Vacation rental platform HomeToGo plans to develop an artificial intelligence travel assistant as part of its vision to become a fully AI-driven marketplace.
Releasing an update on the goal, the company said the assistant “Super AI Sunny” would guide users through travel planning across search, booking and post-booking, including related ancillaries such as tours and activities.
HomeToGo has released a beta version of AI Sunny, a step up from its chatbot Sunny, which has been in place for a number of years.
Patrick Andrae, co-founder and CEO of the company, said HomeToGo has spent time figuring out where its internal AI strategy meets that of large language model (LLM) players such as OpenAI and Google Gemini and their rapid iterations.
He added that a lot of AI startups had effectively been taken out by developments from the LLMs but that HomeToGo has a different value proposition.
“It's a different story because we are not an AI company in the first place," Andrae said. "We are a travel company that wants to create a fully AI-powered marketplace. So we want to utilize and leverage AI, but we need to make sure that we invest into AI at the right point, so that we’re not creating something that is already incorporated into the models. This is a moving target obviously.”
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He added that companies creating their own LLM is a good example that doesn’t make sense.
“I think by now that's the general opinion of everyone that it doesn't make sense to invest. But it goes even farther; we wouldn't try to build ourselves a database around restaurants or something like this, when we could have that data coming from AI itself."
HomeToGo released its first AI mode around curated search a year ago with the company following up with a raft of AI developments including Smart Reviews and Smart Offer Summaries toward the end of 2023. At the time it also said Sunny’s capabilities would be widened to include in-trip and post-trip services.
Andrae said AI Sunny is already improving the guest escalation rate to a human by about 40%. That means that for every 100 queries, about 50 used to be escalated, this has now dropped to about 30.
“We see that this AI Sunny is actually much better, especially in terms of needing help from a human, which is still very important but it nonetheless shows the upside potential because these agents can now take care of other things. This is only an in-between step because the next step would be to have Super AI Sunny with you all the time so not only helping you during the booking phase but also helping you during your search and helping you after the booking. So you have a lot of touch points where it can actively, but also reactively, actually help.”
He added that the full vision for Super AI Sunny would take some time with different elements released enabling HomeToGo to test and learn along the way.
The company has also announced a partnership with Google Cloud’s Vertex AI as part of the bid to become fully AI-powered. While HomeToGo has an “LLM agnostic approach”, said Andrae, with the company working out the different advantages of the various different services.
He also said that of all the updates released earlier this month by the LLMs, he was most interested in the multimodal capabilities as well as the speed of development of conversational interfaces.
Andrae stressed the need for companies to ready themselves to be used by AI or “AI readable.”
“This is something that is not coming from me, but I think I heard an interview from [OpenAI CEO] Sam Altman and I agree with him that we don't know how. I believe there will be visual interfaces and also human interfaces, but we also need to prepare our products to be used by AI. There is some kind of AI interface that will utilize parts of our products. You could imagine an AI that is the partner that gets data access via API to help customers find things.”