Artificial intelligence is transforming global travel experiences

Artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing the global travel industry, streamlining the travel experience for consumers and enhancing operational efficiency for businesses. Agoda, a leading digital travel platform, is at the forefront of this transformation, leveraging AI and other innovative technologies to simplify decision-making and personalize travel services.

Key Transformations in Travel through AI:

1. Personalized Customer Experience:
   • Generative AI: Agoda uses generative AI to tailor the travel experience to individual preferences, treating customer attention as a precious resource. By focusing on what each consumer cares about, AI helps highlight relevant options, making the decision-making process easier.
   • AI Chatbots: Agoda’s ‘bottom-up’ approach with AI chatbots targets specific customer queries, such as questions about a current property. This specialized focus enhances customer service by providing precise and useful information.
2. Unified Travel Experience:

1. Connected Trip Approach: Agoda integrates different travel components—accommodations, flights, and activities—into a cohesive platform. This unification simplifies the booking process, allowing customers to manage all aspects of their travel in one place.
2. Flexible Architecture: Significant changes in data management and technology adoption have enabled Agoda to build a more flexible and scalable architecture, accommodating various travel products seamlessly.
3. Data-Driven Development:
   • Experimentation Platform: Agoda employs a data-driven approach, utilizing an experimentation platform that can run around 1,000 experiments simultaneously. This platform allows for rapid testing and validation of changes, ensuring continuous improvement of the product.
   • Increased Data Volume: By transitioning from .NET to Scala and Kotlin, Agoda has achieved a 30-fold increase in data volume, enhancing its ability to analyze and utilize travel data for better market prediction and operational optimization.
4. Improved Developer Productivity:

1. Observability and Automation: Agoda improves developer productivity through observability and automation tools. The company has developed its own metrics and logs tools, along with a dedicated DevOps team, to build deployment systems and platform engineering tools.
2. Kubernetes-Based Infrastructure: This infrastructure allows developers to automatically deploy applications across multiple data centers and clusters, decoupling them from infrastructure teams and enabling faster deployment and maintenance.
3. Internal AI Tools:
   • Developer Chatbot: Agoda has created a chatbot to assist developers with tasks such as writing SQL queries, summarizing threads, and retrieving information from company documentation. This tool helps developers work more efficiently and independently.
   • Microservices: The adoption of 2,000 microservices allows Agoda’s development teams to work autonomously, speeding up processes and empowering developers to achieve more.

Impact and Future Prospects:

AI’s integration into travel platforms like Agoda is driving a new era of personalized and efficient travel experiences. By simplifying decision-making and improving operational efficiency, AI not only enhances customer satisfaction but also helps travel businesses remain competitive in a dynamic market. As AI technologies continue to evolve, we can expect even more innovative solutions that will further transform the travel industry, making it more accessible, personalized, and efficient for travelers worldwide.