AI Travel Apps You Can Use Right Now (That Are not ChatGPT) [2023]
What are the best AI Travel Apps? Artificial Intelligence is transforming every industry, with travel and tourism making no difference. Recently, I wrote about How to plan a trip with ChatGPT and save money. That article became so popular that I received lots of questions regarding AI-powered travel apps, so I decided to create this post.
You can see the search trends for “AI Travel” and “AI Travel apps”, and the large volumes show how people are increasingly more interest in leveraging the latest technology in their every day use cases, such as planning a trip itinerary, searching for flights, accommodation, transportation and experiences.
Here’s a list of the top AI travel apps that you can use right now.
What are the best AI travel apps in 2023?
1. Hopper
Hopper is a travel booking app that uses AI to predict flight prices that has been the top-1 most downloaded travel app in North America. They aspire to be the world’s best and most fun app to book travel.
How is Hopper using AI?
Hopper analyzes historical patterns of price changes and uses them to predict if prices are likely to go up or down in the future and help customers time their purchases. Travel apps like Hopper have only occasional interactions with users, it makes it more difficult to build individual profiles. However, because Hopper has such a large user base, it can identify similar types of customers and model recommendations on the characteristics of those cohorts.
Hopper notifies you of super-low rates on hotels, flights, and car rentals. It also predicts the prices of flights and references you if you are below, on par or above average prices. Many of the deals save you up to 40% on travel costs! The app is super simple to use and when I started using it, it was only for flights. Now they have grown into a whole technology stack that they call Hopper Cloud.
Hopper sells over $4.5 billion of travel every year, raising over $600 million of private capital and are backed by some of the world’s largest institutional investors and banks. Hopper also plants 2 trees for free on your behalf to help offset the carbon footprint of your travel as part of our Hopper Trees program.
2. Kayak
I’ve been in love with Kayak since 2013. Kayak is a travel tool and search engine that has been around for several years (competing with Google Flights and others).
The focus of Kayak is to quickly research and show you the best travel options and alternatives to the destinations you would like to go. Kayak will help you find the best prices and travel times for flights, hotels, apartment, cruises, trains, rental cars, and even vacation packages.
How is Kayak using AI?
Kayak is using AI in different ways. With NLP, the company can process hundreds of thousands of user-generated hotel and flight reviews, condense them into a few snippets that capture the general essence of them all, and sort each item into the buckets users are searching for. NLP is also powering Kayak’s march into AI integration with chat bots and assistants such as Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, Slack, Facebook Messenger, and more.
Kayak also uses algorithms to tag photos of hotels, determining whether they’re showing a beach, bedroom, bathroom, or gym, for example. But the tagging process isn’t perfect. Even if your AI achieves 95% accuracy, Keller said, 50 out of 1,000 predictions will still end up being wrong.
How I use Kayak
- Forward your bookings to trips@kayak.com (or connect your inbox), and they will automatically add your reservation to their trips planner. In there you can have all the info you need at hand, and the app updates you on flight status, gate changes and other information in real time. It’s so handy! Totally recommended for people who love having everything organized in a single place. It gives plenty of peace of mind.
- Join Kayak’s email list and save up to 35% with their Private Deals.
3. Booking.com
Booking.com is available in 43 languages and offers more than 28 million reported accommodation listings, including over 6.6 million homes, apartments, and other unique places to stay. Wherever travelers want to go, Booking.com makes it easy and provides them with 24/7 customer support.
How is Booking.com using AI?
Booking.com deploys AI in every part of thire business, ranging from our security teams to customer service. They use AI to personalize your experience showing you the hotels that would suit you best. In addition, they have an AI-powered chatbot live for all English-speaking bookers that handles 60% of all requests automatically within seconds. In marketing, the majority of Booking.com marketing spend is driven by data models with learning algorithms behind them.
4. Skyscanner
Skyscanner is an aggregator search engine and travel agency based in Edinburgh, Scotland. The site is available in over 30 languages and is used by 100 million people per month. Skyscanner lets people research and book travel options for their trips, including flights, hotels and car hire.
How is Skyscanner using aI?
Skyscanner uses AI for its chatbot. When the Skyscanner chatbot is activated on Facebook or Whatsapp, users can enter their destination to start the conversation with the bot. If you are unsure where to go, just type ‘anywhere,’ and then the bot will provide you with suggestions, including the price for each destination using real-time search trends.
When you tell the chatbot the travel date, it will show you the cheapest flights to your destination. Then the bot will redirect you to the official Skyscanner website to complete the booking upon selecting to book a flight. Moreover, the Skyscanner chatbot allows you to receive price alerts for a flight. Skyscanner reported that it had surpassed one million traveler interactions with the application.
5. Expedia
Expedia is a popular website for booking travel accommodations. Expedia aims to provide the lowest prices for any booking, which is backed up with the “Best Price Guarantee.” Users can search for hotels, cars, flights, or packages based on your travel requirements, and sort through accommodations that meet your needs.
How is Expedia using AI?
Expedia is not only using AI and ML to bring better experiences to its customers but has also managed to harness the power of AI to reduce business costs. A large part of Expedia’s platform is being able to provide customer service to its customers who might be experiencing troubles with their travels and need immediate assistance.
This was especially true when the pandemic first hit, and people had to cancel trips, flights and figure out if they were even able to travel. To improve its conversational capabilities, Expedia Group powers more than 29 million virtual conversations. This implementation has saved the company more than 40% in variable agent costs.
6. WayAway
WayAway is a flight aggregator that provides travelers with the best rates on airline tickets. Its innovative search finds the best option for specific travel dates by comparing airfares offered by all major US and global airlines and agencies. The aggregator displays final prices, without any hidden fees.
I’ve covered WayAway in detail in this post, check out the full review here.
Ongoing Offer
7. iPlan.ai
iplan.ai is a travel planner with help of artificial intelligence. Its goal is to create a personalized an itinerary in few seconds. Your plan is made by AI based on who you are, how you are traveling, and what matters the most for you, that’s why it is unique to each individual.
The tool is free and always will be. You can customize, change and edit as much as you need to get what you are exactly looking for, and their AI adapts to that. After creating your itinerary, you can share your plans with the people you are traveling with and give them access to see or edit. Collaborate to get a better plan.
8. ChatGPT
ChatGPT 3 is a beast. The OpenAI technology is changing and revolutionizing tons of fronts, and this is just the beginning. ChatGPT 4 is coming out soon and will be able to produce more elaborated results. If you are curious about how to use ChatGPT as a travel planner, check out this detailed guide.
AI Travel Apps: Conclusion
We are just scratching the surface of the power of AI, and I’m already looking forward to which AI travel apps we’ll see in the upcoming years, and what features they bring.
Right now we see a range of concrete use cases from chatbots, to better recommendations, finding deals, experience personalization, travel planners and and fare alerts.
As usual, let me know your thoughts in the comments, or feel free to reach out to me on Instagram too.
