AI Co-Pilots May Be The Future of Membership-Only Luxury Travel

We exist at the intersection of behavior and technology.

When innovation meets expectation, that’s where the magic happens — particularly as today’s consumers increasingly expect tailored content, services and products that cater to their unique preferences and needs.

Within certain industries, like the rapidly evolving luxury travel landscape, the stakes for meeting end-user expectations are even higher. To that end, generative artificial intelligence (AI) is emerging as a tool to unlock the potential of hyper-personalization, and the technology is revolutionizing how businesses engage with their audiences while reshaping the way personalized experiences are curated for discerning travelers.

“The ideal vision is combining the old style of a luxury travel agent that knows the destination, knows you, and gives you personal recommendations, with the real-time digital functionality of a Booking.com or other travel platform,” Joan Roca, CEO at private membership travel service Essentialist, tells PYMNTS for the “AI Effect” series, explaining that “people are becoming addicted to interactivity in real-time.”

That behavioral shift means the days of sifting through countless travel websites and agonizing over the plethora of options available — much less calling up a living travel agent on the phone — are disappearing, particularly within the upper end of the travel market.

AI algorithms are adept at processing vast amounts of data, including user preferences, travel history and real-time trends, allowing travel firms to create personalized itineraries that leverage predictive analytics and historical data to build out and tap on the unique preferences of each user.

“We are connecting to your internal explorer that lives within your heart and loves fashion, loves theater and loves cooking, and we can deliver a customized itinerary in real time,” Roca explained.

“Delivery time is a crucial element,” he added, highlighting the challenge of catering to a digitally savvy audience of high-net-worth individuals who expect seamless, real-time interactions.

Read more: Essentialist Launches AI-Powered App for Planning Luxury Travel

Bridging White-Glove Human Touch With AI

The implementation of AI within Essentialist’s operations focuses on enhancing the efficiency and speed of service. The system aids in context-based decision-making, offering recommendations that align with a member’s history and preferences. The real-time nature of the app allows members to communicate with the service team, making adjustments or seeking clarifications swiftly.

Roca emphasized that AI, as used by his firm’s platform, is not a standalone solution but a tool that supports the human touch and amplifies the capabilities of the service team.

“We have our own database, and then we have our data about our members, and we are using AI to help with the matching — it’s a lot more fluid, and we are doing it much better than we were using traditional methods,” he explained. “AI is helping us to be faster contextually and to analyze options that we would’ve never been able to analyze [manually].”

“It’s accelerating the impact of what makes us unique, which is the matching between the destination and the member’s preferences,” Roca added.

Having a personalized assistant at your fingertips, capable of understanding your preferences and curating the perfect itinerary, instantly available on a 24/7 basis is a compelling phase shift for both the travel industry and the traveler audience.

AI-driven personalization involves customizing content, recommendations and interactions based on individual user data and preferences. This approach goes beyond a one-size-fits-all strategy, creating a more intimate and relevant connection between businesses and consumers.

Still, Roca said that the technology — and the end-user behavior — isn’t there yet for a fully independent AI agent to be a scalable proposition.

Digital Travel Tools Have Become Essential

The integration of AI benefits businesses by improving operational efficiency, and that’s where Roca said that AI is most valuable, at least right now: as an integral part of the service’s backend, assisting in processes like matching destinations and members more efficiently.

He expresses reservations about AI completely taking over the travel planning experience, particularly as it relates to itinerary-creation aspects such as member knowledge.

The creation of bespoke, luxury travel experiences involve intricate details and exclusive access that may be challenging for AI to replicate, Roca noted. Additionally, the intimate knowledge of a member’s preferences requires a level of trust that might be compromised if shared with multiple AI systems.

“For us, AI is another tool within our back-end tool set. For travelers, if they type ‘Three days in Paris’ into ChatGPT, they will get something similar. What we recognize is that what’s most important to planning your trip is who you are. You might hate me, for example, if I plan a trip with five hours in the Louvre when you were looking for a discotheque,” Roca said.

“But what AI can do with matching is incredible, with personalized context is incredible… it is able to make connections that you would have missed or I would have missed,” he added. “It’s the best matching tool that we’ve seen by a factor of 10.”

“Still, we believe our solution is more possible and usable than a pure AI solution, where there are issues with hallucination and people might have a hard time both sharing information with a pure AI, as well as believing what it said to them,” Roca said.

Looking ahead, Roca said he sees the luxury travel sector as ready for disruption through technology. He envisions two key areas of innovation: hyper-personalization and immediacy.

Hyper-personalization involves an in-depth understanding of the traveler’s identity and preferences, providing a level of customization that goes beyond existing mass-market tools. Immediacy, on the other hand, emphasizes the need for real-time interactions and decision-making, offering personalized recommendations and bookings on the fly.

“In 12 months, it’s going to be a completely different landscape,” he said.