HOLIDAYS AND TRAVEL
How AI can assist and enhance your travel planning, itinerary and overall experience
Personalised travel ideas
Summer (or winter) is coming and you’re feeling the need to stretch out on a beach (or ski down a mountain). With a whole planet full of travel opportunities, you just need to decide where to go, how long to stay and what to do while you’re there, given restraints of time, budget and entertainment preferences. Why not let an AI app such as Vacay suggest where to visit and what to explore? This is what generative AI was built for, after all. Remember, of course, that AI apps come and go and that their suggestions should be double-checked before you commit any time and money.
AI travel agents
Layla, Kayak and Eddy Travels all function as travel agents, in other words you prompt them to find the best flights, hotels, car hire and travel insurance and they’ll search up options. Even better, they’ll assist with the actual booking processes and other logistics, ensuring (in theory) that all the right things are locked down at the right time for the right price, just like actual human travel agents used to do in bricks-and-mortar offices until about 2005. As always, some of these apps will encourage you to pay for premium or freemium plans, or otherwise take a cut, so tread cautiously.
Travel price trackers
Apps such as Hopper will help you make sense of the ridiculously complex pricing system of flights, car hire, accommodation and other necessary travel expenditure. These tools take note of trends in pricing over time and give it their best shot at finding you the best possible deals, depending on when and where you’re planning on travelling. Choose an app such as TripIt if you want all the info stored in a single location, too. Still, even AI can’t explain why a given flight between, say, Dublin and Paris costs £78 more if you fly on a Wednesday before 5am with two bags instead of three.
Real-time language translation
Keen language students many of us may be, but there will come a point in any seasoned globetrotter’s travels when we are faced with a spoken conversation or written information that we urgently need to understand but don’t. In that situation, AI translation apps are a potential time- and money-saver. Samsung Live Translate, I Translate, Hi Translate and many other tools will allow you to understand whether that stern-looking official is asking for your passport or just saying hello, or indeed if the sign on the transit lounge wall says ‘Buses depart at noon’ or ‘Trains arrive at midnight’.
Currency value predictors
Treat any app which purports to make you money with zero effort with massive caution, just as you would with any human who made the same claim. Still, AI that tracks relative currency strengths for the benefit of the traveller is a useful and relatively harmless tool, as long as it doesn’t actually ask for your credit card number, so have a look at XE Currency and others. These use machine learning to follow currency fluctuation patterns far more adeptly than you or I ever could, especially if you’re travelling outside the familiar pound, dollar and euro zones.
Airport lounge finders
Why perch on a rickety bench covered in Wotsit crumbs at a noisy, hot airport when you can slide into a VIP lounge and put your feet up in air-conditioned luxury while guzzling free coffee? If LoungeBuddy is to be believed, it’ll let you know which airports have such lounges available at no or low cost, a fact of which most of the general public are otherwise unaware. Believe us, this might just affect your entire flight route planning. We’ve endured too many hours in ‘general population’ in too many departure lounges in our time for this not to seem like a highly attractive option.
Navigation
You probably use sat-nav on a regular basis, assuming you ever go anywhere new of course, but did you know that apps such as Immersive View, Waze and Google Maps all use AI to track traffic patterns and adjust your journey-time predictions accordingly? If you think this is a useful feature on your way to the office on a daily basis, imagine how handy it will be if you’re driving, walking or using public transport in an unfamiliar country, especially if you don’t speak the language, the locals don’t speak yours and you’re exploring a remote area.
Packing assistants
Packing apps such as PackMate take at least some of the pain out of packing your suitcase by recommending what you’ll need (and what you definitely won’t) for a given trip. Off hiking in Patagonia? Take sunblock, don’t take high heels. Travelling to a wine-tasting event in Toulouse? Bring paracetamol, don’t bother packing a bottle of Lambrini. These apps will also let you know useful local info such as amenities and events and the items you’ll need to enjoy them most; weather- and temperature-related paraphernalia that you need to take with you; and even minor irritations such as the likelihood of mosquito bites (pack extra bug spray).