Some still do it, but there are few left. He leaves home or office and goes to a travel agency. Everyone else, and they are the majority, now program everything with their computer or smartphone. For some time now there have also been travel influencers. Raise your hand if you have never saved a video or a post found on social media where someone tells us about places, clubs and attractions that we absolutely must see. After digital booking services, online guides and travel influencers, digital is now making another leap in the way we organize our trips. Indeed, in the way digital will organize travel for us. In fact, with the explosion of artificial intelligence, services that organize complete travel itineraries starting from some indications are multiplying. It will be one of the businesses of the future, experts say. And making it so will be contributed by the fact that, even if traveling is an absolutely active action, the laziness that dwells in human beings means that in order to do so, many people need someone else to choose for them where to go and to plan everything as best as possible. that they will have to do on their tour. There have been start-ups like Mindtrip and Layla on the market for some time that use artificial intelligence to help us plan our trips. But now a giant like Google is taking the field. In America it is testing a new service in its Search Generative Experience (SGE) that will allow users to create journeys using artificial intelligence. At the moment the new feature is only available in the United States and for users registered with Search Labs, the Google program that allows you to experiment with its innovations. The new service works like this: when a person asks the program “plan me a three-day history trip to Washington,” they receive an itinerary that includes attractions and restaurants, as well as an overview of flight and hotel options, broken down by times and prices. To achieve all this, Google’s system searches not only travel sites but also user reviews and photos. A great help, no doubt about it. In my opinion, however, there are two problems. The first is that Google’s service also and above all serves the company to collect user intentions, and then resell them to advertising investors. A leap forward compared to what already happens today. We’ve all experienced it: when we search for a holiday on a search engine in the following days we receive advertising on that place. However, Google’s system, being more sophisticated, will provide advertising investors with even more information on what we are looking for, our spending capacity, our cultural interests and more. Once again, a service that appears free to us ends up paying for it by giving up our digital data and it is a piece of our privacy. Then there is a second problem on the horizon, which is equally important. More and more and more often, thanks to artificial intelligence, we will have services that will simplify our lives and at the same time make us lazier. It may seem like science fiction or a page from a dystopian novel but soon the services themselves will show us places to go and attractions to visit even before we imagine them. I don’t know how long all this will happen, but I know that, once again, each of us is and will be called to be the author and active actor of our own digital life. We are and will be increasingly called upon to make an effort not to leave everything to machines. To learn to use them for what they are: assistants and aids, often very useful. But not our North Stars. © all rights reserved
