Tourism and hospitality companies have been somewhat skeptical of adopting AI in travel, as exploring new places is an inherently human-centric experience. But the sentiment is shifting.
Europe is and will be a fantastic place to invent new AI applications, especially for tourism. We are the first tourism destination of the world, so we are the one generating the largest, biggest amount of data in tourism on this planet.
Domestic and international travel is growing, and companies are looking for new ways to capitalize on this growth. AI appears to hold significant promise as a technology that can help the travel industry on this journey.
In this post, we analyze the scale of AI in travel and zoom in on benefits, commercial opportunities, and use cases by major brands.
Key benefits of AI in travel
AI models are much better than humans at analyzing data — and the travel industry has troves of data. Using algorithms for advanced data analytics, travel companies can reach more customers, elevate service levels, tap into new revenue channels, and increase operational efficiency.
Deeper customer insights
Machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) algorithms can trawl millions of data points in provided datasets to uncover correlations, trends, and similarities. This ability to quickly process massive amounts of data allows ML to enable advanced customer segmentation, sentiment analysis, and behavior forecasting.
Airbnb, an early and enthusiastic adopter of artificial intelligence and machine learning, uses AI for multiple purposes, including customer profiling. Analyzing data from social media and other sources, the accommodation marketplace gets a complete view of its customers. This results in greater safety for both hosts and visitors and helps to prevent fraud.
Better customer service
Thanks to natural language processing (NLP), ML algorithms can easily understand text-based commands and different contextual clues to better deal with incoming customer requests. At the most basic level, AI can help classify and prioritize customer support cases or look up relevant information for agents. More advanced AI use cases include end-to-end customer issue resolution and voice-based customer support.
Artificial intelligence in tourism can increase support staff productivity by 20% to 50%, or even more. Airlines like Cathay Pacific already handle 50% of their customer care chats with AI assistants, allowing human agents to focus on more complex cases.
New revenue channels
AI models are good for needle-in-the-haystack types of problems. By applying classification, regression, or inference, algorithms can locate new revenue-generating and/or cost-saving opportunities within a presented dataset. An average AI model can make over 100 million sales-related decisions each day.
Model outputs can vary from hyper-personalized cross-sells or upsells to dynamic price optimization. Finnair, for example, increased revenue by 3% by optimizing prices across 70 origin and destination (O&D) segments with AI.
Streamlined operations
Apart from supplying teams with business intelligence, algorithms can also handle low-value menial work, ranging from data entry and reconciliation to data modeling and reporting. When integrated with other travel technology — booking engines, property management systems, revenue management software — AI algorithms can also complete more complex workflows: automatically check in guests, design better route schedules, or optimize staffing levels based on demand trends.
citizenM, for example, uses Mist AI by Juniper — an intelligent IT operations and support platform — to streamline the deployment and provisioning of IT services across its portfolio of properties. Thanks to AI, the hotel’s team can create automated cloud workflows to support exceptional guest experiences, from guest self-checkout to in-room technology. With AI-driven IT infrastructure and network monitoring, citizenM can also have fewer technical staff on-site for troubleshooting.
Personalized travel experiences
Travel as such is a highly personal activity. Whether you are planning a dream holiday or just need to wind down from your work routine, you want your travel experience to be perfect for you. This is why cookie-cutter vacations don’t work in most cases. AI can be a great source of ideas and offer finely tailored recommendations based on analysis of volumes of data — booking histories, browsing behavior, social media activity, and so on.
Such advanced personalization resulted from the collaboration between Booking.com and OpenAI. The hotel aggregator and provider of advanced AI solutions joined forces to “meet customers earlier in the process, when they were still figuring out what they wanted,” as Adrienne Enggist, Senior Director of Product Marketplace at Booking.com, puts it. The solution enables fine filtering and natural language search, increasing the overall conversion rate.
Dynamic pricing optimization
In any business, finding the perfect balance between profitability and competitiveness is a true art. In the travel industry, this is especially true. Too many factors must be considered, as they may directly affect the prices of rooms, flights, or tours: seasonal demand, market trends, and weather conditions, to name a few. Moreover, competitor pricing, local events, and even specific users’ shopping habits can influence prices.
This is where AI’s superb computing and analytical capabilities can be handy. By processing and analyzing data from multiple sources, both historical and real-time, AI solutions help travel and tourism businesses fine-tune their pricing strategies.
Marriott International relies heavily on AI to build its pricing strategy. The hotel chain collects data from more than 80 sources, including data on real-time social media sentiment, flight schedules, geopolitical situations, and even air quality. This approach resulted in a 22% improvement in Marriott’s revenue per available room in 2025.
10 real-world use cases of AI in the travel industry, with examples from top brands
AI models may be great with analysis, but what can they know about real-world adventures? A lot, actually.
ChatGPT has turned out to be a capable travel agent. Whether you’re looking for things to do on a budget in Rome or a 10-day itinerary for a backpacking trip in Peru, ChatGPT will give you options. Thanks to plugins, travelers can also compare flights, research car rentals, and handle hotel bookings straight from ChatGPT.
