If you’ve attended any travel conferences in the last 12 months, chances are AI featured high up on the agenda. Personally, I think I’m starting to become all AI-ed out and that’s from someone with a vested interest in this stuff. I thought that the marketing agency world was good at hyping things up, but it seems that it’s not just us AI has become the hottest of topics across many industries, including travel!
I remember going a talk in 2019 where the speaker had just come back from a tech conference and proudly said ‘within ten years, everyone in this room probably won’t have a job due to AI’. The hype was real then and it’s still going strong today. I’ve spent a LOT of time going to AI events, even talking at some about my own views on the topic.
AI is not going away. On the contrary, it’s going from strength to strength, with some big (and small) names in travel embedding AI into their booking systems, marketing efforts and CRMs. Some have even created their travel business with AI as the backbone. In this article, we’ll take a look at a number of recent examples, highlighting the good and bad in them so that, well, you don’t have to!
CV Villas
I was asked to present on a webinar hosted by leading travel tech company Vamoos this March about some of my own AI experiences and was fortunate enough to have Ben Briggs from CV Villas on board too, talking about how they have used AI to help them shape their marketing messages against their mosaic profiles more effectively.
The team at CV Villas has used Perplexity to help them analyse their three target audiences and refine their messaging. By creating tailored prompts, they identified key messages that resonate more effectively with each audience. In Ben’s words, they are ‘using AI to be more human’ which was an interesting take. So far the results are favourable, with the creative images & words generated from Perplexity outperforming normal benchmarks. Ben was quick to warn that getting the prompts right is key to building effectiveness in the tool and crafting prompts is almost an art itself. It’ll be interesting to hear what other initiatives Ben and the CV team get up to.
Black Tomato
I’ve heard the Black Tomato team talk at many events over the years but have in recent times been fortunate enough to hear from their Head of Digital Transformation, Ronan Gay, on some of the things that they’ve been up to.
They’ve worked on several AI projects, one for internal use to check for overall copy tone and ‘Black Tomatoness’ as well as an external project called the ‘Feelings Engine’.
This tool aims to help their potential travellers find the perfect trip for them, not based on destination or budget, but on how they want to feel. I would assume for most of the Black Tomato audience budget isn’t really an issue anyway – they're more focused on the experience and that ‘feeling of getting off a plane in a hot country’, for example. Using some additional technical and content support, the team built an AI on top of their existing website to help present to users a list of possible itineraries matched against the feelings that they wanted. As well as generating better enquiries for the company, it has also created a ton of keyword data that can be used in a variety of ways, along with earning them large amounts of PR coverage across the globe. While this isn’t replacing jobs anytime soon, it’s a fresh and innovative way to use technology to solve problems. As an example of using AI to strengthen a brand, it’s a cracking one to me.
Kowalah
As a new member of Travel Technology Initiative in 2025, I was fortunate to go to the ‘AI in Travel’ conference recently. Presenting in one of the slots was the excellent Charlie Cowan from Kowalah who showed that with a lot of know-how but not a lot of effort, you could go from travel business idea to (nearly) working app within half an hour.
Not only is the app built in almost unbelievable time, it was all done using his voice to describe to the computer what he wanted (rather than having to code) and a variety of AI and ‘no code’ tools that help to understand the written word and human voice to generate ideas and code that, well, works. Using a mixture of pre-defined tools combined with a new coding platform called Lovable, prototype apps can be created within hours rather than months. The art of the possible, if you really know what you’re doing, is there to rapidly create and test ideas without the huge hassle and cost of teams of developers.
There is a big fear from some though that the costs on these apps can quickly spiral out of control if not configured and optimised properly. On top of that, integrating with various travel APIs and systems remains a challenge, as natural language processing is still a long way from making this plain sailing in most cases. However, the direction of travel (excuse the pun) is clear to see. And if you do want to see yourself, then have a ganders at the video below.
Trafalgar
I love a big campaign idea and the Trafalgar Unlocked Awards is a prime example! As a global travel brand, running a user generated content campaign poses big challenges – especially when it’s as popular as theirs (over7,500 entries a year!). The Awards have grown and grown over the last few years and generated many a booking and media asset along the way, as well as rewarding some of their most interesting travellers with some lovely VIP trips!
How can you review each submission and understand how good it is, what type it is, what media is being used and other logistical issues? Fortunately (or smartly) for them, their media library tools come built with various LLM and AI technologies to help assess award entry submissions to categorise different types of content but also tag it with various labels to make sorting and finding imagery or entries that much quicker and easier. The idea of showcasing travellers across the globe as part of their marketing strategy is a fab one but scaling it is a challenging process. While AI isn’t the sole focus here, it highlights how features within existing tools can be enhanced to solve new challenges that would have been tricky to tackle in the past.
