Smart itineraries ‘taking travel experience to next level’

With a rise in demand for personalized, accessible, and convenient experiences, smart itineraries are enabling travel planning providers to take travel experience to the next level, said leading analytics company GlobalData in a new report.

GlobalData’s FutureTech Series report, ‘Personalisation in Travel: Smart Itinerary Planners‘, highlights various disruptive forces in travel & tourism as emerging, accelerating, and maturing innovation areas based on their rate of growth in innovation.

Rahul Kumar Singh, Senior Analyst of Disruptive Tech at GlobalData, said: “Technology innovations have led to a mushroom growth of smart apps and their extensive use in the travel & tourism industry to enhance traveler satisfaction. Travel planners are now focusing on offering highly personalized services with the help of solutions such as smart itinerary planners by leveraging advanced data analytics.”

The increased use of smart travel planning apps is driving many travel organizations to focus on developing new apps and platform integration. The island of Aruba launched its own travel planning and itinerary app myAruba which enables guests to save places to visit, experiences to try, and even find places to eat.

In November 2022, US-based Direct Travel made the beta launch of its traveler itineraries in Microsoft Teams wherein the integration pulls itineraries from its Direct2U mobile app allowing travelers and travel arrangers to have complete access to trip details booked via Direct Travel including flight status updates, weather forecasts, itinerary reminders, and destination information.

Major players within the travel & tourism industry are not only introducing new features into their offerings but also looking into future innovations. Airbnb launched a collaborative feature for co-travelers to design itineraries and trip-planning activities. The company was also granted a patent for a computerized calendar system that automatically determines invitee availability for an event and creates multiple instances of the scheduled event based on individual availability.

Uber also developed new travel features to allow booking of airport pickups and scheduling a trip up to 30 days in advance, and enable riders to view all aspects of their trip which include flights, hotels, and rides, all in one place. The company was also issued a patent that outlines a method to dynamically generate an itinerary for a user based on meeting one or more criteria.

Singh concluded: “Travel planners are aware of the value of Big Data to personalize services. However, considering the massive quantity of data generated in the travel & tourism industry, from transactions to searches and site interactions, travel planners and agencies must find ways to access high-quality data to tap the growing usage of smart travel planners.”