Justin Dawes

Skift has been following the unfolding relationship between generative AI and the travel industry, but this is only the beginning.

Expedia Group is the biggest player in travel to have publicly released a chatbot tool powered by ChatGPT. This is just the beginning, and if any anyone has the resources to really see what this tech can do in travel, it would be companies like Expedia.

The startups this week cover a wide range of industries: rideshare, hospitality buying, audio entertainment, hotel restaurant reservations, business travel planning, and travel insurtech.

As announcements have been made around ChatGPT and consumer-facing travel booking tech, other companies have been quietly working away on business-to-business generative AI products. There's more to come, no doubt.

MCR is using the expertise from its growing hotel enterprise to inform the development of its own growing hotel tech companies. What better strategy to solve some of the industry's biggest problems and make money doing it?

Google has the data to understand exactly how the travel industry has changed post-pandemic — and how its technology needs to change with it.

It is mind boggling to think about how needlessly difficult hoteliers' jobs can be because of old technology. The hotel industry is definitely late to make an upgrade, but better late than never.

Startups this week cover renting apartments as hotels, hotel tech, airline retail, fintech for travelers, and an aircraft that flies only over water.

This is one of the earliest examples of the coming convergence of conversational AI and travel booking, even if it is crude in this new launch from ChatGPT.

Google released Bard this week but has yet to integrate generative AI into its search engine as Microsoft has done with Bing and ChatGPT. But the workings of Bing’s travel itinerary suggestions are less than ideal, so Google has time to catch up.