ChatGPT in travel services – do tourists trust artificial intelligence?
As ChatGPT becomes a widely available tool for tourists to plan trips and solve their travel needs, Professor Jon Lovett and colleagues ask: do tourists like interacting with artificial intelligence?
Have you ever been on holiday and needed to look up the time of a train or bus, or perhaps you’ve needed to find a museum or theatre to escape a rainy day?
Calling into a tourist office is one way to solve the problem, but imagine how much more useful it would be to have all that information on your mobile phone at any time, day or night. This is ChatGPT’s offer.
Do we like using ChatGPT for travel assistance?
In a new paper published in the Journal of Travel and Tourism Marketing, Professor Jon Lovett from the School of Geography and Centre for Endangered Languages, Cultures and Ecosystems collaborated with researchers in Macau to explore how tourists interact with travel information on ChatGPT.
The study explores whether people accept the Large Language Model tool as a pleasant and trustworthy travel companion.
ChatGPT can cater to dynamic interests and needs
Professor Lovett says, “AI language innovations are spreading and give us a wonderful opportunity to research how emotions and narratives communicated by machines are accepted.”
Rob Law, University of Macau Development Foundation Chair Professor of Smart Tourism, highlighted the wide-ranging benefits and future transformative potential of AI-driven chatbots like ChatGPT in the travel and tourism sector. He stated, “As ChatGPT evolves, it could better cater to travellers’ dynamic interests and needs, ushering in revolutionary changes.
“For consumers, ChatGPT can enhance convenience, speed, and accuracy in searching for travel information while serving as a virtual tour guide during journeys, overcoming time and language barriers.”
However, Professor Law acknowledged challenges such as ChatGPT's lack of specialized knowledge in some areas, its pre-trained nature and potential biases influencing its responses. This means users must verify the information the tool offers.
Dr Han Xu from the City University of Macau, who led the study and is a Leeds alum, points out the benefits. “The technology can streamline processes, reduce operational costs from suppliers and improve customer satisfaction through round-the-clock availability,” she says.
Having travel queries answered automatically also frees up staff time. Dr Xu says staff can “shift their focus from simple and mundane tasks to more complex thinking and creative work.”
More research will improve AI tools
The technology is changing fast. The Chinese company SenseTime recently launched its newest product, SenseNova 5.5, which is tailored to large numbers of Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) users. Cultural context is important and these AI tools are very new and still in development.
Dr Han Xu says “The topics of 'emotion' and 'AI bias and discrimination' are areas that need research, given that AI-driven chatbots like ChatGPT are pre-trained on large datasets.
“The sources of these datasets can significantly influence behaviour and decision-making processes of the language models.”
She adds “While ChatGPT is powerful, it cannot always express itself like a real human being in many specific contexts.
“Functional linguistics, however, can help ChatGPT improve its expression to be more human-like. Perhaps this will be our next research collaboration.”
