At this point, you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who hasn’t used Artificial Intelligence (AI) in their personal or professional life at least once. Forbes lays out the compelling statistics below (plus more) that prove this point:
- Within just the first five days following its release, ChatGPT reached 1 million users
- Half of U.S. mobile users tap into voice search every day
- With no signs of slowing, AI is predicted to experience an annual growth rate of 37.3% from 2023 to 2030
But we (and surely you) are most interested in the role AI plays – and will continue to play – in travel marketing. So we’re breaking it down…
Customer Experience
Travel providers have brought chatbots onto their teams to handle a host of interactions with customers and potential customers at every stage of the journey. These critical tasks include responding to inquiries (about general destination or property information, flight status and booking modifications, to name a few), making personalized recommendations (such as trip itineraries, hotel recommendations and others), locking down reservations and managing requests throughout the trip.
Media Monitoring
There are vast amounts of conversations happening online every moment of every day. By using AI for real-time monitoring, you can tap into a 24/7 sweep of data from social media, news outlets, blogs and chat forums, instantly identifying relevant discussions. This intel can then be used to analyze consumer sentiment about your brand, identify emerging trends and industry shifts, keep a sharp eye on competitors’ moves and respond quickly and proactively to crises.
Influencer Marketing
The influencer sphere is more saturated than ever, so the old manual approach to this type of marketing doesn’t cut it anymore. With AI, marketers can use a data-driven approach to identify influencers that would be the best fit for their brand, predict potential engagement for individual posts, recommend relevant topics, measure and analyze content performance, call out areas for improvement or optimization and even detect fraudulent activity (bye-bye fake followers!).
Personalization and Targeting
Rather than painting with a broad brush of geographics and demographics, AI enables marketers to precisely pinpoint their audience. Combing through a mind-blowing amount of consumer data, AI empowers you to walk away with highly granular customer segments to be targeted with relevant, custom-tailored messages and dynamic content. AI models can even predict consumer behaviors (yes, it can see into the future!).
Content Generation
Note we did NOT say content creation! There’s a good reason for that. For content to resonate with your target audience segments, it needs a human touch to make that all-too-critical connection on a heart-and-soul level. Who could forget the blowback Google received for its Olympic commercial promoting its own AI offering? (Although we can all agree the spot did score points for highlighting women in sports.) When sitting down to write your own Dear Sydney letter (or email, blog, newsletter or destination guide), remember that AI is strictly a tool for gathering research and outlining key talking points.
Bottom line: AI is playing an increasingly important role in travel marketing – but it can feel intimidating to the uninitiated. Partner with an in-the-know agency that has the smarts to leverage the latest tech and expertise to deliver communications that bring a personal touch, helping to boost your bottom line. Contact Lynn Kaniper at 609.266.9187 ext. 117 or lkaniper@danacommunications.com to start the conversation.
