"AI has seeped into every corner of the travel industry: It's pricing flights, examining dents on rental cars with eagle-eyed precision, blocking suspicious-looking Airbnb bookings, and parsing the air in hotel rooms for signs of sneaky smokers. For travel companies, AI is the vigilant cost-cutter. For travelers, however, it's a more ambivalent tagalong: AI could be a personalized travel agent, or it could be a restrictive chaperone monitoring every part of your trip and sometimes hitting you with higher costs."
"When I booked my vacation this year, I spent about a month tracking flights and weighing various layover scenarios, and eventually used a year's worth of hoarded credit card points plus about $280 out of pocket to get a flight in an economy seat to Croatia. Could this all have been easier and cheaper if I'd used AI? It's possible some artificial intelligence played a role in what I booked and paid."
AI now touches multiple travel operations, including fare pricing, rental car inspections, Airbnb fraud detection, and hotel-room monitoring. Travel companies primarily use AI to reduce costs and automate decision-making, while travelers gain possible personalization alongside increased surveillance and potential price impacts. The involvement of large language models inside companies adds opacity to how pricing and other decisions are made, creating uncertainty about whether outcomes favor customers or firms. Regulatory and public pushback can arise when airlines or platforms apply generative AI to pricing strategies that may vary across routes or customer groups.
Read at Business Insider
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