The Future Of Travel: How Artificial Intelligence Will Make Our Holidays Even Better

By Phil R. , Head of Futures – Omnicom Media Group UK

While the marketing community continues to be excited about AI's ability to enhance creativity and gain deeper insight into the consumer, candidly, AI’s mpact on marketing means less to those outside our industry bubble.

Here's the reality: the general public is mainly unaware of AI's advantages, even at a broader level. One study has even estimated that 64% of Americans do not know they are using AI in products they rely on daily.

The reason behind this lack of awareness is that, when it comes to AI, customers don't want technical specs or sci-fi verbiage; they want straight answers to fundamental questions.

Namely:

• Does it make product or service recommendations that are practical or useful?

• Will it make things quicker, slicker, and more seamless?

• Will issues or challenges be addressed and solved immediately?

That's the true test. To put it another way: they care not for the thrust output of the jet engine, only that the plane lands on time.

Notably, there's one sector where AI has the potential to transform an entire industry for consumers by relieving pressure points, increasing seamlessness, and decreasing friction. 

It's travel and tourism.

Five Evolutions In The Travel Industry

In the latest report by OMG Futures, ‘Destination AI: How Artificial Intelligence Will Impact The Travel Industry,’ we have documented five AI-led evolutions changing the travel and tourism industry.  They are:

• Refined Recommendations - where AI decodes even the subtlest traveler desires

• Personalized Planning - where AI assembles and adapts entire travel itineraries on the fly

• Supercharged Services - where avatars, ambient assistants, and real-time translation empower human teams

• Optimized Operations - where AI smooths queues and predicts demand

• Maximized Marketing - where AI mines deep-linked consumer signals to make hyper-relevant creative The report details emerging tech such as virtual travel agents that 'playlist’ elements of your vacation, real-time language translation via wearables, and profoundly connected decisioning that gets us to the absolute heart of a traveler's desires.

Optimized Operations

To the point I made earlier, for the everyday traveler and holidaymaker, Optimized Operations is an excellent example of how AI could make things magically "work better," without drawing attention to itself. In this case, its invisibility is its advantage.

Real-world examples exist all around us. We are now seeing AI deployed to manage flows of people and reduce crowds at theme park rides. We know it’s being used to predict engineering malfunctions and maintain spare parts inventories. It's also positioning and repositioning fleets of vehicles to reduce carbon emissions, as well as forecasting extreme weather events.

This is the same thing: data crunching on a colossal scale to identify patterns, anticipate demand, and spot linkages. The output is a form of "digital grease" that makes the travel engine run at maximum efficiency.

To illustrate further, Uber processes millions of arrival predictions per minute, utilizing spatial indexing and deep neural networks – a platform it calls DeepETA – to pair drivers and riders efficiently.

Elsewhere, London's Gatwick Airport has partnered with tech firm Veovo, for instance, to provide real-time security wait time predictions, enabling on-the-fly resource allocation to reduce congestion during peak hours.

Imagine this principle scaled across entire national transport infrastructures, used to reduce delays, cut wait times, and smooth the movement of people.

Building Brand Frictionlessness

In the future, we can expect more of this. We will experience AI's impact on trips not just as a turbo- charged layer of customer service (as we detail elsewhere in the report), but also in the very optimization of movement through physical space.

Most importantly, this is a fantastic opportunity for brands. Now they can craft solutions for travelers and tourists that adapt to real-time changes – and then communicate those solutions through rapidly updated, dynamic creative messages. 

For instance, if peak security is projected to exceed 20 minutes, automatically push a 'Fast-Track Upgrade' offer.

Or when local weather suddenly turns to rain, trigger an indoor experience from a partner supplier at a  nearby attraction.

Or when traffic along the route to the theme park is building, push a Next Gen Fast Pass to help skip queues for rides once they've arrived.

Communicating this AI-led frictionlessness could become a central part of a brand's narrative: faster, easier, more relaxing holidays. The success of delivering that experience lies in one of the best forms of marketing: the happy customer.

Beyond raw travel logistics, with many major travel companies – from e-commerce sites to global airline groups and international hotel chains – announcing the integration of AI into their services, we may be on the verge of witnessing the transformation of an industry from search bar to sun lounger.

This journey has only just begun.

Destination AI: How Artificial Intelligence Will Impact The Travel Industry is available now.