One of the keynote speakers at this year’s ITB Berlin has said that there has been a 'craze' within the industry as to the potential applications of AI.
Opening the three-day show on Tuesday, Tino Klaehne, director of strategic innovation and intelligence for the Lufthansa Innovation Hub, said that AI was set to revolutionise travel as its adoption moved into the mainstream.
He began his presentation by pointing to emerging AI agents that are already demonstrating the ability to autonomously secure travel deals, which was then ‘paving the way’ for enhanced personalisation.
“The year started,” said Klaehne, “with OpenAI, and operators thinking that it could really change things. It’s not just about planning trips, but booking through those trips at the same time. We see, too, that a lot of airlines are offering this along with their products. There’s already been a lot of different launches in January and February this year, and I suspect there will be new launches soon.”
Klaehne pointed to various online questionnaires and surveys about the use of AI. One on LinkedIn, he said, showed that 55% of people expected AI to be the biggest trend in 2025 to shape travel. Exactly half of travellers in another survey, he said, said they expected to utilise GenAI for leisure travel within the next year.
Despite this, Klaehne said that the Traveller Trend Reports his company monitors have shown a huge move towards AI. The subject, he added, was mentioned only fifteen times in thirty-six reports.
There were, he added, other technologies that were having huge impacts, including VR and AR.
VR and AR, he said, had interesting applications outside of the normal route of entertainment.
Klaehne added: “The biggest part is immersive entertainment, such as watching a movie by yourself on the plane. But it’s been most-lucrative in internal use. Nowadays, the majority of pilots and crew are trained with VR headsets. In our industry, we often have enough staff but we cannot train them quickly or efficiently enough. If you need to take a pilot somewhere to do something, that costs time and money. These VR technologies are an interesting use case there.”
