Revolutionizing The Travel Industry: The Role of Artificial Intelligence in Shaping Future Tourism Experiences

Artificial intelligence (AI) is currently present in almost every area of travel and tourism, appearing in different types of applications such as personalization and recommender systems, robots, conversational systems, smart travel agents, prediction and forecasting systems, language translation applications, and voice recognition and natural language processing systems. Recent improvements in big data, algorithms, and computing power have enabled significant enhancements in AI. In this chapter, we review how AI has changed and is changing the main processes in the tourism industry. We start with the IT foundations of AI that are relevant for travel and tourism and then address the AI systems and applications available in the sector. We then examine hospitality in detail, as a sector in which most of these systems are being implemented. We conclude with the challenges that AI faces in the tourism sector, a research agenda, and draw a scenario of the future of AI in tourism.