Artificial Intelligence Tools for Smart Tourism

Development

Tomáš Gajdošík(&) and Matúš Marciš

Faculty of Economics, Matej Bel University, Tajovského 10,

975 90 Banská Bystrica, Slovakia
{tomas.gajdosik,matus.marcis}@umb.sk

Abstract. The recent development and use of information technologies in

tourism lead to innovations that have revolutionised and automated almost every
phase of tourist journey. In order to respond to these changes, the smart tourism
concept emerged, providing real-time solutions, advanced analytics and
enhancing tourist experience. The volume of created data and the need of real-
time interactions and results challenge the tourism sector and open the door for
the use of artificial intelligence (AI). However, there has been a lack of academic
research on AI and its connection to smart tourism development so far.
Therefore, the aim of the paper is to review artificial intelligence tools used in
tourism and to identify its role in smart tourism development. The article focuses
on best practice examples and case studies that examine the use of AI phe-
nomena in tourism.

Keywords: Artificial intelligence
Smart tourism
Machine learning

Tourist experience

1 Introduction

Artificial intelligence is revolutionising almost every sector of economy as it enables

computers to make autonomous decisions leading to more effective processes. Due to
the fast-paced development of tourism, the adoption of artificial intelligence is inevi-
table as it helps in service delivery and value creation processes [1]. Tourists are much
more demanding personalisation and have more digital experience. The challenge is to
integrate their real-time interaction with a tailor-made experience. Moreover, tourism
businesses need to analyse a large volume of data and react within the shortest time to
ensure their competitive position.
The artificial intelligence can help to understand the tourist’s needs, as well as
respond to challenges of tourism businesses. It can provide special, tailor-made
experiences, and even promote opportunities to better explore a tourism destination.
The new AI tools could also ensure that tourism providers are more efficient, inno-
vative and sustainable [2].

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019

R. Silhavy (Ed.): CSOC 2019, AISC 985, pp. 392–402, 2019.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19810-7_39
 Artificial Intelligence Tools for Smart Tourism Development 393

2 Artificial Intelligence in the Context of Smart Tourism

The smart concept has emerged as a result of the rise of information technology and the
need for sustainability. It is mainly based on information technologies that integrate
hardware, software and network technologies to provide real-time awareness of the real
world and advanced analytics to help people make more intelligent decisions about
alternatives, as well as actions that will optimise business processes and business
performances [3]. These technologies trigger innovation and lead to higher competi-
tiveness, while ensuring a sustainable development [4, 5].
As tourism is highly dependent on information technologies [6, 7] and in the last
years these technologies have been so tightly knitted into the fabric of the travel expe-
rience and management of tourism product [8], the smart phenomenon has also pene-
trated into the tourism sector. Information technologies in smart tourism development
should enhance tourist experience giving all the related real-time information about the
destination and its services in the planning phase, enhance access to real-time infor-
mation to assist tourists in exploring the destinations during the trip and prolong the
engagement to relive the experience by providing the descent feedback after the trip [9].
Within these smart technologies, AI is becoming a promising way how to make intel-
ligent human-like decisions. Although AI has existed since the past three decades, it is
the power achieved by processing and storage technologies due to rapid advancement of
Moore’s law that makes a difference in the way processes are being automated [10].
Artificial intelligence has been structured from the beginning of the field into four
different areas. (1) problem solving, (2) knowledge representation and knowledge-based
system, (3) machine learning and (4) distributed artificial intelligence [11].
In the tourism sector, machine learning (ML) is the most applicable area of AI, as it
is focused on predictive and perspective analytics. It involves educating the algorithm in
the sense of combining learning from experience, learning form data and following the
instructions. Machine learning needs data, so the algorithm can be trained and thus to
continue the self-improvement process. Subsequently, big data has become a key
component of the information technologies infrastructure in smart tourism. Unlike the
traditional data, big data refers to large growing datasets that include heterogeneous
formats and has a complex nature that requires powerful technologies and advanced
algorithms [12]. Traditional analytic systems are not suitable for handling big data [13],
while machine learning functions in a complex environment and takes into consider-
ation many variables. Based on McKinsey report [14] the potential impact of AI in
tourism can double what is achievable using traditional analytic methods, amounting to
between 7 and almost 12% of total revenue for the sector (Fig. 1).
Its capabilities lie in understanding, reasoning and learning. A key differentiator
between AI and traditional analytical techniques is the possibility of applying
unstructured big data in audio, video, image or text formats. AI and machine learning in
smart tourism context should collect, process and utilise big data along all phases of
tourist journey. However, there is a lack of academic research on AI and its connection
to smart tourism development so far. Moreover Navío-Marco et al. [15] call for the
investigation of the potential of AI in travel, tourism and hospitality industries and the
immediate satisfaction through digital technologies, where human-computer integration
plays a major role.
394 T. Gajdošík and M. Marciš

Fig. 1. The impact of artificial intelligence on various sectors of economy.

