Travellers Choice today unveiled an ambitious Artificial Intelligence-driven project designed to enhance productivity by allowing its members to search the group’s preferred products and quickly generate complex itineraries.
Announcing the development at the retail network’s conference in Melbourne today, managing director Christian Hunter described the initiative as “the most exciting project Travellers Choice has ever embarked upon”.
“Imagine a system that uses AI to support members in curating customer itineraries,” Hunter told delegates. “One that only shopped from within our preferred product range, had in-built guardrails to prevent hallucination and produced amazing output in a fraction of the time.
“Sounds good huh? Well, that’s what Travellers Choice is building.”
He says the intuitive and easy-to-use AI-system will dramatically reduce the time required to search for products during the itinerary planning phase, freeing members up to focus on adding value.
“If a consultant can turn a one-hour task into a 40-minute task, they have won 20 minutes. If they can do that twice a day, that’s the equivalent to 200 minutes a week, 800 minutes a month, 9,600 minutes (or an additional 20 working days) every year – and that is per staff member.
“The efficiency will amplify member businesses massively and address one of, if not the biggest challenge members face today – a shortage of time.”
As well as delivering efficiency gains, Hunter says the initiative will help less-experienced consultants fast-track their professional development, while also “mitigating leakage” by building itineraries based only on preferred content.
The move follows a flurry of activity in the move to AI with Virgin Australia yesterday announcing it was set to redefine flight search with its own OpenAI capability.
Click HERE for a must-read story on the AI space for the travel trade
Transformative data strategy
Hunter says the first phase of the project involved a “transformative data strategy” digitizing Travellers Choice entire preferred product portfolio. The second phase saw the group work with a technology partner to develop its AI search engine, which it expects to go live within weeks.
“Essentially, like a Google for Travellers Choice preferred products, it has a simple, question and answer format that will eliminate the need for leafing through brochures or surfing multiple websites and fast-tracking your product searches.”
The final phase – scheduled for mid-2026 – will see the introduction of AI-powered itinerary building technology that will interrogate the preferred product library to curate “optimal itineraries that best meet your customers’ needs.
“This will be an absolute game changer for our members, but also for Travellers Choice itself, as we further demonstrate why we are Australia’s most outstanding travel agency network.”
