(Posted 18th October 2024)
Courtesy of Mark Whitman
Following the bucket list research I shared a while ago, our client has since gathered another 4000 survey respondents and analysed AI adoption rates for travel planning. I thought you’d find the insight newsworthy.
Research shows the following insights about the relationship people have with AI during their travel planning process:
- Nearly 4% of global travellers are using AI to research travel destinations
- Men are currently 3x more likely than women to use AI as a research tool
- Nearly double the number of Americans use AI for travel planning than Brits (2.56% vs 1.42%)
- Belgium has the highest AI usage (nearly 8%)
An ongoing study has revealed that nearly 4% of global travellers use AI programs such as ChatGPT as their main way to research a travel destination.
Adventure travel company Skyhook surveyed nearly 7,000 people from all over the world, asking them about their travel preferences. The survey formed part of a broader study on people’s adventure personality traits.
Participants were asked to select their primary way of researching a destination as part of the study. They had six options to choose from, including researching on social media, browsing official travel publications, and getting tips from friends and family. People’s answers differed by generation, gender, and country.
Megan Firth, head of operations at Skyhook, said: “We plan to run this same study annually. Given the above results, we expect people’s adoption of AI in travel planning to accelerate in the coming years and surpass search engines as the #1 method that people use when planning travel.”
Study Insights on How People Use AI for Travel Planning
Here are some of the top insights on the relationship people have with AI when it comes to planning and researching a travel trip.
We’ve included information based on responses from people who are:
- Located in different countries
- From different generations (Baby Boomers (aka Boomers): Born 1946 to 1964, Gen X: Born 1965 to 1980, Millennials: Born 1981 to 2000, Gen Z: Born 2001 to 2020),
- Of different genders (over 98% of respondents selected either female or male when asked about gender, so we used those two answers to focus the gender analysis).
1. Nearly 4% of People Use AI As Their Main Way To Research a Destination
Close to 4% (3.94%) of our 6,921 respondents say that plugging their travel destination into an AI program (like ChatGPT) to see what information comes up is their MAIN method of research.
The other options people could choose from were:
- Catch up with a friend or family member who’s travelled there/currently lives there
- Head over to my favourite official travel publication
- Read travel guides written by bloggers
- Search engines (like Google) are my best friend in this case
- There’s nothing I can’t find on social media these days
Although AI is still currently the least popular method to research travel, it has seen an uptick in the last six months. As a comparison, data from the first study run in early 2024 showed that 2.78% of people turned to AI as their primary research method.
2. Men Are 3x More Likely Than Women To Use AI for Travel Research
Results showed that men are the top users of AI for travel research. They are nearly three times more likely to turn to AI for help with planning.
Interestingly, despite the strong trend towards men engaging the most with AI, both genders shared the same preferences around their main research methods, which are search engines and travel blogs.
If we look at the strongest vote disparity inversely and consider the biggest difference in female vs male votes, women trended strongly towards the option of consulting with a friend or family member.
It’s not surprising that out of the generations, Gen Z voted the most for AI as their main travel research method – 7.31% of them, to be exact. They are the youngest generation to participate in the quiz study and have grown up with technology in their lives.
Millennials were only half as interested in using AI for trip planning, with 3.81% noting it as their preferred method. Gen X were next, with 3.32% selecting the option. Boomers trailed the end of the pack, with below 2% choosing AI as a research method.
Comparing the US and the UK, just under double the number of people from the States say they use AI as a primary research method (2.56% for the US vs 1.42% for the UK).
Of all the countries that have taken part in the study, Belgium has the greatest number of votes (7.69%) for AI as the main travel research method. Australia was next, with 6.02% of Australians claiming AI is their primary research method, followed by South Africa with 4.84%.
See all tables for additional data.
- Table 1 shows the order of most to least popular travel research methods as voted by all study participants.
- Table 2 shows the percentage of votes by women and men for the six research options.
- Table 3 shows how the percentage of votes was split according to each generation.
- Table 4 shows how each country voted for their primary method of research during travel planning.
This study formed part of a broader adventure travel personality quiz launched by Skyhook Adventure in early 2024.
Access the quiz here: Skyhook’s Adventure Travel Personality Quiz.
At launch, the quiz was sent to the Skyhook customer database of 30,000 travellers and promoted across the Skyhook website, which receives 30,000 visitors a month.
At the time of analysis, close to 7,000 people had completed the survey (6,921 participants).
Insight for the study was gathered from a study question asking participants to pick their main way to research a travel destination from a list of six options. These activity options were randomly selected after doing internet research on the ways people discover travel online.
- Age
- Country location
- Gender (we include the option for Other and Prefer not to say. But the number of respondents who selected these was minimal).
At the time of analysis, respondents from nearly 70 countries participated in the study. For this case study, we narrowed the focus to the ten countries with the most respondents.
Because each country had varying numbers of respondents, we calculated multipliers to scale the answers proportionally from each location.
We took the country with the highest number of respondents and divided the number of respondents with each of the other nine countries. This gave us a multiplier for the nine countries with lower votes.
We then took that country multiplier and applied it against the number of votes each method received from each country.
The study received responses from four generations. Where mentioned, the following applies:
- Baby Boomers: Born 1946 to 1964 (also known as Boomers)
- Gen X: Born 1965 to 1980
- Millennials: Born 1981 to 2000
- Gen Z: Born 2001 to 2020
Again, the study had an uneven number of respondents from people spanning the generations. So, we calculated multipliers for three generations to get a proportional response weighted against the largest generational group.
To do this, we took the generation with the highest number of respondents and divided it against each of the other three groups. This gave us a multiplier to apply against the number of votes made by the three generations with the lowest representation.
The study received responses from various gender groups. More than 98% of respondents selected either female or male when asked about gender, so we used those two answers to focus the gender analysis.
To ensure proportional representation of women and men in the votes, we calculated a multiplier for the smaller group. We did this by dividing the number of respondents from the larger group by the number of respondents from the smaller group. We then used the multiplier to increase the number of votes submitted by the smaller group and give a proportional result.
