Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to add even more value and ease to the travel process and experience. But do travel companies have enough money to take advantage of new trends and how could these new technologies actually play out in real life situations? BTiQ spoke to Ian Richardson, co-founder at ICE Technology Services ahead of Travel Technology Europe, which you can enter with a Business Travel Show pass 21-22 February.
ICE doesn't just work with travel companies. How does the industry's technology compare to others?
There are some parallels between the healthcare and travel sectors as both are about the customer journey. The way the systems are created and integrated is similar too. Travel is ahead in terms of customer journey but healthcare is forward in integration as the processes is more standardised. Travel just doesn't have that maturity.
Retail is definitely in front on AI; the level of big data through loyalty programmes means they were early adopters.
Why has travel been a little slower to adopt this new technology?
From an integration point of view it's the lack of standards. Also over the years there has been a lack of funding for technology and it's only now with increasing digitalisation that it is getting attention at board level.
So what's the biggest request you're currently getting from travel companies?
GDPR is a big focus. AI is big but many are trying to get their data sorted and see what is compliant. But doing so will lay the foundations to use AI because AI projects have to be built on a good data structure. If data is organised it will make it easier and more cost effective to create AI projects; a lot of them fail because people spend too long sorting out data.
What are you seeing in terms of AI?
There's a lot of investment going into voice devices — virtual personal assistants (VPAs) and natural language processing. There are two ways that travel companies approach AI.
- How AI and travel can improve the customer experience — at the moment so much data is unstructured (80%) and mostly online data like tweets, blogs etc that's held in legacy technology. There are so many free text fields where travel agents are putting any text in [that is hard to sort]. With AI you can start to make sense of it eg reviews, social, and it provides a sentiment analysis. That way, businesses know what customers are saying about a brand or experience. It means fewer surveys as they can process the thoughts in real time, see the problems and get the temperature of what people are thinking or saying.
- To make the interaction more conversational with machines; building personalities instead of bots. By 2020 25% of customer service will be via conversational agent and by 2022 people will have an average four VPAs they will turn to for advice. Travel needs to prepare for this; to handle search by speech because of devices like Alexa.
In enterprises I can see VPAs being adopted heavily to drive operational costs and automate services; more business users are communicating with AI.
What other technologies are interesting to travel companies?
Emotional recognition is gaining traction: being able to read a crowd's face and gain insight into emotion-based thought. It can gauge the mood and count the crowd by ages, sex etc. It doesn't store images or information, just looks. The algorithms still need work as currently it needs the ethnic origin before understanding how they show emotions. We will be showcasing this technology at TTE by scanning the crowd to see how they are feeling.
Another major focus is virtual reality (VR) and especially augmented reality (AR). AR is great for travel companies to use for training or customer try-outs. But AR in the destination itself is mobile focused — it's about good content and programming for guided tours or overlays of historical buildings etc. Through this technology you can start to personalise what each traveller sees.
However, a lot of AR is currently based on trigger points where you have to scan or do a particular action for it to work. As this technology matures you'll be able to just look at something to trigger the AR. You could then fuse the facial recognition with AI to adapt a tour to whether they're enjoying it or not, which means AR could solve over-crowding issues and how people move around a city.