AI Tour Assistants: The travel industry can be one of the most significant sources of money. In South Korea, the industry produces over 10 per cent of the gross domestic product (GDP), and the market size reportedly amounts to 9.2 trillion dollars. Over 60 per cent of non-Koreans who visited the country in 2022 were for tourism. 

Although interest in the country is rising with the growing popularity of Korean pop culture, like dramas or pop songs, travelling around South Korea has been a challenge to many tourists due to language barriers.

Following the government’s announcement to attract 30 million foreign tourists to the country until 2027, Korean travel package operators introduce their plans to work with artificial intelligence to make tours easier to find on the internet.

AI Assistant Available 24/7

Interpark Triple, a leading ticket-selling company in South Korea, said it is making an AI-powered assistant for travellers during a press conference held at Fairmont Ambassador Seoul on June 20.

Reports say the company already has an AI system that makes customised suggestions for travel plans. The new AI assistant will be backed by ChatGPT to make more relevant and precise recommendations based on tourists’ schedules and destinations. With the help of ChatGPT, it will also suggest a more optimised time plan. 

For example, if a user says, “I want to go to places that appeared in famous Korean drama series”, the assistant would suggest a three-night-four-day long trip consisting of places featured in dramas like “The Glory” in Gangneung, South Korea.

The system is currently developing in cooperation with other travel companies like Yanolja and its subsidiary web cloud service provider Yanolja Cloud Korea. The release date of the assistant has yet to be discovered to the public.

The three companies said they will aim to attract 50 million inbound tourists to the country by 2028, which is bigger than the government’s current plan. Kim Jong-Yoon, CEO of Yanolja Cloud, says that the travel industry in South Korea holds a lot of potential and products powered by AI can boost it. 

“The travel industry can be a more attractive export source than trading semiconductors,” Kim said. “If we reach our goal of 50 million tourists bound to South Korea, we expect the size of its economic impact will be approximately 300 trillion won ($US 235 billion). This is way beyond the yearly export of Korean semiconductors, 168 trillion won.”

More Operators to Join, but Concerns Remain

Teaming up with AI, operators can provide more customised, fitting travel plans for tourists. This allows them to set marketing strategies for specific targets and lure more potential customers. Knowing the advantages, several companies have followed suit or have already been building AI-related products of their own.

Hanatour, a Seoul-based tour package service, offers the beta version of its ChatGPT-enhanced chatbot on its website. From recommendations of tourist destinations to local weather conditions, the chatbot gives all-in-all information that may be helpful for travellers. 

Very Good Tour, also a Korean operator, developed its own AI assistant named “Cuve”, which also gives customised destinations and package plan recommendations. Compared to other existing AI assistants, Cuve’s information is based on the traveller’s reservations, travel dates, and history of searched keywords.

As these tools are powered mainly by generative AI, the concern of screening harmful or fake content from the tools may rise. ChatGPT, for example, gives automated responses scrapped from information available online, which often includes unintended content that may not be relevant to given prompts. 

Kim from Yanolja Cloud Korea said in an interview that generative AI products from major tech companies could establish the “foundation” for AI tour assistants and can be combined with other tools or empirical data sets to improve it.

“We are planning to launch various services, adopting the best tool that can fit the purpose of each service, from ChatGPT to Naver CLOVA,” Kim said. “Regarding the limitations of generative AI, the developers are working on deploying our own data sets to do an ultra-customised service with no error.

“We are going to continue our efforts to become the best global travel tech company,” Kim added.