3 Materials and Methods

The aim of the paper is to review artificial intelligence tools used in tourism sector and
to identify its role in smart tourism development. In order to examine the use of
artificial intelligence in tourism, best practice examples as multiple case studies are
chosen. The best practice has become a popular qualitative research method in business
and tourism domain, as it describes leading cases as role models. The case study
methodology is suitable both in tourism studies and in the field of information science,
when technology is dynamic, changing and newly implemented [16]. The presented
study uses multiple cases studies to fully and complexly examine the phenomenon of
artificial intelligence.

4 Results

The smart tourism phenomenon implies the use of information technologies during all
phases of the tourist journey. Nowadays the possibilities of information search about
destinations and their services in the planning phase is overwhelming, leading to the
need of personalised recommendations. The massive use of technologies in planning
and especially staying phase leads to the demand of real-time interaction with service
 Artificial Intelligence Tools for Smart Tourism Development 395

providers. Therefore the chat bots and virtual assistants are started to be used by
tourism businesses. The evaluation phase is focused on tourist feedback, which is many
times expressed on social media (Fig. 2).

Planning Phase Staying Phase Evaluation Phase

Personalised recommendations
Chat bots and virtual assistants
Tourists' feedback

Fig. 2. The use of artificial intelligence during tourist journey

The amount of data created and the need for real-time solutions challenge the
tourism sector. The AI tools are welcomed and are starting to be used by tourism
businesses, as well as destinations. The applications of AI in tourism consist of the in-
built mechanism and algorithms that enable to predict potential interest of tourists,
personalise the tourism product and analyse the feedback. Therefore, they are valuable
during all phases of tourist journey.

4.1 Providing Personalised Recommendations for Tourists

A tourist journey begins with the information search, decision-making and the booking
process itself. From the tourist point of view, the most significant are search engines
(e.g. Google), word of mouth marketing, hotel website, internet distribution systems
(IDS, e.g. booking.com) and online travel agencies (OTA, e.g. Expedia). Moreover,
tourists are also searching for information on social networks (e.g. Facebook), in travel
agencies, on destinations’ web and review sites (e.g. TripAdvisor). In the last years the
significance of sharing economy platforms (e.g. Airbnb) and meta search engines (e.g.
Trivago) has been rising steadily, leading to the massive creation of big data.
With the help of AI, these digital footprints of each tourist allow to understand
needs, budget and travel preferences, and suggest the right offer at the right time. AI
provides automated, personalised and intelligent travel services. It enables to learn the
behaviour, choices, and preferences to the travellers and provides a personalised
product. Recommender systems use, within the unsupervised learning, the cluster
behaviour prediction to identify the important data necessary for making a recom-
mendation. These personalisation techniques are particularly relevant in travel rec-
ommender systems. Travel recommender systems suggest products and provide tourists
with relevant information to facilitate their decision making in a complex environment
of the Internet. It provides personalised travel recommendations based on the traveller
socio-demographic features (e.g. age, gender and interests), trip characteristics (leisure,
business) or location.
396 T. Gajdošík and M. Marciš

