In youth travel, is the rise of AI all bull?

Bull or buzz? Guessing the future of tech in youth travel

WYSE News | November 15, 2024

At WYSTC 2024, Kevin O’Shaughnessy of CityHook and Jason Noronha of D3x led an interactive session title ‘Bull or buzz? Guessing the future of tech in youth travel‘. The pair presented different topics, debated them, and asked the audience whether they agreed or disagreed with the statements Keep reading to find out what delegates believe will impact youth travel in the near future.

By Kevin O’Shaughnessy

Learning from one another is what makes WYSTC – The World Youth & Student Travel Conference a great travel industry event. When given the stage to present on industry trends with Jason Noronha this autumn, we did exactly this: the audience were asked to make a call on each of the biggest trends to see what really mattered to them in the youth and student travel sector.

We chose an unusual format for this: rather than the usual powerpoint, panel or pitches, we opted for a debate and let the audience of WYSTC delegates decide which trend was “bull” and which was “buzz”.

Things move fast in tech, and doubly so in AI. To set the scene, at the time we presented in September 2024, OpenAI was still a not-for-profit and dominated a small pool of generative-AI startups backed by rivers of venture funding; OpenAI themselves had just released their “o1 mini” preview. Apple had started shipping their latest iPhone (16) with AI features that were still due to ship at some point down the road. A lot has happened between our event and preparing this write-up.

Let’s take a look at the seven trends and how the delegates called it.

1. AI will do all of our jobs (including Sales and Tours)

While studies show that customer support is 14-34% more productive and software engineers 26% with generative AI tools, this frames the technology as a productivity tool. Since the ominous plot of machines coming after our jobs is as old as science-fiction itself, we looked at two specific roles behind-the-scenes of everyday youth travel: selling and guided tours.

In the tours space, it’s still early days: projects like Autoura show promise down the road, and yet Kate Hennessy for the Guardian was critical of the performance of the current AI-generated tour content in her native Sydney. More focused applications such as NotebookLM give us hope for how we might package content into an audio format in the future. So far, there are no break-out projects we’ve seen when it comes to delivering tours.

Meanwhile, in sales, there’s never been a shortage of “augmentation” products, and bland.ai took an interesting approach to scaling outreach itself. Instead of automating the research element for a sales development rep, it could also scale execution by using voice: phone calls to every client at volume and scale? An interesting approach. Also in recent headlines was the quip from the Klarna CEO that they’re replacing their Salesforce subscription with “AI”. The details and results of the project are yet to be seen but the interest and coverage so far has been broad.

While it’s easy to imagine a flight deck without a flight engineer for example, or modern manufacturing without a blacksmith, it’s certainly hard to imagine the youth travel industry without the “Fun” element, or the authenticity element for that matter. Spotting the analogue in other markets, Jason noted that there are always ways to make your product stand out. From B-Corp to H(uman)-Corp perhaps?

The audience’s decision? They voted this one “Bull ”, and by a landslide: AI won’t be doing sales and experience jobs in the near term.

2. Robots will do the housekeeping

Jason showed the Figure.ai demo of a robot responding to voice commands to learn a household chore. There are even “humanoid” robots available for less than $10,000 on Alibaba. Considering that it’s still the early days of generative-AI and generalist hardware manufacture, it’s possible to at least imagine a fleet of specialist robots taking the lead in maintaining hotel rooms. Roomba Pro anyone?

Contrary to this, the “Doorman Paradox” is how we model automation in the context of members of the service team. In times past, the traditional doorman would take care of all aspects of first impressions, including, hopefully, a friendly greeting, and of course, manually opening the door. If housekeeping is reshaped by automation, what unseen service elements might vanish? We’ve been promised the future of housekeeping for a while, whether “The Jetsons” or Disney’s Tomorrowland Home, and maybe it’s not getting here nearly fast enough. As Joanna Maciejewska quipped “I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing”, and not the other way around.

But what did the audience think? Buzz ! Robot housekeepers are on the horizon.

3. The cost of business just went up, thanks to AI

Have you spotted that your favourite everyday tools now come with a little “sparkle” feature, available for an extra few dollars a month? By the time you’ve added this into your office suite, your development or marketing tools, chat, Notion and added a few options, the SaaS impact is anything from $10-100 per seat per month. Costs are also indirect. There’s a cost of training staff and deploying or responding to new policies, but these are one-off.

