By Dana Zificsak, CTIE, Sales and Marketing Consultant, Travel Agent Sales Lab
ChatGPT is a new artificial intelligence tool that users can ask questions and “converse” with and it will respond back. News broadcasters have had fun having it write poems and scripts, but can it write a travel itinerary or replace agents?
1. One of its biggest limitations (of the free version) is that its knowledge is based on things that happened up to 2021. We know that, with travel, things change daily, so this is not going to replace us as agents.
2. It sounds smart but it really is just being a search engine combing through the internet’s data to put together sentences. If you ask it to put an itinerary together for Paris, it will give you a beautiful list, but it hasn’t sat in the cafes or experienced the culture to really know what to recommend to a guest.
3. It can be wrong. It uses the internet to find answers. Not everything that is on the Internet is fact. Therefore, if someone is looking for a detailed itinerary costing thousands of dollars, they are better off with you.
4. It’s good for a rough draft. They can play around with it and get ideas and it might help with the overall itinerary, but then you are the final input, not a robot.
5. Finally, it is actually really helpful for agents’ marketing strategy: to find out what questions people might have about a destination and to help you brainstorm marketing materials with, of course, you having the final edit before posting.
It does tell decent dad jokes, so they can go to the ChatGPT for that, but when it comes to planning an itinerary, leave that to the experts.
