Today, we can obtain information and seek inspiration about our future travels in many ways when in the planning phase of the process. We can go to a travel agent/expert, check online platforms, ask our friends or family, get inspired by influencers, read a book or a travel magazine, Google it, or, since recently, ask ChatGPT (AI). In this piece I will try to explain where AI will fail in tourism and where travel experts will still be relevant.
Some people still seek information and inspiration from travel experts and some still believe they will be useful in the age of hyper AI.
I also believe they will, but in a very specialized way and not in the way as we know them now. We were debating this with Jaka in our sTOUdio Discord server, where he posted an article of the author writing about testing ChatGPT when planning her travels.
''When it comes to travel, it doesn’t make sense to trust anything automated or generic: That’s why we still find ourselves going back to the pros'', she says.
I don't think most people go to the pros. We are already trusting millions of generic blogs, which will soon, if they are not yet, become automated and be written with the help of ChatGPT. The same goes for travel magazines. We are trusting millions of influencers that influence our travel decision by mostly giving out generic tips. Top 10 destinations, top 10 restaurants, etc.
I think that AI models are going to become less generic when it comes to travel recommendations and with that, travel experts will need to become even more specialized and give you the experience and the information AI will not be able to. These will usually be personal experiences which only you as an expert had or information about less-visited places and stories about the people in those places. While places are more easily found, interesting people in these places are not. And I believe interesting people you meet make the travel experience valuable.
Activities or places who don't yet exist on online marketplaces or appear in travel blogs are the real value you as an expert could provide today. Because there's not yet a description for these offers and they’re not listed online, you can basically create your own story from your personal experiences and AI will probably not be able to do the same.
Last year, we had our retreat in a very peripheral, lesser-known Greeek island in an even lesser-known camp. The camp is owned by one of the most interesting people I’ve met, Panos. A very special character who made our island experience exciting but also very raw. He’s not your cup-of-tea person. But that made it interesting.
When I talked to people about my experience, no one knew about this island and everyone was very excited when I told them the stories about Panos and our retreat. This is one example of an experience that is very hard to find online and will not be recommended by typical travel agents. My hypothesis is also that these kinds of experiences will not soon be recommended by AI. That’s what I also wanted to find out.
To check, I asked ChatGPT about the camp and it failed.
Sure, if you know what to look for, you will find the camp on Google. But you will not get more than the classic information about it. Nor Google nor ChatGPT will be able to craft the story we as people who experienced it can.
I triend another example of an experience Jaka designed in a project we did for Tourism Ljubljana. In Ljubljana we have one of the only persons in Europe that repairs umbrellas for a living. She is an interesting person in itself and just being with her and hearing about her stories is an experience in itself. This is not a mainstream tourist experience and is also not promoted as such. That’s why it’s hard to find it as a tourist. Again I wanted to test if ChatGPT will be able to tell me more about it. It failed, again.
Then again, I asked it if it can give me recommendations for some lesser-known experiences in Ljubljana. It failed again by giving me mostly classic recommendations.
Let's say sooner or later, people will start building more awareness about these experiences and promoting them heavily.
That means if you would want to be a travel expert, you would have to be looking for hidden, non-touristic places like the camp on Leros and interesting people like Panos all the time, which I would happily be doing all my life.
This was actually the idea behind our marketplace for local experiences and hidden gems, LocalsFromZero. But I think now instead of creating a marketplace, where you put all of those experiences into the public and again promoting them intensively which makes them loose their charm, my idea is to create a private community where people pay a fee/membership to enter and get exclusive information about such lesser-known experiences and people.
To this group and this group only you share these hidden, off grid experiences and gems and provide them with off-chain, offline information they can't find with Google or AI. I predict this will be the golden information travel experts will be able to give out in the age of AI.
And this is where AI will fail in tourism and where experts can position themselves. AI will not be able to share personal experiences that you as a travel expert had. It will help you craft them, but not create them instead of you.
"I would say that the real key is whether somebody can understand you better than you understand yourself. The algorithms that are trying to hack us, they will never be perfect. There is no such thing as understanding perfectly everything or predicting everything. You don't need perfect, you just need to be better than the average human being."
https://www.wired.com/story/artificial-intelligence-yuval-noah-harari-tristan-harris/
Hmm time to start building this database of hidden experiences? Only accesible for FromZero Travelers NFT owners or people buy the database in form of Notion or Gumroad online for a fee.
Tots,kveščns,konsrns