During World Travel Market 2024, Trip.com Group showcased tech solutions, tools and products that are elevating consumer travel experiences.

Travel booking company Trip.com Group has highlighted some of its game-changing products and tech-powered tools that are enhancing people's trip-planning capabilities, and bringing travel brands closer to their desired customers.

Speaking at World Travel Market in November 2024, Boon Sian Chai, managing director and vice president of International Markets for Trip.com Group, shared some of the company’s customer experience-related innovations.

Artificial intelligence underpins many of the tools, products and tech that were showcased. For example, Chai spoke about Trip Best, a tool that provides personalised hotel, destination, restaurant and experiences recommendations based on analysing more than 100 million user reviews. He also presented TripGenie, an AI travel assistant that crafts itineraries and answers customers’ questions - and that has now served more than three million customers.

Hotel + X is a product that allows hoteliers to promote their hotel on Trip.com as a holistic experience, by allowing them to upsell unique elements of a property as a “room-plus” package. According to Chai, 8,000 hotels have signed up to the product, and are seeing an average 30% increase in their average daily room rate as a result.

During the World Travel Market session, Chai revealed how Trip.com Group is building localised capabilities into its global innovation roadmap. For example, in response to intelligence that travellers in Europe have a greater interest in sustainability, Trip.com's points of sale in Europe can bring information about sustainability to the surface during the stage where a customer is searching for travel, and can provide recommendations accordingly. Similarly, the tone of voice and formality of language at the point of sale can be adapted to align with the cultural preferences of a region’s travellers.

Chai also indicated that there will be a further expansion of Trip.com Group’s Live Streaming product. An initiative launched by the group’s co-founder and executive chairman James Liang during the pandemic, the aim was to maintain travellers' connection with destinations when travel was not possible, and the chairman’s live video streams picked up tens of millions of views across platforms in China. This led to the opening of a dedicated live streaming centre in Bangkok to serve the Asia-Pacific market. Mr Chai said the increasing popularity of live streaming online led the group to believe: “it is possible to replicate the success we’ve seen in China in the rest of the world, including Europe.”

by Rose Dykins | GLOBETRENDER