Can you book flights and hotels using AI? The short answer is… kind of, but none of the AI chatbots are reliable, so you’ll still nee
Can you book flights and hotels using AI?
The short answer is… kind of, but none of the AI chatbots are reliable, so you’ll still need to do your own research at this stage.
Having recently spent hours researching flights and accommodation for a three-week trip to Japan, I decided to compare my results to Bard and ChatGPT’s suggestions.
It turns out that Bard is actually surprisingly good at finding flights. A simple request for flights from Melbourne and Tokyo on a particular day returned options with major carriers like Qantas and Japan Airlines, which is probably what many people would be after.
Bard was then able to further refine the results to “cheapest direct flight, with seat selection, a minimum 15 kilograms of luggage and a meal,” finding an Air Asia flight from Melbourne to Osaka that was cheaper than the one I’d booked to Tokyo.
The AI was also pretty good at determining the seat width, pitch and recline angle for the Air Asia flight to work out if actually flying with the airline was going to be a nightmare.
Overall pretty impressive, though it’s unable to provide a link to book that particular flight. I checked, however, and the prices and details on the site matched.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, ChatGPT was a total fail, despite its new Kayak travel agent plugin. It offered me a 29-hour flight via Atlanta and Detroit, which is about three times as long as a direct flight would take. And while there are plenty of direct flights available, it insisted there were none. As it’s a U.S.-focused site, your mileage may vary.
In terms of hotels, the Kayak plugin won but only by default. Prompted to find an affordable double room in Shibuya with a review score above 7, it suggested the Shinagawa Prince Hotel for $155 a night and provided a direct link to book it. It turned out the hotel was an hour’s walk from Shibuya, and none of the other options were located in Shibuya either.
This was still an order of magnitude better than Bard, which suggested the Hotel Gracery Shibuya at $120 a night. The only problem is that no such hotel exists.
It then offered the Shibuya Excel Hotel at $100 per night, but the actual cost was $220 a night when I tried to book. After I pointed this out, Bard apologized profusely and again suggested the non-existent Hotel Gracery Shibuya.
Frustrated, I gave up and asked Bard for a transcript of our conversation to help write this column.
Hilariously, Bard provided a totally fictional transcript of our conversation in which the AI successfully booked me into the nonexistent Hotel Gracery Shibuya at $100 a night, with the reservation number 123456789. The hallucinated transcript ended with the fake me being delighted with Bard’s superlative performance:
User: Thank you, Bard, that was very helpful.
Bard: You’re welcome. Is there anything else I can help you with today?
User: No, that’s all. Thanks again.
Bard: You’re welcome. Have a great day.
Clearly, AI assistants are going to revolutionize travel booking, but they’re not there just yet — and neither are their imaginary hotels.
All killer, no filler AI news
— Toyota has unveiled generative AI tools for designers to create new car concepts. Designers can throw up a rough sketch and a few text prompts like “sleek” or “SUV-like” and the AI will transform it into a finished design.
— Vimeo is introducing AI script generation to its video editing tools. Users simply type in the subject matter, the tone (funny, inspiring etc) and the length, and the AI will churn out a script.
— China Science Daily claims that Baidu’s Ernie 3.5 beat OpenAI’s GPT 3.5 in a number of qualification tests and that Erine Bot can beat GPT-4 in Chinese language tests.
Also read: Is AI a nuke-level threat? Why AI fields all advance at once, dumb pic puns
— Booking.com has given a select group of Genius-level app users access to its new AI Trip Planner. It’s designed to help them plan itineraries and book accommodation.
— Although worldwide visits to Google’s Bard grew by 187% in the past month, it’s still less than a tenth as popular as ChatGPT. According to Similarweb, 142 million visits were logged to Bard, but that’s just a fraction of the 1.8 billion visits to ChatGPT. ChatGPT is also more popular than Bing, which logged 1.25 billion visits in May.
— Google is reusing the techniques from its Alpha-Go AI system — which famously beat a human player in the notoriously complicated board game Go in 2016 — for its latest model, called Gemini, which it claims will be better than GPT-4.
— The GPT Portfolio launched six…
cointelegraph.com