Traveling in style with Gen AI
Reshaping the corporate travel experience with generative AI
In Summary
Most corporate travelers find the trip planning process to be overwhelming, complicated, and stressful, often experiencing it as fragmented.
Generative AI has the potential to transform the travel experience by delivering greater convenience and ease throughout the inspiration, planning, and booking phases.
Industry leaders in the travel sector acknowledge the significant value of generative AI and recognize the necessity of scaling its implementation.
Corporate travelers need simplicity and convenience
Today’s corporate travel landscape demands extensive planning, with many individuals involved in beginning the process early—sometimes up to six months in advance for international trips. This journey is often time-consuming, stressful, and fragmented, spanning three key stages: inspiration, planning, and booking.
Our research, based on surveys of 4,000 corporate travelers globally including 800 C-suite industry executives, was further enriched by a crowdsourcing initiative with 100 travelers from six countries spanning four continents and a data-driven statistical analysis of their perspectives. The report synthesizes the insights gained from this comprehensive study.
At each stage, corporate travelers encounter a vast array of choices. Managing multiple browser tabs, bookmarking websites, using offline spreadsheets, and taking detailed notes can quickly become overwhelming, leading many to abandon their travel decisions for later and in some rare cases abandoning it compeltely.
We examined the challenges corporate travelers face across these three critical phases.
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Corporate Travelers rely on a diverse range of sources, often overlapping, to seek inspiration for targets, activities, and types of trips. This variety of resources highlights the complexity of the decision-making process.
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Corporate Travelers frequently navigate multiple websites to gather the necessary information. This process makes the overall planning experience time-consuming, stressful, and fragmented.
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The absence of personalized options during the booking process and the difficulty in easily securing the best deals continue to be significant challenges for corporate travelers.
Survey reveals convenience and simplicity as priority
Corporate Travelers' preferences show remarkable consistency across different age groups and income levels. They seek convenience and simplicity, with a strong desire for benefits such as personalized trip planning, the best deals, and curated itineraries.
Key expectations for the future of travel include:
- A one-click booking process
- Intuitive search functionality
- Intelligent, live support for booking and inquiries
- Automatic, personalized suggestions (e.g., schedules, itineraries), similar to having a local travel guide
- A simplified view of offers, including points, miles, and redemption options
- Clear processes for cancellations, modifications, and safety advisories
- Automatic prompts highlighting the best spots and hidden gems
- A journey assistant providing real-time reminders and updates
These features reflect travelers’ desire for a streamlined, hassle-free experience that enhances every stage of their trip.
Gen AI has the potential to reshape the traveler experience
A generative AI-powered solution has the potential to significantly enhance the travel experience by providing personalized, integrated, one-stop access to a wide range of travel services. Travelers are increasingly open to adopting such technology. In fact, it has been observed through an internal study that more than half of corporate travelers are willing to use conversational AI solutions to enhance their overall travel experience.
During the initial phase of identifying trip purpose for corporate travelers, say for corporate events, generative AI tools can alleviate the overwhelm caused by an abundance of overlapping choices. By considering each traveler’s unique preferences and motivations, it filters out irrelevant options, highlighting only the most appealing and rewarding choices. At the planning stage, these tools can personalize itineraries, simplify the management of travel details, and provide seamless tracking. For the trip booking—the most complex part of the process—generative AI can present a centralized, easy-to-navigate view of options such as payments, offers, rewards, and final itineraries.
Generative AI also has the potential to transform how travel businesses operate, enabling them to maximize revenue by analyzing travelers' preferences and responding to booking patterns in real-time. This allows businesses to better meet corporate needs while driving growth.
Are you ready to experience the new generational corporate travel experience?
Across the travel industry, top leaders are increasingly recognizing the transformative value generative AI can bring to both client-facing and internal operations. As many as 82% of travel executives are prioritizing the adoption of generative AI to achieve cost savings and operational efficiency, while over 70% are also leveraging it to drive top-line growth and enhance brand perception. However, nearly all acknowledge that to fully capture the benefits of generative AI, it must be implemented at scale—across the enterprise and throughout the entire value chain.
Realizing the full potential of generative AI requires a commitment to several key principles, including:
- Evaluating every strategic decision within the context of the value chain
- Prioritizing data readiness and AI integration
- Embedding responsibility and ethical considerations
- Continuously assessing what defines a successful working experience and how best to support it
The potential of generative AI to revolutionize the travel industry is vast. Travel companies have a unique opportunity to harness its power to simplify and streamline the complexity travelers currently face across all stages of their journey. Embarking on a data and AI-driven transformation is akin to a challenging expedition—it requires dedicated investment in advanced technologies and establishing the necessary foundation to unlock AI’s full potential. However, the resulting improvements in customer experience and business outcomes will make the journey well worth the effort.
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