There are many types of recommender systems, which can be content-based (content
filtering, based on item content analysis), knowledge-based (knowledge record about
users, items and needs), memory-based (database of users known preferences) or based
on collaborative filtering (uses similar users’ information to give recommendation) [17].
Among the collaborative filtering, association rule mining is becoming a promising way
how to overcome problems of scalability or increasing recommendations utility. It
provides stronger recommendations to tourists based on their past history and their
patterns of co-occurrence across the digital footprints. The recommendations are gen-
erated by finding the strongest association rules of a tourist’s frequent items and pre-
viously unknown items.
Companies like Expedia, Booking.com and TripAdvisor have already experi-
mented in this area by using AI for customer recommendation service. In order to
provide personalised recommendations and improve the anti-fraud algorithms,
TripAdvisor has developed a custom Big Data platform. It uses Hadoop to store and
process web log data, SQL Servers to report against aggregated data, Hive to query the
data and put it into tables and machine learning to continuously improve the site
experience. From ML techniques it uses Stanford’s maximum entropy classifier to
classify tourists’ reviews. This classifier “read” a review, score its helpfulness and
decide whether the review should be automatically rejected, accepted and published or
queued for human interaction. It also uses agglomerative clustering within NLP to find
clusters of phrases that has similar theme and thus provide recommendation for tourists
searching specific theme. An example of classifying hotels in New York based on
previous comments are in Fig. 3 [18].

Fig. 3. Example of hotel classification in TripAdvisor based on tourists’ comments

4.2 Interacting with Tourists Using Chat Bots and Virtual Assistants
Tourists are nowadays spending more and more time in the digital environment, which
push the tourism businesses to move into digital services. The progress in information
technologies allows virtual service agents (bots or virtual assistants) to enhance cus-
tomer experiences through real-time interactions. These experiences start in a planning
 Artificial Intelligence Tools for Smart Tourism Development 397

phase, but are more used in the dynamic context of the trip – in the staying phase.
Virtual service agents serve as 24/7 customer care service and are based on machine
learning algorithms, most of which fall in the supervised machine learning category,
which uses trained data to develop an algorithm for classifying new examples. Training
a supervised machine learning system involves providing it with representative inputs
and corresponding outputs. The example of training a bot is shown in Fig. 4.

Fig. 4. Example of training a bot for tourism purposes

With the proper pre-programming, bots can empower the tourist experience,
starting from automated reminders before the arrival to suggesting nearby activities in
the destination. However, they can also be used post-trip, to send feedback forms. The
use of bots has expanded rapidly among tourism enterprises, such as airlines, travel
agencies and hotel booking services. Dutch airline KLM was an early adopter of
chatbot technology. Their chatbot BB (Blue Bot) is based on DigitalGenius platform,
which core are deep learning algorithms, trained on customer service data and inte-
grated directly into the existing software. Once enabled, the platform automates and
increases the quality and efficiency of customer service and supports conversations
across text-based communication channels like email, chat, social media, SMS and
mobile messaging. When an agent receives a customer question, the AI suggests an
answer. The agent decides whether the proposed answer is accurate, adjusts it if
necessary and sends the response. The AI system learns based on what the agent does.
With Google Assistant’s bot users receive tips on how to pack bags for a flight based
on a destination.
Another example is Bold360, an AI-integrated chatbot and live-agent software that
uses natural language processing (NLP) to answer user questions in a conversational
and helpful manner. Bold360 uses proprietary algorithms to break down unstructured
language into recognizable inputs and consider contextual information to understand
the customer’s natural language. The AI technology can understand hidden informa-
tion, handle complex sentences that contain a lot of information and retain information
from previous questions to make conversations flow naturally. Bold360 was deployed
by Thomas Cook travel agency to deliver personalised travel solutions and provide
consistent responses across multiple markets.
398 T. Gajdošík and M. Marciš

Moreover, except of bots, virtual assistants are also used in a tourism sector,
namely hospitality. IBM´s Watson Assistant uses NLP that lets customers talk to the
hotel the way they talk to a friend. The assistants can also deliver tailored responses
based on previous behaviours and preferences. With data, skills and AI, the virtual
assistant can synchronise with guests’ calendars, interact with their homes, make
recommendations or use any number of third-party applications. The property can also
develop unique skills that extend the solution of their loyalty program, payment system
and entertainment programs. Also Amazon Alexa is being used by several hotels (e.g.
Marriott) as smart room equipment. Guests can verbally control many aspects of
lighting, temperature and audio-visual components of a room using voice commands.
The above mentioned examples show the rise of conversational artificial intelli-
gence. These conversations are mostly formed by unstructured data consisting from
either voice, text, images or videos (Table 1). Therefore, it becomes critical to capture
and understand the intent before generating the right response using machine learning
models deployed on conversational AI systems.

