Report From the Global Travel Tech Thinktank at WiT Singapore 2023
The first Global Travel Tech Thinktank, held by WiT, Phocuswright and Phocuswire, in 2022, covered the theme of “How To Future Proof Travel: Resilience, Responsibility, Respect”.
A direct outcome of that Thinktank was the launch of the WiT Travel Changemakers Awards in 2023 to recognise travel industry players who have built back better in line with recommendations raised at the Thinktank – five categories were recognised: environment awareness, local community engagement, hidden gems, generative tourism and diversity and inclusion.
The second Global Travel Tech Thinktank, held as part of WiT Singapore 2023, gathered close to 60 key industry leaders from around the world to brainstorm the way forward for travel in the age of AI and tech.
Its purpose was to brainstorm ideas under the umbrella theme of “The Possibilities & Responsibilities of Travel In The Age of AI and Tech”.
Executive Summary
The Thinktank identified 9 main possibilities and corresponding hazards of generative AI for the travel industry, as well as the responsibilities and recommendations for various stakeholders to address them. These are:
- Addressing over tourism: Generative AI could help to incentivize adjacent tourism spots, disincentivize poor usage, and use tech to decongest crowded destinations, but it could also raise privacy, bias, and algorithmic issues.
- Pricing and load optimization: Generative AI could enable personalized pricing, optimal supply and demand match, sustainable computation, better forecast, asset utilization, upsell/ancillaries, and process optimization, but it could also face regulatory, data, competitive, and irrational pricing challenges.
- Use in talent: Generative AI could enhance the industry’s productivity, efficiency, and creativity, but it could also lead to job displacement, skill gap, and talent retention issues.
- Empowering the long tail: Generative AI could facilitate the discovery, curation, digitization, training, and feedback of micro service providers, but it could also encounter challenges in data quality, consistency, incentives, and privacy.
- Turbocharging product innovation: Generative AI could automate and accelerate large parts of design, coding, testing, and marketing processes, allowing for more experimentation and differentiation, but it could also generate spam, bias, and unsustainable outcomes.
- Deep personalization: Generative AI could enable targeted travel recommendations, minimize fraud, streamline payments, and create customer stickiness, but it could also raise questions on data ownership, privacy, and transparency.
- Building the connected trip: Generative AI could integrate and consolidate trip data, provide virtual concierge, match trip history and preferences, and manage disruption and communication, but it could also require a universal travel ID, data validation, and customer trust.
- Inclusivity: Generative AI could improve the accessibility and experience of travel for people with disabilities, by crowdsourcing and validating inclusive data, and meeting sustainability and ESG goals, but it could also depend on the endorsement and participation of customers, local governments, telcos, DMOs, platforms, and hotels.
- Predictions on anything and everything: Generative AI could enhance common and new predictive elements of travel, such as future rates, optimal times to book, best products or experiences, fraud or fake detection, but it could also be affected by natural disasters, market volatility, and incomplete data.
For the full report, download here.
