“Search is fundamentally changing,” proclaimed Harriet Brown, VP of Product at Mobi, from the stage at the Destination AI Summit 2024, where she was joined by her colleague, James Russell, Chief Product & Engineering Officer. Together, they explained how Mobi’s AI solutions deliver personalization to enhance the traveler experience.
Brown and Russell have collaborated for more than 15 years and have an impressive history that includes developing the QPX airfare pricing and shopping engine at ITA Software and then at Google to develop Google Flights and Hotel Search on Google. Now, at Mobi, they are applying their experience to revolutionize the hospitality industry with artificial intelligence (AI).
“A big part of the reason we joined Mobi was just the tremendous potential that AI has to transform the travel industry,” Brown emphasized, setting the tone for the presentation.
The Problem: A Changing Landscape in Travel Search
“People are traveling because of the things they want to see and… do, but… they don’t know where they want to go to have those experiences,” Brown highlighted. Current hotel search interfaces still ask, “Where do you want to go?” and “When do you want to travel?”—a framework that hasn’t evolved in many years. The hospitality industry finds itself at a crossroads whereby the traditional means of understanding the travelers’ desires do not get to the core of what that traveler wants to experience personally.
Travelers today expect more personalized responses that they can query and refine. “… 10 blue links aren’t going to cut it anymore,” Brown noted, as consumers now demand search results that are accurate and relevant to their specific query.
The Solution: Intent Driven Search
Russell then discussed the technical heart of Mobi’s solution: Intent Driven Search, an AI-powered platform designed to interpret and respond to highly specific, experience-driven queries. The system uses AI to understand the intent behind a traveler’s request, allowing for a deeper and more personalized interaction between users and the search engine.
“Our platform helps hoteliers and their guests find the perfect properties in the perfect places based on the experiences and desires that the guests express as intents,” Russell explained. Unlike relying on large language models (LLMs) alone, which can produce convincing, but often inaccurate results, Mobi’s AI product uses additional AI algorithms to plan and reason over an enormous quantity of real-time data.
Some of the platform’s standout features include:
- Its ability to process data about experiences—what activities the user may want to participate in, what events might interest them nearby or what type of amenities they are likely to favor based on its formal planning, reasoning and recommendation system.
- Its enormous dataset of millions of touristic points of interest structured and tagged with data, such as place, time and cost.
- An overlaid natural language interface to allow for easy searching and refining of that search, as someone would in a regular conversation.
As Brown showcased during the demo, users can query and refine their searches live, with the system returning highly relevant and personalized results instantly.
A Collaborative AI Future
The Destination AI Summit emphasized collaboration between AI technology and the hospitality industry as a key to future success. Brown put it succinctly: :One path to personalization is just letting people ask personal questions and giving them really relevant answers.”
Mobi’s Intent Driven Search offers an exciting solution to this path, where collaborative AI can help businesses move beyond transactional relationships with guests and foster deeper, more meaningful interactions.
Welcome to the future of travel planning.
This content was provided by the team at Mobi, a collaborative AI platform with B2B partners in the travel, tourism and hospitality spaces.