Customer preferencestowards AI functionalities in OTAs

Online travel agencies (OTAs) are platforms that allow customers to book a range of travel-related services such as accommodation, flights, car hire, cruises and other activities online. The modern age of travel is being driven by the use of digital technology and, in particular, artificial intelligence (AI) to design and deliver products and services. The implementation of AI functionalities in online travel agencies is a rapidly evolving area where the focus is on developing attractive products that satisfy, surprise and delight the customer. The research methodology consisted of three main phases, the second and third of which are described in this paper. The first phase identified the key AI functionalities in the OTAs that impact the customer’s travel experience and developed an original questionnaire based on functional and dysfunctional questions from the Kano model. Kano’s two-dimensional model aims to determine the level of customer satisfaction or dissatisfaction when a particular attribute (in this research, each attribute is represented by an AI functionality) is present or absent. There are five Kano categories for each quality attribute: Must-be, Performance, Attractive, Indifferent and Reverse. In addition, some of the AI functionalities were considered as clusters of AI topics such as personalisationbased, optimisation, advanced search and AI chatbots when formulating the research questions. The second phase described in this article was conduct a survey using the Kano questionnaire and prepare the dataset for analysis. The third phase consisted of applying discrete and continuous analyses for each AI functionality, discussing the results and answering the research questions.