Effects of Generative AI in Tourism Industry

In the dynamic and evolving tourism industry, engaging with stakeholders is essential for fostering innovation and improving service quality. However, tourism companies often struggle to meet expectations for customer satisfaction through interactivity and real-time feedback. While new digital technologies can address the challenge of providing personalized travel experiences, they can also increase the workload for travel agencies due to the maintenance and updates required to keep travel details current. Intelligent chatbots and other generative artificial intelligence (GAI) tools can help mitigate these obstacles by transforming tourism and travel-related services, offering interactive guidance for both tourism companies and travelers. In this study, we explore and compare the main characteristics of existing responsive AI instruments applicable in tourism and hospitality scenarios. Then, we propose a new theoretical framework for decision making in the tourism industry, integrating GAI technologies to enable agencies to create and manage itineraries, and tourists to interact online with these innovative instruments. The advantages of the proposed framework are as follows: (1) providing a comprehensive understanding of the transformative potential of new generation AI tools in tourism and facilitating their effective implementation; (2) offering a holistic methodology to enhance the tourist experience; (3) unifying the applications of contemporary AI instruments in tourism activities and paving the way for their further development. The study contributes to the expanding literature on tourism modernization and offers recommendations for industry practitioners, consumers, and local, regional, and national tourism bodies to adopt a more user-centric approach to enhancing travel services.