The Artificial Intelligence in the Tourism Sector: Issues, Challenges and Opportunities

The travel and tourism industry is one of the world’s largest industries with a global economic contribution (direct, indirect and induced) of over 7.6 trillion U.S. dollars in 2016. The direct economic impact of the industry, including accommodation, transportation, entertainment and attractions, was approximately 2.3 trillion U.S. dollars that year. A number of countries, such as France and the United States, are consistently popular tourism destinations, but other, less well-known countries are quickly emerging in order to reap the economic benefits of the industry. Nowadays independent travelling is becoming more and more common as people use the internet in the search of cheaper holidays, organizing their travel plans and accommodation separately. All are well and good so long as everything runs smoothly. There are more independent travelers recently as it’s a lot easier, quicker and cheaper to book your own accommodation, flights and ancillaries, the only bad thing is that if you book them separately you are not covered for things like the ash cloud unlike if you was to book a package holiday. More independent travelers go on long-haul flights for things like business trips. This will affect the travel industry as more and more people are travelling independently for things like business trips and trips for example attending conferences or health related tourism or mountain biking, in which tour operators will lose money as people are more likely to book the trips and excursions separately. All this brings us to the important question of whether Artificial Intelligence (AI) can bring about any substantial changes to the way travel is managed and delivered. There are a good number of key areas where AI can strongly impact travel to provide better assistance and elevate customer experience. In order to properly address this question a careful review of the trends and factors affecting the travel and tourism sector must be performed. For one thing a lot of data are produced everyday in this sector. Tripadvisor, Trivago and travelwebsites generate millions of data that can be used. AI can and could use these data to further develop theoretical and computational models to assist the travel and tourist sectors. In this paper the trends and factors affecting these sectors will be analyzed and studied using methods and techniques of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Related issues, challenges and opportunities will be discussed and presented Not all AI methods can be used for this research study. The appropriate ones will be identified. Useful examples will be provided at the conference