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Online Travel

How Artificial Intelligence Could Reshape How Travelers Book Hotels

Sean O'Neill photo
Sean O'Neill
team leader computer engineering artifical intelligence project Gorodenkoff AdobeStock_297628763 ai

Photo Credit: A team leader consults a computer engineer on an artificial intelligence project. Artificial intelligence could provide new technical infrastructure to streamline how consumers buy travel, said Fetch.ai, a British startup. Adobe / Gorodenkoff

Skift Take

Imagine there's no distribution. It's easy if you try. Imagine there's no commission. All bookings, peer-to-peer. You may say Fetch.Ai is a dreamer. But it's not the only one. This startup hopes someday you'll join it, and hotels will sell as one.

It's easier to talk about people, companies, or events than to talk about ideas. But one idea worth discussing, despite its complexity, is how artificial intelligence could reorder hotel distribution. Some researchers are wondering if artificial intelligence could handle some of the more complex tasks of shopping and haggling. Could new algorithms and processes shrink the role of travel search engines and comparison apps? Could the cost of bringing buyers and sellers together shrink thanks to technical innovations? "What is cumbersome and inefficient is the way we, as consumers, interact with travel businesses," said Humayun Sheikh, co-founder and CEO of Fetch.ai, a startup based in Cambridge, UK. "We need a shift of the technical architecture in the middle." Sheikh knows a thing or two about these ideas. He was an investor in DeepMind, an artificial-intelligence company that Alphabet acquired as a sister division to Google. He's helped raise more than $21 million for Fetch.ai, his new project. We asked Sheikh how he would explain the new concept to one of the co-founders of Airbnb if he happened to sit next to one of them on a flight by chance. "That would probably not be a very good conversation because the whole concept here is that you don't need an Airbnb," Sheikh said.

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"Today, if you have a room in your house and you want to rent it, you go to Airbnb or a competitor, and it aggregates the supply and demand," Sheikh said. "But tomorrow, the consumer may have a piece of software made by us or someone else that can look for all the rooms available via an alternative system that replaces a centralized aggregator like Airbnb." Reimagining Hotel Distribution Sheikh said artificial intelligence could smooth out how consumers book hotel rooms. Details vary on how the distribution changes might happen, but some broad concepts are being outlined now. In one vision, consumers could use an app that they set to automatically book hotel rooms when available for specific dates, based on their preferred rate, quality, and location choices. This "app" might not be something consumers download specifically for travel. Makers of smartphones might include the AI-powered "app" as a default utility for booking services like travel but also parking spaces, hairdresser appointments, and other products and services. For their part, hote

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