improvements. Edwardian Hotels has launched its chatbot, “Edward,” and Hilton Worldwide teamed up with IBM to develop their AI-based hotel concierge, “Connie.”
At this point, digital assistants aren’t posing a direct threat to the need for “human” assistants; however, having a digital assistant handle the more “basic” functions in the travel industry – such as getting a boarding pass, checking out of a hotel room, and (in the case of TARA), changing a flight – certainly provides an efficiency improvement.