Artificial intelligence in tourism software solutions: Opportunities and challenges until 2024

Artificial Intelligence (AI) used in the software industry has experienced great success during the last years. Especially emerging and technology affine markets in Asia and Latin America offer great opportunities for new AI solutions that support the customer. Additionally, to the technological development, there is also a growing demand in the tourism and hospitality industry. As a result, software companies specialized in the tourism and hospitality industry have started to adopt artificial intelligence in many different forms in their products. Especially in the tourism industry, customers require personalized service and are also highly emotional. As a consequence, the industry lives or dies on excellent service. Furthermore, there is a high pressure on prices, AI and automatization can help to offer tourism products and services for reasonable costs. However, AI software systems have become more and more complicated and society’s expectations regarding the capabilities and intelligence of such systems are also growing. That results in higher costs, higher difficulty levels and higher computational requirements tourism software companies have to cope with. For these reasons, the main goal of this research is to find sectors within the tourism industry in which AI software solutions are helpful for the travelers’ experience and also reasonable in efforts and costs for tourism software technology providers within a defined time horizon of 5 years. To get an impression of future developments, various foresight methods such as the Delphi method and a structural analysis were used. This paper elaborates on the practical opportunities and challenges to be faced by tourism software companies when developing AI software solutions and provides recommendations on how to deal with these challenges. The analysis shows that major improvements because of AI can be implemented in online travel agencies (OTAs) which are considered as the most important field for application of AI technology. Within this sector, chatbots, individual offers, mobile apps and social networks as a data source will improve travelers experience which leads consequently to an increase in revenues.