Last week, I had the pleasure of attending the AITO conference in the beautiful region of Asturias, Northern Spain. My role was to act as a catalyst for a debate about how AI will impact specialist tour operators and how businesses should start implementing AI into their operations.

My core message was that, because travel is a high-value transaction based on a promise to deliver a product at a future date, “Trust” in them as humans or in their company’s brand is their key defence against AI disintermediation, where customers go to “Destination Management Companies” (DMCs) and organise their own itineraries using the knowledge of the internet.

Some individuals argued that their expertise was vastly superior to that of the internet and that AI was prone to “Hallucinations” that could lead to disastrous outcomes. To some extent, I think they have a point, but I reminded them that AI is currently just a “one-year-old child” and that they should be prepared for the rapid progress approaching. I believe it is unlikely that their agents will know about every restaurant, bar, and attraction, or the full details of every possible hotel choice, whereas AI already does.

I advised that they should continue to keep all sales contacts “Human”- facing, as I believe humans prefer buying from humans, but empower their agents behind the scenes with as much AI knowledge and tools as possible so they can continue to know more than their customers.

For example, why not have AI listen to all customer calls and automatically prompt agents on their screens with information they might want to discuss with the customer, or send via WhatsApp or email, using professionally generated content and PDFs with full quotes for the itinerary and pricing.

I also demonstrated how they could extend their interactions with customers by using Travel Voice’s “AI Reps” to manage pre-departure customer service and in-resort information flow when they lacked on-the-ground human representatives. These AI reps use a “Cloned” voice of the agent who handled the initial sale to provide continuity of interaction.

Some operators recognised the advantages of this but wisely expressed a desire to test these tools gradually on a subset of customers so they could “Test and Learn” without risking lasting damage to their brands or reputations. This is always a sound strategy when implementing AI.

However, nearly all the operators I spoke to like the idea of using AI Review Agents, pre-programmed with detailed knowledge of a customer’s itinerary and weather during their stay, to have a “Chat” with the customer upon their return. They encourage customers strongly to upload holiday photos and videos. Our extensive testing already shows that this leads to much more detailed user content being captured, which AI can then use to generate reviews for Tripadvisor, Trustpilot, etc., to be posted by customers. These reviews are automatically seeded with the agent’s name and company details, creating a “Digital Word of Mouth” within trusted sites that power most “Large Language Models” (LLMs) responses to customer searches.

This same content can also be used on the operator’s website and added to their CRMS so that they know not just what holidays customers took last time but what they enjoyed doing during those holidays.

None of these tools replaces humans, as they mainly perform functions that the business currently misses due to scalability or resource cost restrictions, thereby logically increasing business stickiness and repeat booking levels.

Most businesses expressed the opinion that they need to embrace AI as a back-office tool to increase efficiency and allow their staff to focus on the human-facing sales functions, but few had a definitive plan and found the vast array of AI tools daunting.

My advice is simple. If you want to implement AI successfully, the project must be led by the business owner or leader and cannot just be delegated to the IT or marketing departments. It is also advisable to bring in “External Advisors” to demonstrate the “Art of the possible” in a morning session and then guide a business team comprising both senior managers and internal young AI advocates in identifying the 5-10 things the business could do immediately.

This should then be reduced to a maximum of 5 projects to ensure the initial focus is maintained and that these first experiments in “Test and Learn” succeed, allowing the AI rollout to get off to a positive start and creating a virtuous cycle of efficiency gains.

This blog is not an advert, but if anybody does want some low-cost AI Advice, contact me, and I’ll put you in touch with Neural River, the AI Consultancy business that I have invested in as a Chair.