British Airways
I was fortunate enough to not only speak a global travel conference earlier this year about AI but also host a panel session from a variety of flight companies about their use of AI. We heard from BA, United and Travelport about how they are all using AI in different ways. The general consensus was that AI can help drive significant cost savings by improving back-end processes, enhancing data connectivity and predicting price changes. It can also help optimise seat allocation and yield based on past trends. For airlines who have many decades of data across billions of touch points, the opportunity for machine-learning to improve overall efficiency and output is great and there are some good things happening in lots of places.
This does go back to a bigger point however, that bigger companies with large scale challenges are making plenty of AI investments as their needs are greater than most mid or small level travel businesses. When listening to large companies talking about AI challenges and solutions it’s always worth remembering that for them, AI adoption is probably a good strategy to try and improve efficiency. For most smaller travel companies, the challenges of technology are far different – replacing one system for another with limited technical resource or expertise, limited funds to invest and ongoing sales targets to meet. I feel sometimes that the disconnect between the ’big’ travel companies and the rest is perhaps getting bigger, but we’ll see how some of these initiatives pan out in the coming year or so, hopefully to see if the gap is growing.
Trip.com
Which nicely leads onto one of the biggest OTAs in the world, Trip.com and how they have made AI one of their core pillars in recent years. Having had success with the Ctrip brand in China (where everything is app focused), their expansion into the US and Europe with a different name has allowed Trip.com to apply technology refined on millions of users to new markets, driving impressive growth effectively in the last few years.
To help keep on top of their growth, Trip.com have used AI to help them handle customer service enquiries which has led them from a 2.2 Trustpilot score to now being 4.4 as well as handling something like 97% of cases via their AI tools & bots. This is quite an incredible use of technology and has obviously help them to scale considerably.
Another AI use case presented in the talks I’ve seen is around AI picking up customer service when things go wrong, rather than dealing with questions. With the recent fires at Heathrow as an example, sadly things do go wrong from time to time with our travel plans. Could AI be used to automatically spot flights leaving late and then make alternative arrangements or share travel updates with say connection partners? This is another area that Trip.com are supposedly doing and working on more to help improve the traveller experience. The phrase ‘seamless travel experience’ is so incredibly common but use of AI and technology in this way truly does help to deliver that if it can be done well.
Future AI development in the Trip.com app centres on the common need for trip and itinerary planning, led by its TripGenie feature. I personally find the idea of a machine coming up with a bespoke list based on a few data points pretty weak and I wasn’t hugely convinced by their video demonstrating it in a possible real world example, but no doubt it will evolve and be used by many.
TravelAI
Canadian based Travelai.com were recently featured on the Travel Trends Podcast talking about their growth as an AI first travel business reborn out of covid. Having had a long history in domain names and using tech for scale, the team at TravelAI rebuild their business around the AI models to deliver content creation, image generation and many other things to help them scale into hundreds of micro niches within travel. It was a fascinating insight into how AI can be used at the core of your business to achieve in minutes what might’ve previously taken months. The company has grown rapidly in the last few years to now having a team of over 100 across the globe with plans to increase their portfolio of AI driven websites by TEN TIMES in 2025 without adding a single person to their team. Listen to the whole interview on Spotify to find out more.
Where are we now?
These are just some of the examples of AI in travel that I’ve seen, no doubt there are dozens more from travel companies in the UK and beyond. The reality seems to be that if you are a big company, you’re probably already using it in a number of capacities, i.e. to help reduce admin, improve customer service and ultimately deliver more with fewer people.
For smaller travel companies with headcounts in the lower levels, then finding the time, knowledge and frankly business case is hard to do. There are many other battles to be fought and, at the moment, investing in AI when say your booking system isn’t talking to your CRM system correctly or as one travel person put it recently ‘sacrificing good UX like a contact form that works on mobile for the sake of the latest marketing trend isn’t wise’.
And yet that’s what a lot of us want to talk about. We completely get that LLMs and AI things are the hot topic. And yes, they are in some cases showing some very real benefits to some companies. But let’s be honest, we’re also talking about AI because the other stuff has been around for a long time and is largely boring or not new or very interesting.
Who really wants to hear from a travel business that successfully integrated Hubspot into their booking system and saved hours a week? It’s not really that sexy is it? But this is where the true wins are for most smaller travel businesses I think. The AI technology in the mass market tools is still full of errors and therefore not good enough or reliable enough in the main without a large dollop of customisation or extra work added on top.
That’s not to say travel companies shouldn’t be investing, but the longer you hold off, then perhaps, the more catch up you’re going to have to do further down the line. If it were my budget, I’d be thinking very hard about say a better website experience or better internal system upgrades before going full tilt on AI projects when you probably don’t have the right set up to make the most of it.
Whatever happens from here though, sure enough the Adido team will be listening, watching and playing to share our best thoughts with you!