28% of travelers said they would consider using AI-powered travel platforms to suggest destinations in 2025.
Current trends show that people actually trust GenAI travel recommendations. A Deloitte survey showed that as many as 43% of respondents booked accommodation suggested by AI tools, and 38% chose destinations that AI recommended.
Travelers considering recommendations by GenAI tools
But conversational AI in travel is just one use case. Almost every major player in the tourism and travel industry is sizing up the technology’s cross-functional potential and looking into implementing applications of AI in their operations.
Hotels
The hotel industry has many balls in the air: competition is rising, guests are becoming more demanding, operations are getting increasingly complex, and sustainability requirements must be reckoned with. AI is lending a hand to help hotels streamline operations and keep up with modern challenges.
AI-powered guest experiences
From pillow types to entertainment choices, AI can anticipate guests’ preferences down to the smallest detail. Based on previous stays and learning in real time, AI-powered smart hotels smoothen a guest’s journey from check-in to check-out, adjusting amenity settings, recommending dining options, and suggesting places to visit.
At Virgin Hotels, guests are greeted by Lucy — an in-app virtual assistant. Lucy functions as a contactless mobile key to access the room and can automatically adjust the lights, thermostat, and TV. It also allows guests to request room service or ask about any details regarding the stay.
Lucy is a capable concierge because it integrates directly with Virgin’s property management system (PMS), which contains data about guest bookings; a point of sale (POS) system used for managing food and beverage operations; a smart system for controlling every appliance in the room; and guest management software, which automatically generates checklists for staff based on guest requests. Thanks to such deep integrations, Lucy can perform a wide range of tasks across all Virgin properties and remember guest preferences for better personalization.
Process automation
Intelligent process automation (IPA) helps hotels offload manual and menial business processes, from payment reconciliation to shift planning and housekeeping management, to robots or software. Process automation benefits both guests and staff. Guests enjoy contactless check-in and check-out, avoiding lines at the reception while getting access to quick and efficient room service and support. Hotel personnel benefit through improved productivity and reduced workloads thanks to automated inventory and reservation management, streamlined housekeeping and maintenance, and advanced guest data analytics.
For example, Choice Hotels, an avid adopter of technology, uses AI to streamline processes in a network of over 7,500 properties worldwide. The hotel group also runs an annual tech innovation summit, encouraging development teams to share knowledge and upgrade their AI and other emerging tech skills in hack-a-thons aimed at designing solutions that can enhance hotel operations.
Hyper-personalization
An AI travel agent may have never been on a real trip, but it still knows how to delight travelers in new ways. Thanks to robust classification capabilities, AI travel apps can identify new patterns in data representing customers’ purchase intentions, stay preferences, and general travel interests. Similar to Netflix, such algorithms can churn out hyper-personalized travel offers based on customers’ past trips, known room preferences, and data from third-party sources.
Accor, for example, uses an AI-powered customer relationship management (CRM) suite with some 400 customer attributes to run deep segmentation and personalize customer communication. According to the company’s CDO Alix Boulnois, the solution significantly lifted sales, with revenue from emails increasing threefold.
Car rentals
Whether traveling for business or leisure, car rental customers demand fast, seamless, and often contactless service. To meet these demands, car rental companies use advanced technologies to optimize their processes and minimize costs.
Vehicle maintenance
Vehicle condition is a top priority for any car rental provider. To ensure superb customer experiences, car rental companies invest a lot in inspections, both pre- and post-rental. Enhancing car inspections and maintenance with AI can both accelerate the process and reduce the probability of errors.
Hertz, a global leader in the car rental industry, is planning to use AI in the inspection of cars at airport locations. Their solution includes AI-powered cameras and machine learning algorithms for automated inspections of a car’s body, tires, glass, and undercarriage. Hertz expects this to accelerate vehicle inspections and improve the availability and safety of rental cars.
Customer service and predictive analytics
Data that car rental companies collect over time provides lots of insights into different areas of their operations: customer behavior and preferences; future demand; trends correlated with seasonality, location, events, and competition. AI tools help car rental companies process diverse data and turn it into analytics that can improve business productivity.
Avis Budget Group took the AI approach to operations and implemented intelligent tools to streamline processes and predict customer preferences. The company uses AI to accelerate vehicle pick-up and drop-off, improve customer experience, forecast demand, and optimize fleet management.
Air travel
Aviation is especially dependent on accuracy and timeliness. In addition to dealing with dissatisfied passengers and facing reputational damage, airlines bear material losses from flight delays — in the US, one minute of flight delay costs about US$100.
Aiming for maximum accuracy, airlines and airports implement technology solutions that help them accelerate their processes and ensure timely operations.
GenAI-powered chatbots
Airlines get lots of customer requests on a daily basis: flight bookings and changes, policy inquiries, baggage tracking, and more. Enhancing a support team with an intelligent chatbot allows airlines to relieve pressure on their agents while simultaneously improving customer satisfaction. Chatbots can shorten the time necessary to handle a request, increasing support efficiency.
