New Report: How Travel Marketers Are Using AI
The travel business has unparalleled access to customer data, and AI offers ample avenues to apply it and improve the traveler experience. By creating insights and knowledge, including who to talk to, where to reach them, and what to say to them, AI offers travel marketers unique opportunities to help their brands make better decisions that can drive business growth at scale.
This sponsored content was created in collaboration with a Skift partner.
The travel industry stands apart in terms of the vast amounts of customer data it has at its fingertips. Travel’s customer journey is uniquely personal, and the complexity of planning and booking yields rich customer profiles unparalleled in other industries and sectors.
This outstanding opportunity comes with an equally daunting challenge. The amount of data available to travel marketers is much more than any person or team of people can make sense of on their own.
Enter AI. Applications of AI technology give travel marketers the ability to create insights and knowledge, including who to talk to, where to reach them, and what to say to them. This offers opportunities to help their brands make better decisions that can drive business growth at scale.
According to a 2024 Skift survey, nearly 90% of travel marketing leaders said that AI will be important in driving overall business value for their organization in the next three years. However, just 64% said they had already deployed AI solutions for marketing and advertising.
This gap indicates that many in the industry willingly acknowledge the value of AI, but actual implementation often lags behind interest. What’s holding them back?
A new Epsilon Pulse research report analyzed motivations, investments, and barriers to AI across the retail, financial services, travel, restaurant, and consumer packaged goods (CPG) industries. Its insights help travel executives in all departments better understand how AI is revolutionizing the customer experience — and what they can do now to leverage its benefits to improve engagement and drive more revenue.
Like marketers in other industries, a vast majority of travel leaders are already invested in using AI for marketing. However, travel had the highest prevalence of non-users (11%), while all other sectors checked out between 4% and 6%.
Furthermore, the travel industry was the least likely to find AI capabilities “extremely valuable” for their business. Overall, 46% of marketers gave this response, compared to about 38% among travel leaders.
According to travel marketers, “cost reduction” was the most common reason their organizations were motivated to adopt AI. By comparison, leaders in all other industries were most likely to say their organizations were primarily motivated by “improving the customer experience” or “increasing operational efficiency.”
In addition, the travel industry’s number one barrier to AI adoption was “fear of change.” The landscape is changing around them, and if travel marketers aren’t able to persuade organizational leaders how AI can benefit them through proactive customer engagement, they’ll continue to lag behind.
Looking around at their counterparts, 33% of travel marketers believe that their colleagues and competitors in the industry are using AI effectively to offer personalized recommendations for customers, the most common response in the survey. When asked about specific marketing challenges that they believe AI can solve, 61% of travel marketers said that customer journey mapping was the most useful, followed distantly by predictive maintenance (39%).
- How marketers are using AI in travel and beyond
- AI’s impact on market performance
- What’s driving brands to invest in AI
- How much budget they're allocating to AI tools and technologies
- How to measure success
This report explores the contrast between what travel marketers observe in their organizations — i.e., hesitancy to adopt due to cost and logistical concerns — and the potential value they see in improving the customer experience by moving forward with sophisticated AI strategies.
The road to productive use of AI is a marathon, not a sprint, and there are widely varying degrees of usefulness and utility depending on the company and its goals. However, all travel marketers need to get off the starting blocks and benchmark against their competitors if they expect to stay in the race.
This content was created collaboratively by Epsilon and Skift’s branded content studio, SkiftX.
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