Ready for takeoff: Reimagining travel and hospitality with agentic AI

Digital transformations are revolutionizing the travel and hospitality market, with generative AI leading the charge. Google’s Gemini models, with their advanced capabilities in generating text, images, audio, video, and code, as well as understanding and summarizing diverse information, offer powerful new avenues for differentiation and growth in the travel industry.

And increasingly, as agentic AI provides the opportunity to bring action to AI, travel and hospitality companies can now automate actions at scale, driving increased efficiency and faster time to value.

Inspired by the innovations seen in other consumer industries, here are five key ways generative AI can transform the travel and hospitality landscape.

Personalizing experiences for travelers and guests

The modern traveler craves more than just a destination; they seek experiences meticulously tailored to their individual preferences and past behaviors. Artificial Intelligence, advanced models like Gemini, are revolutionizing the travel and hospitality market’s ability to deliver this deep level of personalization at scale.

With Gemini’s advanced reasoning and multimodal capabilities, travel providers can build AI agents that can analyse customer data while interacting with information like images and video.

• Personalised Ads: Thanks to Gemini, providers can intelligently analyze vast streams of customer data - ranging from booking histories and loyalty program interactions to real-time feedback and even social media sentiments.

For example, the Radisson Hotel Group worked with Accenture and Google Cloud to use Vertex AI and Gemini models to Personalize ads at scale, in multiple languages automatically with AI, increasing revenue and efficiency. By training AI models on extensive datasets stored in BigQuery; ad teams saw productivity rise 50% while revenue increased from AI-powered campaigns by more than 20%.

• AI-Powered Trip Planning: Gemini can help create AI agents that assist users in planning trips by understanding complex queries, accessing real-time information (like event APIs and hotel availability), and generating personalised itineraries.

For example, IHG Hotels & Resorts: used Vertex AI and Gemini models for a generative AI-powered travel planning capability within its mobile app app, using Google's Vertex AI and Gemini models to offer personalized recommendations.

Streamlining guest services

The inherent complexities of travel — from unforeseen delays and urgent booking modifications to diverse in-destination needs — require a support ecosystem that is both highly responsive and deeply understanding.

Thanks to Gemini, customers can use a combination of chat and images to reshape this landscape of guest services moving beyond basic automation, empowering travel and hospitality providers to offer intelligent, context-aware Agents across every touchpoint of the journey; responding proactively to travelers changing itineraries.

For example, loveholiday’s self-service AI agent addresses 55% of customer questions in less than a minute without human intervention, handling a large volume of cases and automating servicing for many customer conversations.

Personalized recommendations and bookings

Google Gemini family of models are natively multimodal, meaning travel and hospitality businesses can create highly relevant and personalized marketing campaigns, fostering deeper customer engagement. By understanding and processing diverse customer signals - from explicit preferences shared via text to implicit cues in image selections or video engagement - Gemini enables the creation of highly relevant and individually personalized communications.

For example, a travel agent could leverage Gemini's known multimodal strengths, to show a customer travel recommendations:

A traveler could upload an image of a bustling European street market they admire and then verbally ask for "similar vibrant city experiences with a focus on local food and history, staying under $200 a night." Gemini, leveraging its multimodal understanding, could then generate tailored city break recommendations and even suggest specific historical walking tours and food markets.

Making operations more efficient

Beyond the front-of-house, the engine room of any successful travel and hospitality enterprise relies on seamless, agile, and intelligent operations. Leveraging Agents for advanced analytical and generative capabilities, providers can tackle challenging tasks like optimizing resource allocation and automating intricate back-office processes but also unlock new operational advantages.

• Next-generation promotions: thanks to Gemini, promotions can be created with unprecedented speed and relevance based on real-time data, summarizing previous customer interactions in real-time, equipping teams with instant context to deliver superior service and make smarter, faster decisions across the board.

For example, while focused on customer experience, Priceline's collaboration with Google Cloud to enhance trip planning and hotel booking for customers also has operational benefits. For employees, this includes using AI for more efficient campaign creation and boosting developer productivity.

AI-driven predictive insights and rapid innovation

In the ever-evolving travel and hospitality market, staying ahead means innovating faster. Agentic AI, supercharged by models like Gemini, delivers this crucial edge. It empowers providers to pinpoint emerging trends and unlock novel service opportunities with unparalleled analytical depth. Crucially, AI is also now enabling the rapid creation of even more sophisticated tools.

• Innovating Faster & Accelerating Development: Gemini Code Assist can support development teams in coding faster and more efficiently, reducing the time it takes to build and launch new features for booking platforms, mobile apps, or internal operational tools, and even automating code creation to accelerate the entire development process..

For example, HomeToGo, a marketplace with the world’s largest selection of vacation rentals, is known for rapid testing and quick go-to-market approach. The company continuously evolves its AI solutions in real time, giving them the tools to significantly reduce the development time and to release to the market faster.

• AI-Driven Predictive Insights: Gemini and Google Cloud's AI suite can analyse vast datasets and identify complex patterns, delivering actionable predictive insights; enabling travel and hospitality providers to anticipate market shifts, forecast demand with greater accuracy, and proactively tailor offerings to evolving guest preferences. Ultimately leading to more informed strategic decisions and new revenue opportunities.

HomeToGo, again is leading the way using machine learning to understand what customers are looking for through “Smart AI Reviews” processing and deriving insights from data to improve relevance and decision-making for travelers.

By embracing these AI-driven transformations and the latest agentic capabilities, travel and hospitality organizations can not only enhance operational efficiency but also create more personalized, engaging, and ultimately, more memorable experiences for every traveler and guest.

Ready to launch your AI voyage? Explore the full suite of cloud and AI solutions from Google Cloud on our industry pages, as well as further case studies of leading organizations transforming their operations and offerings with gen AI.

Opening image created with Imagen 3 running on Vertex AI, using the prompt: Can you please help me make a colorful illustration for a business magazine in a flat style. Show a series of commercial airplanes flying across the sky from bottom left to upper right, and their contrails are rainbow colored. The perspective is of a viewer on the ground, looking straight up as the planes fly over head.