When it comes to the Travel and tourism industry, technology has played an impactful role in how people plan and go for trips. Travel is increasingly shifting more towards experience, than just going from one place to another. If you look at the entire travel cycle — ‘Inspire’ > ‘Shop’ > ‘Book’ > ‘Pre-Trip’ > ‘On-Trip’ > ‘Post-Trip’, technology has been playing the major role in each phase and its impact keeps on increasing as the new generation continues to become more tech-savvy.

Starting from chatbots helping with ‘Search’, natural language processing (NLP) helping to ‘Shop’, machine learning (ML) changing the way we ‘Buy’, facial recognition changing the way we ‘Transit’, personalisation giving leaps and bounds to a traveller’s experience and AI-driven analytics improving travel services — the synergy of all these elements show that the presence of advanced technology is felt everywhere.

With the rising influence of travel bloggers, social media has become the research ground for a traveller. Also, travel and tourism have a wide range of related industries, e.g., hotel and lodging, food and beverage industry, transportation, the industry dealing with real estate, finance, leasing, and insurance. All of this coexists in a well-knitted ecosystem and all of these have grown tremendously with technology over time.

Let’s look at a few modern technology trends that are impacting the travel industry significantly:

Travel apps: Just like any other industry, apps are making the traveller’s life easier. Transport booking, accommodation booking, navigation/geo-tracking services, social (trip reviews/messaging services/social feed etc.) and banking & payment Integration – all such facets of travel are at your fingertips, thanks to modern travel apps.

AI chatbots: Be it a booking process or faster customer service response time, AI chatbots help immensely with 24×7 customer support, multilingual support, personalised recommendations, immediate customer care response, and many more.

Voice tech: Voice search is on the rise to find and book airline tickets, hotel rooms, and travel experiences. On the other hand, integration of improved voice recognition into the travel agency business improves the whole customer lifecycle experience dramatically where an agent is able to interact with diverse and multi-cultural customers. Read More

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This article by Sanjeeb Patel was published in ABPLive.com