How AI Can Improve Travel Industry (Part 2)

In previous post, How AI Can Improve Travel Industry (Part 1), we identified the way AI is influencing our lives daily and mostly why travel industry is one of the industries that are highly impacted. In this post we continue the series of changes with which AI enriched travel industries from airports procedures to simple searches on the web for a flight you need or for planning your next holiday. The improvements AI brought to the field are numerous but there are more to come.

Maintenance

“We’re experiencing a delay due to aircraft maintenance. We regret any inconvenience this may cause. We’ll have you boarding as soon as possible. Thank you for flying with us and do let us know if we can do anything for you in the meantime.” 

You’ve likely heard some variation of this statement, right? Dreaded aircraft maintenance that is oh so necessary but oh so inconvenient when it carries over into your scheduled flight time. Maintenance is key because passenger experience, safety, and airline revenue all become factors. Yet, when maintenance fails to operate as planned, it can also lead to delays and cancellations, which lowers customer satisfaction. 

For these reasons, the fact that AI is now shortening maintenance lead times by 50 percent means that airline management efficiency has just been boosted significantly. AI will automate the detection of irregularities and expedite resolutions of them, which means that you don’t have to worry about as many delays or disruptions. 

Pricing

You may have heard a rumor that prices are cheapest for airlines on Tuesdays. You may have even found yourself trying this trick. Yet, this trick was actually debunked by AI. Here’s how. 

Pricing for anything travel-related can be tricky. When’s the best time to purchase a train ticket, bus ticket, plane ticket? When should you book a hotel or a rental car? What about that tour? What route is better? Which gives me a better bang for my bunk? There are a million different combinations, and it’s up to you to sort through them. 

That said, it’s just as much of a game from the company’s side of it. How do they know what pricing to put in front of the customer? What optimizes their profits while still creating sales? It can be tricky for them to know, and often (even though prices seem astronomical) airlines don’t make as much on your individual ticket as you might think. 

AI has become instrumental in figuring out real-time pricing for air and ancillary products. This allows companies to create pricing structures that continually optimize their pricing based on consumer selection. This is a drastically different approach than the airlines used to have when humans would put up all the tickets once a week. In fact, that’s how the Tuesday “rumor” got started. 

You see, if you wanted a cheap airline ticket when humans were doing the optimizing, then it made sense to hop online when the airline agents would upload the tickets once a week and do their “ticket dump.” You’d grab the cheapest ticket available and get that travel deal. 

Yet, that’s not how it’s done anymore. Tickets aren’t uploaded only once and flash sales are created like they used to be. AI makes it a continual adjustment process, which kind of ruins the game if you enjoyed playing it (sorry!). But look on the bright side – this also means that you could be getting a great deal on every other day of the week as AI helps the market adjust in real-time!

User experience management

It’s no secret that a lot of the travel industry is going online. Travel agents are out after all with everything being so accessible online. That said, the Internet has necessitated that companies manage the user experience (UX) that they’re providing. 

If your company has a positive UX, you’ll ultimately maintain your client base and attract more. However, if you have a poor UX, then it won’t be long before you lose your customers. What’s this looking like? Well, 38 percent of people will stop using a website that isn’t engaging enough. This means that the content has to be robust and the layout has to be satisfying. 

Well, UX is important, but it can be time-consuming to figure out. How are you supposed to know if your clients enjoy your UX? Enter AI. AI can now actively learn from interactions on your website and track what the flow of these interactions mean. Are your website visits ultimately earning you sales? What do customers visit the site seeking? Are they able to find it quickly and efficiently? Are there too many touchpoints before they get there? Do customers fall off during their journey, and why does that occur if the answer is yes?

There are a million questions to ask about user experience, but the answers all lie in AI. It can help you understand what you’re doing effectively and ineffectively so that you can boost it in ways you hadn’t previously realized. 

Final thoughts

AI is simply taking over the travel industry in all the best ways. It’s making it more efficient and more relatable to customers than ever before by analyzing data, mending inadequacies, or in the case of immigration and customs, just flat out fixing. Don’t stop watching where this technology can go in the next decade!