Jamie Biesiada
If you look at Google Trends data on the search term "AI," you'll see what's essentially a flat line from January 2004 to January 2022.
The "interest over time" metric hovered between three and eight in that time period. For Google Trends, interest is measured on a scale of 0 (not enough data) to 100, which represents peak popularity.
But starting in January 2022, the number starts to rise -- by the end of that year, just after ChatGPT came online, it hit 31. Its sharp rise continues until today, when its interest over time number sits at 100 this October.
The kind of AI behind ChatGPT, generative, or the AI that can create content like writing and images, undoubtedly spurred that rapid rise in interest.
It also sparked initial fears of AI taking jobs and -- once again, in a refrain that's been spoken many times but never yet proven correct -- the metaphorical death of travel advisors.
Of course, within the industry, those fears largely died out after the initial panic. Many have seen the potential of generative AI when it comes to streamlining workflows, like tasking AI with creating social media captions and blog posts.
And more good news comes this week thanks to a new Andrew Harper survey: A large majority of those polled don't trust AI when it comes to making their travel decisions. Andrew Harper is a members-only luxury travel company acquired in 2017 by what is today Internova Travel Group.
Andrew Harper polled 500 Americans with household incomes of $100,000 or more.
Fully 86% said they would rather use unbiased reviews from a trusted source instead of AI. Eighty-two percent said they agreed they are more vulnerable to scams and fake news thanks to the surge of AI-generated travel content.
Most importantly: Of those polled, 78% agreed that itineraries that come from trusted travel advisors are more accurate than itineraries created by AI.
"The results of our survey clearly show that consumers have doubts about using artificial intelligence in planning their travel and place great trust in the human connection," Don Jones, Andrew Harper's senior vice president, said in a release.
It seems that consumers have done their due diligence with generative AI, but still value travel advisors. I don't think most in the industry would be surprised by that, but it's always nice to see some tangible validation.
I've used generative AI to create itineraries in the past, and there are some travel advisors using it as a jumping-off point today. That's a great use case, but those itineraries need to be edited. They usually leave something to be desired.
For instance, I asked Google's Gemini to create an itinerary for a Fourth of July vacation in the Jersey Shore town where I live, Manasquan. The general outline wasn't bad.
But I also asked for restaurant recommendations. In my town, it listed two restaurants that don't exist (the Blue Clam and the Point), as well as another that's located a few towns over (the Breakers in Spring Lake). Oops.