The #1 thing people are excited to do on vacation may surprise you

The Street

Skyscanner’s Naomi Hahn joins TheStreet to discuss what people are looking most forward to doing on vacation, as well as AI’s impact on the travel industry.

Transcript

00:00 Does your data tell you much I wonder about people booking elsewhere looking to the United

00:03 States as a destination?

00:04 That could be New York or you have some people who may say, "Hey, I'd love to get out and

00:08 not necessarily be in a crowded city."

00:10 Is there an interest in like the American Southwest or areas like that?

00:14 So I don't know.

00:15 I'm trying to think if you've got anything specific on that.

00:17 What we are seeing, there's an interesting trend that I think persisted from last year,

00:23 which was last year you had people going on a lot of solo travel, which was to do with

00:27 well-being and space.

00:29 And to that you had a lot of people not doing the city stuff but wanting to go and reconnect

00:33 with nature.

00:35 And this year the trend we're seeing is sleep, destination sleep.

00:40 I know.

00:41 And I get it.

00:42 When I go on holiday, I want to sleep too.

00:44 But the number one activity that came through in the research was that 33% of people said

00:50 the first thing that they wanted to do on holiday, the most important thing, was sleeping.

00:54 So this is the whole thing around kind of combining holidays with experience, but also

01:01 recuperation, which is quite an interesting move.

01:04 Absolutely.

01:05 Talk to us a little bit about the role that AI is playing when it comes to making travel

01:08 plans for 2024.

01:09 Yeah.

01:10 So AI has always been a big part of what Skyscanner does.

01:13 So in terms of machine learning and using data intelligently to be able to crunch 80

01:17 billion different prices every day to be able to serve them to travelers so they can decipher

01:22 them and figure out what's right for them.

01:24 So AI has always been important.

01:26 As we go into next year, we're finding that travelers are proactively searching for generative

01:34 AI, suggestions for where they should be going on holiday.

01:38 And I think, I don't remember the specific stat, but there's a high number of Americans

01:43 who have actually actively used generative AI to search for things on their mobile phones.

01:50 And they're the highest.

01:51 They were the highest out of the whole globe that we interviewed.

01:53 So it was America who were trending more towards using that.

01:57 And the great thing about generative AI is that they can identify different sources of

02:01 information and pull them together really, really quickly for a consumer like you or

02:06 I to say, well, what's it actually going to be like in that destination?

02:09 Or if I want to go somewhere where I can see Taylor Swift, I can get a good night's sleep

02:13 and I can go to a Michelin star restaurant that isn't going to break the bank, like this

02:17 can all come back to you.

02:18 Yeah.

02:19 [BLANK_AUDIO]

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