Samantha Donovan: Well, if you’re dreaming of a last-minute summer getaway, you may be turning to artificial intelligence for inspiration. Travellers around the world are increasingly embracing AI to plan their trips. Industry experts say it can be a helpful tool for gathering and summarising information, but they’re warning it does have its limitations. Tanya Dendrinos explains.

Tanya Dendrinos: It’s the new age of travel research.

Brad Campbell: I use chat GPT and AI to actually verify things that we’ve got planned, to make sure that we’ve covered the ground that we want to cover, and pick up any things that we may have missed.

Tanya Dendrinos: Since retiring around five years ago, Sydney-based Brad Campbell has embarked on an overseas trip lasting up to two months each year, as well as additional travel around Australia. He used chat GPT to help verify his travel plans for the first time in August.

Brad Campbell: I found that it replicated probably the bulk of the things that you would find within travel guides, but what it didn’t do was it didn’t tell you when you needed to pre-book things. So for major tourist destinations, particularly like Spain over summer, where things book out really, really quickly, like Sagrada Familia or the Alhambra in Seville, it didn’t warn you that you needed to book some of those things up to two months in advance.

Tanya Dendrinos: He says the questions inputted are critical.

Brad Campbell: I think as everyone’s starting to realise, if they haven’t realised it already, AI and chat GPT is always designed to give you the answer that you want, which is sometimes not very accurate. So depending on how you frame your questions, you could end up with some information that will take you where you want to go, but it isn’t necessarily going to be the experience that you want.

Tanya Dendrinos: The Australian Travel Industry Association is the peak industry body that represents travel professionals and businesses. Its CEO is Dean Long. He’s been in the travel industry for around 20 years and has seen significant technological advancement in that time.

Dean Long: When I started in the industry, the fax machine was still a really important part of the reservation and communication system. And now we’ve got this new revolution of where technology is really making travellers be able to be more informed, but also changing the way that tour operators and travel agents build their itineraries and build those insights.

Tanya Dendrinos: A survey conducted by Australian market comparison site Compare the Market found that of around 1,000 Australians surveyed in June, almost 30% had used AI tools for travel planning. 11.5% said they’d used AI for destination recommendations, while 10% were searching for travel deals. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there was a generational divide. Compare the Market’s data found old generations were more resistant to using AI, with 93% of baby boomers who responded stating they’d never used it to plan a holiday, compared to 48% in Gen Z. Dean Long says for now, AI is predominantly being used in what he calls the dreaming stage, where people conceptualise a trip, and says it’s crucial to fact check the information provided.

Dean Long: We do find the level of fraud and we do find the level of mistakes that occur where you’re using non-trusted tools or non-trusted people or businesses such as those that are at your accredited, the mistake rate is significantly higher. What we will find though in the next 12 to 18 months is AI will start to move into that booking processes and we actually have huge concerns over the ability of those AI algorithms to really get the information right.

Tanya Dendrinos: He says while industry evolution is inevitable, the death of traditional travel agents who serve as a trusted single point of contact is highly unlikely.

Dean Long: If you’re doing a Sydney Melbourne, I think AI will really challenge the airline websites and hotel websites rather than going to two separate websites to do one bookings. AI will have a role in that space. But for our larger international bookings, agencies will have an incredible future, purely because of the amount of money that people are spending when they’re travelling.

Tanya Dendrinos: For avid traveller Brad Campbell, nothing will replace personal experience.

Brad Campbell: The best part of travel is getting lost and discovering something that you didn’t know was there in the tour guides to start with.

Samantha Donovan: That’s Sydney-based travel enthusiast Brad Campbell. Tanya Dendrinos with that report.