Can you plan a vacation using ChatGPT? This is the question that was asked and put into practice by Oded Battat, general director of the Traveland travel agency in Bridgeport (United States), who has shown that AI is closer than ever to setting up a dream trip in the form as comfortable as possible.
The truth is that there are those who believe that ChatGPT can already organize a vacation autonomously, but for now, those who want to travel and use this powerful new artificial intelligence software will probably have to lower their expectations.
To put this revolutionary way of organizing trips to the test, Battat asked ChatGPT what outings he could propose to his clients traveling to Tuscany, Italy, to see if the program was useful in relation to his work and the result was a large list of activities, places and plans without waste.
ChatGPT offered a total of 14 activities, including visits to wineries and museums, with an ice cream stop in the square of the medieval hilltop town of San Gimignano: “I knew all these things,” Battat said, though he admitted thanks The AI was spared the trouble of compiling all the information and delivered to him in a format that he could e-mail to each of his clients.
In this sense, Battat believes that there is a big difference between the already known chatbots of travel web pages and a generative AI such as ChatGPT, since in addition to analyzing or summarizing content from a huge set of information, including web pages, books and other writings available on the Internet, you can use that data to create new original content.
The travel industry may never be the same again. The travel community can now "converse" with the system, giving it information such as the destination, time of year and their own interests, and receive back a personalized itinerary adorned with vivid descriptions thanks to its advanced natural language functions allow them to also understand and respond in a more colloquial way.
Another example of the capabilities of ChatGPT today is the plan for a journalist who requested a two-day itinerary in the town of Whistler, British Columbia, for a winter excursion generated ideas such as snowshoeing and a guide to show him the flora and local wildlife, or take a husky sled ride “with some gorgeous huskies”.
However, ChatGPT is not perfect, and one of its biggest drawbacks is that its data base does not currently go beyond 2021, nor does it have access to important travel-related data that can change from moment to moment, such as airline schedules and weather forecasts.
It also has a very marked problem with the new AI and that is that it does not always know how to distinguish between reliable and false information on the Internet, so it can deliver answers that are not true, in addition to offering "biased content" on certain occasions, as OpenAI recognizes. about your main product.
Despite these problems and the challenges posed by the new AI, tools like ChatGPT can become a great help for those who travel. According to Chekitan Dev, a professor at Cornell University's Nolan School of Hospitality Management, one of the keys to the future will be for artificial intelligences to access up-to-the-minute information, taking into account every sudden change to plan the best vacation.