Costs can also creep into your product offering. Building products is not commonplace in Youth Travel, so we won’t see a per-session cost creeping into your infrastructure costs like Google Maps or payment services, but we might find ourselves using “new” products with pricing part-driven by the cost of training and running models behind the scenes.

On the flip side, the cost of doing business with OpenAI has dropped with the release of every new model, and these costs are expected to fall more and more as new models are published. When building products, we need to recognise that better products can generate better data. This can be leveraged to help design better and better products with every release.

The audience were AI-positive on this one: trends mean that the cost of doing business just went down: the audience decidedly voted Bull !

4. We have reached “Peak AI”

We don’t attend conference tracks on “Electricity” or “Cloud”. Once revolutionary, then widely adopted, now everyday. The same will be true of AI: we can see general interest dwindling while we get on with the exciting applications of the technology: whether large language models or other models. On the Gartner “Hype Cycle”, we don’t think that we’ve peaked yet.

Likewise, the “strawberry” models recently released are great but haven’t wowed us to the same extent that the first demo of “GPT v3” did in 2022.

What did the audience think? AI has a way to go, yet and overwhelmingly voted Bull !

5. (AI) “Agents” will make our lives hell

AI Agents, the action-taking complement for models like LLMs, should be able to do work on your behalf; this carries a lot of promise for the future. Think IFTTT and Zapier but with a deeper range of applications. There are thousands of “agent” tools available today already with OpenAI on board to make a release in this space too. What if these agents were booking our flights for us?

On the flip-side, using AI for customer service carries some risks. Customer Service reps can burn out quickly from their front-line work. Adding AI to the front-line is not without risk but carries immediate benefits for customers and reps alike. This evolution from reactive customer service to an efficiency tool (“proactive” service in this case?) to something that can be hopefully predictive is another promise of AI agents.

AI will be on both sides: A consumer bot calling a hotel bot, each optimising around lowering cost or up-selling services. It’s an interesting direction to consider.

The audience were positive about the trend and called it Bull !: AI agents will actually make our lives better.

6. Dynamic pricing is inevitable

Dynamic Pricing, well-known for optimising revenue and availability for an airline is creeping into other sectors. So-called “surge pricing” is triggered in a taxi app when demand is too high, boosting profit of course, but also keeping a little availability for those who might desperately need it. The cure for high prices is high prices, as Jason puts it.

The cure for high prices is high prices

Bed-nights in hostels are inventory after all, but unlike “seats”, surely it’s easier to stand out on anything other than price? Joining the revenue management party assumes that there’s a working model, enough data and operating in a high-volume environment.

Buzz ! The audience sees a trend on the way: dynamic pricing — whether tiered pricing or airline-style revenue management — is coming.

7. Web, mobile and now we need to build support for AR too

The growth of Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality (AR/VR) are closely-related trends, one adds data to the world we see, while the other is a completely immersive experience. We might be able to say that general interest has waned since both the announcements of the Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse and the Apple Vision Pro, however the foundational technology keeps improving in leaps and bounds, whether for a headset or, in the case of AR, for your smartphone screen.

AR is useful where other tools are prohibitively expensive. This might be useful for aircraft maintenance, but the options for youth travel are only so useful. Etihad have published a virtual cabin experience which allows you to preview what your flight might be like, assuming of course that your favourite aviation youtuber doesn’t do a better job. You might be able to shortlist the stops for the next big adventure or limited city break by previewing them in AR first. Compared to say, aircraft maintenance, this seems superficial where other alternatives exist. That said, some analysts are predicting that 28% of US online consumers will use AR as part of their shopping flows by 2025, a more rosy perspective.

Does that mean that we need to support web, mobile and, now, a third platform to support our youth travel projects? The audience didn’t like the sound of this trend, this one for them is Bull!

Conclusion

Our audience called “bull” on most of the topics as we presented them. However, to keep the session lively we positioned a number of “negatives” into the trends, like a trend that might make things “worse”. Overall, the crowd voted positively with the trends, at least in the context of youth travel.