Artificial intelligence (AI) has increasingly become a much-discussed tool in the travel sector. For travel professionals, AI has the potential to revolutionize their daily workflow by streamlining tasks, improving customer service, and enhancing the overall travel experience for their clients. Most significant, however, has been the promise of increased productivity and time savings for travel advisors who feel the demands of content marketing stretch them to the limit, especially as solo practitioners.
Working with over 500 travel advisors currently, the team at the Voyager Content Portal has discovered many shortcuts and workflows that allow travel advisors to integrate AI successfully into their daily routines. Time spent researching, drafting, and proofing writing tasks can be greatly reduced, and the travel professional can more quickly produce a quality text-based product using AI where it is best suited. The most common uses we have found travel advisors using our AI platform for are:
- Customer Service Letter Writing: Advisors have found that letters to clients and suppliers alike can be composed much more quickly and with less emotional toll when AI is used to write the first draft of a customer service letter.
- Itinerary Writing: AI can create well-organized itineraries tailored to individual client interests, ensuring a personalized and creative output.
- Blogs: AI-powered content generation can help advisors produce informative and engaging blog posts to attract and retain clients.
- Generating Lead Magnets: Many of our travel advisor clients use AI to create valuable content encouraging prospective clients to engage with their travel practice.
- Creating Packing Lists: AI systems can suggest customized packing lists for clients based on their destination, travel style, and personal preferences.
- Website Page Copywriting: AI can help design persuasive and effective website content that engages clients, improving conversions and growing the business.
- Advertising Copy: Travel advisors can leverage AI-generated advertising copy that resonates with their target audience, increasing the chances of successful marketing campaigns.
- Miscellaneous: We have seen our travel advisor clients use AI to write scripts for YouTube Videos, talks in front of groups, games to play at travel parties as well as poetry, responses to both positive and negative reviews, and newsletters.
When initially working with AI and the necessity for appropriate positioning in the agent’s workflow, an almost immediate need is for the travel advisor to recognize where bottlenecks are occurring in their agency. A commonly identified problem is, quite simply, “blank page” syndrome: not being able to come up with suitable topics about which to write. Fortunately, this is an area where AI is very well-suited to assist the travel advisor. AI is undistracted, can analyze a situation very quickly, and can generate dozens of possible topics in only seconds and with minimal prompting.
Researching appropriate AI solutions is another requirement for busy travel advisors looking to manage their content marketing better. ChatGPT, Jasper, and Bing’s Chat AI are now widely available. Voyager’s solution, Toby, is currently being used by over 500 travel professionals. The advantage of Toby is our efforts at schooling our AI in the travel industry. We have kept Toby tightly informed on the logistics of the travel industry and continue to feed him a steady diet of travel-related information.
It is also essential for the travel professional to understand the current limitations of AI, the creators of which, by and large, trained their models on pre-2023 information. Many early experiments by travel journalists delighted in the mistakes AI would make by failing to bring back current information when requested. However, it is a mistake to attempt to use AI as a Google replacement. While it is possible to do rudimentary research with current AI models, the user must remember that ChatGPT and the other AI solutions are language models that excel at writing but not so much at research. You would not ask Google to write a letter for you. It is equally dangerous to ask current AI models to research for you unless you are willing to fact-check fastidiously.
Finally, anyone using AI in a professional context needs to be schooled, trained, and coached. There are pitfalls, mistakes, and lessons to be learned. A recent article in the New York Times about an attorney filing a legal brief against Avianca Airlines using ChatGTP should be lesson enough. Everything must be fact-checked and edited. There are precautions to be taken, and they are easy enough to guard against copyright infringement and plagiarism. Without guidance, however, there are definitive risks.
Free Trial
The Voyager Content Portal offers a 7-day free trial and includes not only Toby, our AI component but also lots of other content to assist with your marketing. If you ask in any Facebook group if anyone can provide you with an affiliate link, your friends who participate with us can get you not only a 7-day free trial but also a discount on the program. If you do not know who to ask, you can email me at Richard.Earls@tro.travel, and I will supply you with the name of one of our current users who can provide you with an affiliate link.
