The news. A journalist who has covered Africa for years asked an AI assistant to help prepare a trip to the Republic of the Congo, and wrote up the result for Travel Weekly. The assistant said to replace boots that later survived a tropical downpour. It said to pack gloves, which made the guides raise an eyebrow. And it gave travel warnings that applied to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the much larger country across the river.
The column cites Longwoods International: 28% of American travellers used AI to plan a trip in the past six months, up from 19% in an earlier reading. Its conclusion is that specialists now get clients who are "not uninformed, but misinformed, and feeling confident about it."
The head of one of Africa's largest destination management companies draws the line this way: "AI will eat the simple layer first: itineraries, quotes, rate comparison, routine emails." What it cannot touch, he says, is a guide reading a client's mood, or judgment "when a flight is canceled in Maun at 4 p.m." His company's numbers show the shift: hotel rooms in one city fell from about 60% of its sales eight years ago to under 5%, while a harder region grew from about 15% five years ago to more than half.
The conversation starts somewhere else now
The column has a good example. A traveller came to an operator convinced she needed two private charters and a $1,300-a-night lodge to see one animal. He could have shown it to her from a $400 lodge. "She didn't believe me," he wrote.
An agent used to start from an empty page. Now the client arrives with a plan and some confidence, and the first job is finding out which parts of the plan are wrong without making them feel foolish. One safari founder in the column welcomes this, because the AI research shows her what caught the client's attention.
Judgment keeps its own hours
In the booking record from the desks I ran, 60.4% of more than 32,800 timestamped bookings were made outside office hours. Problems keep the same hours. That part of the job has never been a rate comparison.
What is the most confident wrong thing a client has told you this month?
Source: Travel Weekly, The real danger on safari: Letting AI plan the trip.