Search for a tour or activity for your next trip and you’ll get a list of ideas – but no real sense of what you’ll truly experience or how it will make you feel. GetYourGuide CEO Johannes Reck thinks AI will fix that.
“It’s [currently] about typing in a destination and then putting down a couple of filters, and then some more filters. It’s really imperfect,” said Reck this week at the Skift Global Forum. “It’s very mechanical to the present day, and it does not actually take into account how you want to feel when you travel. And that is precisely the difference that we at GetYourGuide believe AI can make for search and discovery over the next 10 years.”
The company is experimenting with training its AI model on how customers interact with content on its platform through immersive video tours of attractions and user reviews detailing their experiences in specific destinations.
Instead of long text boxes, the company wants travelers to have a stitched-together itinerary of “rich media” recommendations to create a personalized experience.
Reck used the example of a couple going to Paris, who had a free couple of hours while a nanny watched their kids. “So they will interact with our content. And immediately, the AI will understand that they have a couple of hours free and that they want to do something romantic.”
“The AI will guide them to the perfect places of where they can see things, where they might do a food or macaron class, where they can have a quick river cruise,” said Reck. “It can stitch together the itinerary in a very dynamic way, leading them to the best food experience, the best local authentic things that are available that given day. And through that, they will transform the customer journey not with long text boxes but with immersive and interactive content.”
Freeing Up Tour Operators to Create Tours
Reck said the company was using AI to transform the supplier side of the marketplace in several ways to help tour operators do their job more efficiently, including “handling tasks like availability updates and pricing,” freeing them up to focus on what they love – creating experiences.
“We see that new experienced businesses are coming up all of the time serving new and diverse customer tastes and customer profiles, whether that’s the new tour in Croatia following Game of Thrones or whether that might be the very new immersive food experience here in New York City,” said Reck. “Those are the types of tastes that we want to relay to the supply community so that they can come up and create a lot more content, a lot more experiences in real-time responding to customer needs.”
“And that in turn, and I predict that, will lead to millions of more experiences being created on our marketplace over the next decade, fueling the need of the experienced economy and the craving for new and better content,” Reck said.
Skift Global Forum Coverage
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