Will AI replace Travel Consultants?
- thesocialspiders
- Jun 6
- 4 min read
Artificial Intelligence, or rather GPT tools, are a subset of technology which have begun to be particularly disruptive in everyday life.
You might not notice it explicitly, but many of the new emerging technologies centered around AI are being used everywhere. For example, whenever we google something the first result is usually replaced by an answer generated by AI Overview, a type of generative AI technology used by Google. These answers can be notoriously incorrect, inaccurate, or misleading, and yet it shows at the top of a search result with only a small disclaimer after all the information stating “AI Responses may include mistakes.”
So, our question here dear Travel Professional, is will AI replace us?
GPT stands for “Generative Pre-Training Transformer”. Generative means it generates content, pre-training indicates it generates content based on old data it has been trained on, and transformer is a kind of technology which enables it to understand and predict what you want based on full sentence prompts. In other words, if you ask a tool like ChatGPT or Gemini to do something for you, the machine does not fundamentally understand the question in the way you or I understand it. The individual words mean nothing to it, it predicts an output based on what you input from the significant experience it has from all its prior training. These predictions are usually quite good, it stumbles in some areas but is still able to give mostly errorless responses. When talking about AI, it is important to understand that the AI many of us grew up reading or seeing in science-fiction media is completely different to the GPTs we have seen dominate the headlines of the past few years.
As professionals in the travel industry, we have all experienced significant changes throughout the years. The internet changed the way travel agents worked, online agencies gave us a massive shake-up, and these emerging AI technologies are expected to have similar impacts.
The first, most unavoidable impact, is younger or more tech savvy individuals will opt to use AI tools instead of a travel agent. These tools are getting better and more useful, and even though they do not offer the human expertise that many travel agents have, they are very capable of building itineraries with links to book flights, hotels and tours.
We wanted to put AI through it's paces and see how it performed. So, for this exercise, we used mindtrip.ai.
We input a fairly simple prompt, requesting it to generate me an itinerary for travelling from the Gold Coast, Queensland, to the South Island of New Zealand where we would go on a road-trip around the South Island.
It does a fairly decent job, although it makes some questionable decisions on some of the travel dates. Driving all the way from Queenstown to Christchurch in a single day is not a very efficient way to see the South Island. It entirely misses some of the highlights from the South Island too, missing key locations like the Abel Tasman, Kaikoura, Lake Tekapo, Mount Cook, to name a few. With some further prompting it is able to provide some hotels, from which I can view the various prices offered on different booking platforms and choose whichever is the cheapest, or whichever I might have a membership for.
Of note here, although it has all the prior information and a set itinerary for my trip, when prompted to provide hotels for all the locations, it assumes I want the hotels in specific locations for the full 14-days. Even though I had specified the start date for the trip, it incorrectly lists the date, instead seemingly choosing a random date in September. These are relatively simple issues to fix, but this is to show that these tools are not completely reliable and still require a large amount of planning on behalf of the user.
It is able to find and suggest flights that are serviceable, but without further prompting would not suggest an alternative travel plan that might avoid overnight layovers or multiple-leg flights.
This is not to discredit the usefulness of these tools. In seconds we were able to get a decent framework for a trip to New Zealand, and with further prompting we would be able to get something more personalized and refined for our own needs. But, it also relies on our own knowledge. If we only knew that we wanted to travel to New Zealand, and took the first itinerary it provided at face value, we would not have had the best trip that we could have had. This is where travel agent expertise comes in. A client might want to travel somewhere, but you know that there could be a better way to approach their trip that provides more value to them. GPT tools are simply looking for the best output for a prompt. They are not intelligent enough to recognize that the user might not have provided the best prompt.
All these tools are relatively similar, some are slightly better than others, or offer slight variations. We highly recommend that you familiarise yourself with these tools to figure out what they offer, and compare your own skills and services to them. Mindtrip.ai also offers integration for businesses, you can look at how this works on tourism sites like Visit California (https://www.visitcalifornia.com/road-trips/). There is some notable value in having prospective clients utilise planning tools like this on your own websites, especially when it can be modified to organically recommend business partners. It might also save time, allowing you to get a rough idea of what your client is looking for so that you can recommend them a trip quicker.
Takeaways:
Don't ignore AI - if you do, you may miss the new technology opportunities on the way in
Don't panic - AI isn't yet fully capable of replacing human beings in this sphere - but plan for a future where it will.
Do - think about how you can provide real human services to your clients and in unique ways
Do - embrace this new technology and learn from it as much as it is learning from you.
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