Table 1. The use of conversation types in tourism

Conversation Technology components Types of model used Examples in tourism
type
Voice Voice identification, Convolutional neural Personal Guide
Voice-to-text networks (CNNs), Deep SmartEcoMap, Voice
conversation neural networks (DNNs), assistant Google
Generative adversarial Assistants, Amazon
networks (GANs), Alexa
Boosted trees
Text Language detection, Recurrent neural Chatbots, Sam, Kayak,
Language understanding networks (RNNs), Bold360,
Support vector machines, Booking.com’s
Naïve Bayes Assistant, Mezi,
classification, Boosted Hipmunk
trees
Face to face Object (logo, face, Transfer learning, CNNs, Watson-enabled robot
product) detection and Artificial models with concierge, Dash the
classification, Action GANs room service robot,
recognition, Cross- Robotic butler A.L.O
camera person
reidentification

4.3 Evaluating Tourists’ Feedback

Traditionally, the evaluation phase has been left to the tourist with his photos, videos
and souvenirs physically shared among friends. With the massive use of social media,
sharing the experiences in forms of status updates, comments, photos and videos is
gaining the importance and significantly affects the reputation. AI can be applied to
customer feedback as well, as both ML and NLP can be used to make feedback
analytics more effective.
 Artificial Intelligence Tools for Smart Tourism Development 399

Tourists’ comments on review platforms, OTAs and blogs can be analysed using
text analytics, especially by opinion mining and sentiment detection. AI tools can
highlight frequently used words, distinguish sentiment, as well as look at the corre-
lation of certain words (Fig. 5). Machine learning can be used to make predictions
based on historical feedback data. NLP can address sentiment behind feedback and
collect text together to quickly uncover patterns and trends within the feedback [19].
If a tourist expresses a frustration on a social media, the AI tool analyses the tourist’s
intent and the context to automatically reach out with real-time interventions that are
most likely to deliver a positive impact. These interventions could range from providing
additional information, helping the tourist to understand the situation to more options
that can meet the tourist’s requirements.

Fig. 5. Example of sentiment analysis on the destination High Tatras

400 T. Gajdošík and M. Marciš

For example, AI platform Metis can help tourism providers digging into customer
feedback such as surveys and reviews, measure performance and instantly discover
what really matters to guests. The city of Cork uses Citibeats, that can instantly and
visually analyse data, compare opinions and feelings shared e.g. on social media to get
genuine insights on visitors. With the Citibeats segmentation of amounts of data,
positive and negative visitors’ emotion, this destination is able to focus resources more
efficiently.

5 Conclusion

The applications of AI in tourism reduce time taken to complete repetitive tasks, while
improving the accuracy of processes and leading to real-time outcomes. The artificial
intelligence tools can be used along all phases of tourist journey to enhance tourist
experiences. Thanks to digital footprints of each tourist, enormous amounts of data are
present about everything that is relevant to different stages of travel — before, during
and after a journey and collected in different formats. AI can present near-real-time data
processing, integrating and sharing using complex analytics, modelling, optimisation
and visualisation to make better operational decisions relevant both for users and
tourism providers [20].
However, the main concerns of AI include the fear of job loss, social acceptance
and the willingness of tourists to adopt and interact with AI [21] as well as the privacy
and individuality of users to share more of their data [22] and tourism providers´
cultural data silos which may result in isolation of data [23].
Moreover, research in artificial intelligence shows that complex reasoning, which
requires precision and regularity, is hard for humans but easy for machines, while tasks
that require generalisation, perception, creativity and interacting with real world are
relatively easy for humans but computationally expensive. In this vein, any task that
can be described by an algorithm or is repetitive, can be outsourced by technology.
Skills like pattern recognition, recombinant innovation, multi-sensory communication
and development of creative solutions to previously unimagined problems would be
left for humans [24]. This leads to the fact that the personal approach, which is crucial
in tourism, will not be replaced. Conversely, artificial intelligence supports it by
facilitating the work and providing more place for real hospitality. Finally, based on the
case studies presented, it can be stated that AI contributes to smart tourism develop-
ment, by enhancing overall tourist experience and providing businesses and destination
with better results and lead to overall sustainable competitive advantage.

Acknowledgments. The research was supported by the research project VEGA 1/0809/17
Reengineering of destination management organizations and good destination governance con-
formed to principles of sustainable development.
 Artificial Intelligence Tools for Smart Tourism Development 401

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