ChatGPT in the business travel world

Much of the talk about ChatGPT and generative artificial intelligence in travel so far has been around trip planning and personalization.

But the corporate travel world is also considering how it might boost productivity internally as well as the customer experience externally.

During a ChatGPT session at the Cvent Travel Summit 2023 virtual event this week, speakers explored a number of use cases for corporate travel.

Patrick Linnihan, CEO of Gant Travel Management, said he put the technology into practice as soon as the buzz started by seeing what it could do for human resources.

“I asked our executive assistant for anything we write inside the arena of human resources, what if we took a pass at it first with ChatGPT? Within a week she came back and said, `I now have an assistant.' So imagine every member of your team having an assistant, and what if that results in an extra hour or two? You’ve collectively added labor hours to your time. And right now if you’re using the free version of ChatGPT, you’re doing it at a very low cost.”

Linnihan, who was discussing the technology with Norm Rose, Phocuswright senior technology and corporate market analyst, said he doesn't believe AI will replace people in the travel and events arena. “But someone who knows how to use AI is probably going to replace you," he said. “And that begs the question for every one of us of how do we harness this tool to be able to be competitive inside our marketplace.”

In addition to productivity gains, Linnihan highlighted how AI might increase potential existing bias towards particular suppliers in travel contracts and urged travel managers and event planners to read travel management contracts more carefully.

Furthermore, he said AI would start asking the right questions of someone right from the beginning of booking travel.

“It’s going to appear more seamless than you’ve ever seen before," Linnihan said. "It’s going to follow [that] because the machine is going to understand what the goal is, and it’s going to bias even the questions it asks you, so that it seems natural that you’re going to essentially use the suppliers that maximize the revenue and profitability of your intermediary.”

Beating skeptics

Rose worries that skeptics might not trust the technology, leaving travel managers and travel management companies to take a wait-and-see approach to experimenting and implementing ChatGPT and other similar technologies. But Linnihan said the industry would be forced to look externally for solutions because consumers are “benchmarking Amazon and Netflix as their experience.”

“Other industries that aren’t as fragmented as travel are going to harness AI and specifically ChatGPT-like technology to deliver a quality of interaction that’s going to be the benchmark for travel to hit,” he said. “That’s the bigger picture of what’s going to happen here.”

He also said companies should gather “ammunition to take on a skeptic” and demonstrate the revenue opportunities.

A further use case is in AI helping to bring together increasingly fragmented content and data in corporate travel.

“ChatGPT and other AI can help an intermediary reach the technology nirvana they’re searching for," Linnihan said. "They’re searching for the most efficient tool to serve a client and what this tool can do ... is bring in options that are more difficult to obtain on the current platforms, and that’s going to raise the bar. With technology like ChatGPT and APIs that are available, I predict you’re going to see these emerging content providers pulled into the corporate travel arena at a higher rate.”

A vision presented by Rose, meanwhile, is that the industry will move from a search-and-evaluate model to a fetch model. He predicted we will see more integration of booking tools and collaboration platforms such as Microsoft Teams.

“So here’s this meeting coming up, it’s in my calendar, and there’s going to be a point where you’ll just get a question ‘Do you want me to book your trip?’" Rose said. "It will have enough knowledge about you and your preferences and enough automation behind it to look at different sources to come up with itineraries that most closely match.”

The Kayak ChatGPT plugin and the potential to bring in OpenTable content is evidence of that happening, according to Linnihan.

“Kayak is moving aggressively into the corporate market," he said. "We could see them create a user interface that starts to harness other aspects, that they know corporate travelers are using, in a more seamless manner. What’s driving this is demographics. ... There’s a generation of travelers who want to communicate in a manner that doesn’t look anything like the way [baby] boomers communicated. What’s exciting about those platforms is they succeed on less information. The more concise you are, the more likely you are to get a rapid response. You might not get the right answer the first time, but the generation right now is very willing to say, ‘No, that’s not right. try again.’”

A final generative AI use case is likely to come from the hotel selection request for proposal process, said Linnihan, who predicted that in two years “we’ll have an AI-powered or ChatGPT-powered RFP process for hotels.”