While tourism industry leaders have begun to adopt AI in their businesses, questions continue to arise about measures for successful integration.
“Across tourism and hospitality, AI is influencing how organisations operate, how services are delivered and how customers experience these services,” says Diane Abrams, Director for the School of Tourism and Hospitality at the University of Johannesburg (UJ). “It is changing what services look like while raising questions about the people who deliver it, the kind of businesses that provide it and the guests who experience it.”
AI has served a largely functional purpose in the tourism industry for the past two decades as automation devices and chatbots for airlines and hotels.
“Most of the AI we use today we have been using for the past 20 years but it has become a more explicit, consumer-facing technology,” says Dogan Gursoy, Research Associate at UJ’s School of Tourism and Hospitality.
He describes generative AI (GenAI) as enabling a “try-before-buying” approach to travel planning, allowing travellers to explore itineraries and experiences before committing to bookings.
Despite its advantages, his study found: “While personalisation is frequently cited as a key driver of GenAI adoption, concerns regarding the emotional authenticity of AI-mediated experiences continue to surface. This reveals a fundamental tension between efficiency-driven automation and the affective depth of human service encounters, especially in high-touch settings like luxury hospitality or cultural tourism.”
In response to the integration of AI in the service industry, Gursoy points out that the service industry should be aware of when and where to make use of AI. “If you are paying lots of money for a full-service hotel, people want human engagement. In limited-service hotels, people just want to go there and sleep so it’s better to deal with a machine.” This suggests travellers are more likely to accept AI’s role in functional services instead of hedonic services.
“There are five established dimensions and one of them is human-to-human interaction so the use of AI changes how we evaluate service quality,” Gursoy says. The “black box decision-making” presents challenges as lack of transparency makes it difficult for evaluators to assess whether a service is being delivered fairly, he points out.
“Tourism is inherently social. We still need humans for co-creation. People manage the machines to provide services that the customer wants,” he adds, emphasising AI is unlikely to replace the human aspect of travel and tourism. “You can’t automate a holiday experience. Travel is about experience.”
