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, and also how to use Google Bard to book flights. Those articles became so popular that I received many questions regarding AI-powered travel apps, so I created 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 interested in leveraging the latest technology in their everyday 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.
UPDATE
If you are looking for apps that use AI to find cheap flights, check out this follow-up post on AI apps for flight booking.
What are the best AI travel apps in 2023?
1. Kayak
I’ve been in love with Kayak since 2013 and it’s an app I love for planning, tracking my flights, and even finding the right place to book my tickets. 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 to. Kayak will help you find the best prices and travel times for flights, hotels, apartments, 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 their general essence, and sort each item into the buckets users are searching for. NLP also powers Kayak’s march into AI integration with chatbots 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 be wrong.
How I use Kayak
- Forward your bookings to [email protected] (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.
2. 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.
3. 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 their travel requirements and sort through accommodations that meet their needs.
Expedia also recently introduced a ChatGPT plugin, read my review on this post.
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.
4. Eddy Travels AI Travel Assistant
Eddy Travels AI Assistant is powered by Kiwi.com. It is a fully automatic travel chatbot that uses artificial intelligence, and it is available 24/7 to help users find the best travel deals. You can chat with the AI Assistant to search for flights, accommodation, and other travel products with prices and inventory in realtime. The Eddy Travels AI Assistant works via their website, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Telegram, and WhatsApp.
The app is free, but they offer Here are some of they offer a premium subscription with more advanced features. With Eddy’s AI Travel Assistant, you can save time and money by finding the best travel deals, getting personalized travel advice from a real travel expert, booking flights and accommodations in seconds, asking questions about travel destinations, and staying up-to-date on the latest travel news and trends.
5. 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.
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
Get $10 when you sign-up for WayAway Plus (free trial), and get 5% cashback on your PayPal account.
7. Google Bard
Google Bard is a large language model chatbot developed by Google AI and an aggressive response to ChatGPT. Bard can generate text, translate languages, write different kinds of creative content, and answer pretty much any of your questions quickly. And so far, it’s free.
I put Google Bard to test in this post: How To Use Google Bard To Book Flights. Make sure to check some tips there!
8. Tryp.com
Tryp.com is a Danish online travel agency that facilitates the booking of transportation services (including rail, buses, flights, and ferries), ancillary services, and accommodation. It is a registered IATA travel agency and was crafted to be your own personal travel assistant.
With help of AI, Tryp.com can propose unique itineraries and grab deals that wouldn’t be seen anywhere else. The cool part about Tryp.com is that it targets uncommon airports and destinations. Most other tools find great flights to 99% of the biggest airports. But what if you would like to travel somewhere else?
Coming from a small town at the end of the world (Ushuaia, Argentina), I can relate to those trying to score good deals to unknown locations. With its proprietary AI-powered algorithm, Tryp.com is able to propose crazy itinieraries that are incredibly cheap, but also fun experiences. You can choose how conservative you want your trip/stopovers to be, date range you’d like to travel, plus trip length. You can also add hotels and accommodation from the same dashboard, and explore local points and attractions.
9. ChatGPT
ChatGPT is a beast. OpenAI’s technology is changing and revolutionizing many fronts, and this is just the beginning. ChatGPT 4 was released recently, and it is able to produce more elaborate results. If you are curious about how to use ChatGPT as a travel planner, check out this detailed guide.
ChatGPT Plus also supports plugins, and some travel companies such as Kayak, Expedia, and Trip.com have plugins available. However, these plugins still suck for complex queries (read more here).
10. 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 fr7ee 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.
11. 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.
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 fare alerts.
As usual, let me know your thoughts in the comments, or feel free to reach out to me on Instagram too.
Tryp.com is a must on this list.