While ChatGPT needs plenty of prompts, Lucio Ribeiro needed none at all in this fast-paced and information-loaded The Obligatory AI session on Day 2 of Travel DAZE 2025 at Cairns Convention Centre.
Working in AI since 2012, Ribeiro shared his own AI journey from building a BOT for BMW, working with IBM, and at Optus at director of technology before launching into his subject of the need for travel operators to adapt and adopt AI.
“AI in its current state is a co-pilot, not an autopilot… just inserting something and expecting something to come out the other end,” he said.
It is still not vertically integrated, only horizontal and it will take much work from the user end before it becomes second nature.
And the travel industry has much to benefit from AI, he said when it comes to simple searches for dynamic pricing, integration of systems and scanning the competition.
“It’s not super sexy but it’s very vital to the business,” he said.
While 70 per cent of Americans are already using A tools, only 40 per cent of global travellers are using those tools to assist them.
He said there had been 96 per cent drop in website traffic due to AI searches for travel. Travel business can expect to lose nine out of 10 people if a website is their only funnel.
AI for beginners
For starters, Ribeiro suggests looking at ChatGPT to see if your own business appears or shows up in any prompts as four in 10 travellers now prefer to use chat bots to search for travel ideas while 63 per cent value AI recommendations.
There is a potential 3o per cent reduction in operational cost by using AI. Ribeiro called bull***t that it was to spend more time customers saying that it will eventually lead to job losses in the travel trade.
“There will be an impact on jobs,” he said.
But AI is just fulfilling their role “It’s a new way of fulfilling old needs,” he said.
Checking trending, then too late
“When you identify trends, you are already late,” Ribeiro said. The challenge now is to identify niches that the travellers are looking at and getting ahead of the trends.
“I think there is the rise of the highly informed customer,” he said as they begin to adopt ChatGPT and question the information that your salesforce has to offer they become a “hyper-informed customer” who is way more prepared.
He suggests start thinking about the new user experience and redesign the whole thing. First up, the salesperson needs to ask them if they have already played around with AI before asking the obvious: Where did you want to go.
“That would be my assumption, they will walk in already more well prepared,” he said.
He also suggests that while AI is still learning, the travel industry need to learn too and businesses need to ask the question “are your staff learning” and where do they start. The horizontal solution he suggests is to impact the most people you can then create more verticals. Key points around that are Assessment, Planning, Implementation, Evaluation and Embedding.
The expert toolkit
Ribeiro’s toolkit includes ChatGPT, with him suggesting the No.1 technical skill you can learn is prompts.
Perplexity AI is another tool he uses, “It’s like Google going to a bar and meeting ChatGPT and they have a little baby,” he said.
Google NotebookLM, where you can upload PDFs, search websites, look at YouTube videos, search audio files and Google Docs or Google Slides. Gemini 2.0 ’s with NotebookLM then able to summarise them and make interesting connections between travel topics.
It indeed was a keynote not-to-be-missed.
