Vision for Innovation, Collaboration, and Sustainable Tourism

The Skål India National Congress 2025, Themed around ‘Connecting Tourism Leaders, Inspiring Growth’. this Congress reaffirmed my belief that India, with its unmatched richness, can position itself as a leader not only in travel but also in building enduring global relationships.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming tourism by providing personalized travel experiences through recommendation engines and virtual assistants, streamlining planning and booking with chatbots for seamless reservations, and enhancing destinations with virtual and augmented reality tours. AI also improves operational efficiency through dynamic pricing and demand prediction, boosts safety with threat detection, and supports businesses with data-driven insights for innovation and revenue maximization.

AI is widely expected to define and revolutionize the future of customer experience by enabling highly personalized, proactive, and efficient interactions across all touchpoints. Key advancements include agentic AI, which can manage complex tasks independently, generative AI, which powers human-like conversations, and predictive analytics for anticipating customer needs. This transformation will shift from reactive support to a proactive, relationship-building model, ultimately boosting customer satisfaction and loyalty. AI will define the future of customer experience.

ChatGPT, OpenAI's text-generating ChatGPT has captured the world’s imagination since its launch in November 2022, significantly raising the bar for expectations of generative AI’s capabilities. It is already woven into the fabric of our daily lives, to the extent that it's rare for a day to pass without encountering some mention of it in the media and other channels. ChatGPT counted an estimated 100 million monthly active users within two months of its launch—a significant milestone. For comparison, it was about nine months before TikTok hit the same number of users after its global launch, while LINE took over 19 months.

Although there are raised expectations for AI’s potential, its use is not yet widespread. However, it is becoming increasingly democratized because of its relative simplicity and accessibility as an open-source technology. It is open to all particularly with the arrival of generative AI, including ChatGPT.

According to data from Statista, the worldwide market is forecast to exceed USD1.84 trillion (approximately JPY276 trillion) by 2030, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 35.5% for the period from 2024 to 2030. Reports also indicate that applying generative AI across all industries could have an economic impact of USD 2.6 to 4.4 trillion, which represents an economic boost of 15 to 40%. It could potentially raise global GDP by 7% (approximately USD7 trillion) over the next decade and enhance productivity by 1.5%.

AI in Travel: Revolutionizing safety and seamless journeysAI is revolutionizing future tourism by providing highly personalized travel experiences, improving operational efficiency through automation and smart booking, and enhancing customer service with AI assistants and chatbots. It also boosts safety and security via biometrics and real-time threat analysis, breaks down language barriers with advanced translation, and supports sustainable tourism by optimizing resource use and visitor flows. The industry is rapidly adopting AI, but faces challenges like workforce shortages and the need to balance technology with human interaction.

“AI is already being used across the tourism sector with incredible results. Several major hotel groups including Iberostar are using AI to monitor and reduce food waste, which recently resulted not only in a 27% cost saving but prevented thousands of kilos of unwanted food going to the landfill.“

According to WTTC, AI has the power to revolutionise how businesses in the Travel & Tourism sector operate, offering immense opportunities for growth and innovation.

The advent of generative AI sees numerous companies aiming to deliver personalized information to travelers. However, without access to data, AI systems find it challenging to present viable solutions. In addition, unless a significant volume of individual preference data is available, the techniques for personalization are similar to those used previously, and typically involve providing information based on inferred preferences from clustering within large datasets.

Efforts to aggregate data through regional collaboration have begun in various parts of Japan. However, progress is often slow due to resistance from local companies that are concerned about sharing their proprietary data with other businesses. The use of AI relies heavily on data as a critical element. If it is difficult for businesses to collaborate in collecting data, could they instead have customers directly provide the data? This concept, known as VRM, can be seen as the reciprocal of CRM.