The “connected trip” has become a bit of a tired buzzword, but the ability to bundle different trip elements is not less coveted in the travel space.
During an interview in the PhocusWire studio at The Phocuswright Conference last month, Manuel Hilty, CEO and co-founder of Nezasa,
and Andrew Boch, CEO of Mobi.AI, discussed the end-to-end traveler journey and the gaps that remain.
While some think of the connected trip as being “top-down,” Boch highlighted Mobi.AI’s context-aware approach to artificial intelligence (AI).
“We think that, when you’re changing your flight, that should be aware of what your hotel plans were, and it should be aware of what the purpose of your trip was. Like when you’re staying at a hotel, the hotel should know why you’re there,” Boch said.
“That sort of context should be preserved throughout the travel experience, and fundamentally, all the downstream suppliers need some method of both understanding that context, ingesting that context and then, hopefully, acting on that context.”
When asked about personalization and the leveled-up hyper-personalization, Hilty said that customization might be a more ideal focus point.
“When I travel, I could travel alone, I could travel with my wife, with the whole family, with friends—it's always a different setting—and each time, there is something else to know or maybe I want to do something completely different or I want to stay
within my habits,” he said.
“So maybe I also just need a way to express what I’m looking for and then a system that actually surfaces me something that corresponds to what I just said. And maybe I don’t even have to store my preferences with a system. I just need a way to easily
formulate what I want now.”
The pair also commented on generational differences in data sharing, AI’s impact, agentic opportunity and more.
Watch or listen to the full conversation with PhocusWire’s Linda Fox below.
Evolution in trip planning and personalization