While many are still skeptical about the ability of chatbots to handle customer requests, real-life examples prove that with the right design and implementation, they can become a valuable asset. Air India’s Azure-based chatbot, AI.g, can resolve 93% of requests independently, automating a large chunk of passenger service. Powered by generative AI, the chatbot provides accurate answers using a vast database of relevant information and documents.
Improvements to airport performance
Large airports struggle with improving efficiency of their flight and passenger handling processes, aiming to maximize timeliness and minimize delays. They often turn to technology to streamline and accelerate everything that happens along the path of getting passengers to their destinations: face recognition and biometrics for security, intelligent sensors for baggage handling, smart airport navigation. AI is lending a hand, too, helping airports process large volumes of data on a daily basis.
The John F. Kennedy (JFK) International Airport in New York City, one of the largest airports in the US, uses AI to analyze real-time passenger data, including gate locations and wait times at security checkpoints. Such analysis provides insights into ways to identify and eliminate bottlenecks and optimize staff allocation, taking into account peak times. Successful implementation of AI-based efficiency-boosting strategies can help airports maintain efficiency with growing passenger volumes.
Booking platforms
The holiday market is leaning towards online travel agencies and booking apps. The Phocuswright Global Travel Market Report 2024 estimates that by 2026, about 65% of all travel bookings will be made online. The travel industry is actively exploring technologies that can help companies attract, engage, and retain customers despite the strong competition.
Itinerary building
Artificial intelligence takes holiday planning to a totally new level. From hotel recommendations to suggestions for events, local attractions, and dining options, AI has travelers covered. Moreover, AI can personalize itineraries to the max, taking into account individual preferences and interests.
For AI-assisted holiday planning, Tripadvisor offers its Trips smart planning assistant. Based on a user’s preferences, previous experiences, and specific requests, the tool suggests a variety of destinations, restaurants, tours, and other activities that make a perfect vacation. For those who prefer building their own plans from scratch, Trips supports that option too.
Fraud prevention
Like other industries, travel and hospitality are not safe from fraud. To protect both travel platforms and their customers and ensure the safety of sensitive information, online booking portals implement AI tools to identify suspicious transactions.
For example, Amadeus, a global airline booking platform, offers Amadeus Fraud Alert, a real-time transaction screening service that uses AI to detect suspicious behavior patterns, unauthorized payments, and potential theft. The tool analyzes multiple factors, such as the time and location of bookings, passenger history, and credit card data.
Hyper-personalized recommendations
User data (such as past behavior, browsing and shopping activity, as well as demographics) holds an abundance of insights. AI-driven tools process such data and turn it into analytics that serve as the basis for personalized travel and vacation recommendations.
This technique is used by Expedia in the Romie AI-powered assistant. Romie leverages AI to take the stress out of vacation planning and helps users with personalized recommendations based on their data. From price comparison to guest reviews, Romie can provide all the necessary information about future holidays and even support users should any disruption occur.
How generative AI transforms travel businesses and their customer experiences
AI in travel and hospitality: Emerging trends
Soon, AI won’t just support hospitality operations — it will be the invisible engine that designs, adapts, and perfects each guest’s entire journey, almost like having a personal butler powered by data, empathy, and predictive intelligence.
- AI-driven guest journeys. Artificial intelligence will guide the customer from booking to check-out, providing personalized offers, enabling seamless check-in and customized in-room experiences, and adapting to guests’ requirements in real time.
- Invisible service. AI will help hospitality businesses minimize human interactions with contactless check-in, AI concierges, smart room controls, and intelligent assistants.
- Improved sustainability. Both hospitality businesses and their customers will rely on AI to expand their sustainability options by dynamically adjusting room settings and optimizing housekeeping.
- Virtual travel agents. AI will become a personal travel assistant that remembers all of a user’s preferences, past choices, favorite destinations, activities, and foods, helping to build uniquely personalized journeys.
- Industry-wide AI collaboration. Hotel chains, airlines, car rental companies, and local tourism boards will integrate AI platforms to create end-to-end travel experiences.
The potential of AI in the travel industry is massive
In 2025 and beyond, success in the travel and hospitality industry will be largely shaped by the ability of businesses to apply the right technologies to achieve certain goals, whether to improve workforce efficiency, lower carbon emissions, or grow revenue per room.
AI offers travel businesses a unique opportunity to reinvent and improve almost every aspect of travel planning, from creating personalized itineraries to booking unique stays and receiving unparalleled assistance during trips.
In fact, AI can become a new channel partner, promoting the creation of new industry partnerships among travel suppliers, distributors, large global brands, and emerging startups. It can also help travel providers offer new customer-facing products for smarter travel. By sourcing more data and embedding products from partners, travel companies can reach new customer demographics, grow their ancillary revenues, and continuously adapt to evolving customer behavior.
In addition, AI may create new job roles of AI administrators, data analysts, and technology support experts.
Intellias helps global companies stand at the forefront of the AI revolution. From intelligent chatbots to advanced NLP solutions, our engineers help bring the boldest tech ideas to life. Contact us to learn more about our services in the field of AI for the travel industry.
