https://youtu.be/XHKHi9ItiKY
“When you travel you want your needs to be understood – no matter where you go” says Lisa Seacat DeLuca in the ad above. Something I can very much relate to.
It all started in Hawaii in May 2016. I am honoured to have been invited by IBM to join 999 colleagues at the ‘Best Of IBM’ event. Sitting at the event I have already traveled 24 hours from my home Melbourne and all my travel booking experience has been the usual endless search pain. Something that could have been quite different, if I had known and used WayBlazer.
You want an experience that feels highly personalised
I travel a lot (151 flights in 12 months, something I wrote about here) and the story almost always starts with my favourite airline – Qantas – and is followed by me trying to find a decent hotel, car, restaurant. The search engine can be IBM’s OTR (now thank god Concur), Qantas, Booking, Kayak, Agoda and many more. The experience is always the same – you have to exactly know what you want and you are bound to the simple search terms – such as destination or type of hotel. Alternatively you can spend hours reading through Tripadvisor comments of people who like to complain.
Enter Terrell Jones – Chairman of WayBlazer, 30 Year Travel and IT Veteran. He has been invited by IBM to speak about his latest creation – a cognitive infused search engine. His presentation on WayBlazer is astonishing and yet so simple. Instead of relying on recommendations of people that do not travel like I do and reverting back to the lowest price with a simple filter, Terrell gave the example of a different experience – an engine that simply starts by asking you what you want to do? Me – of course I want to surf in Hawaii…
In his presentation in Maui, Terrell referenced his work with The Leading Hotels of the World discovery tool. You can try it for yourself here. A simple but great change of experience. WayBlazer combines machine learning with natural language processing to provide the most relevant travel recommendations possible. Best described by Jones himself in the video below with the simple example: “I wanna go to Italy this summer with my family”.
https://youtu.be/7LPQpqTSXVA
Of course there still is a long way to go, but the foundation is there. Take another great feature of Watson called Personality Insights and add it to WayBlazer. Watson can analyse my reviews of hotels as well as my use of language in blog posts, twitter posts, etc… and further personalise it’s results to me. It can become smarter and also learn from my choices.
How far this change in travel experience can go was recently described very well in a New York Times article with the matching title: “When a Robot Books Your Airline Ticket“.
Jane Levere also mentions another example of the Watson and WayBlazer partnership called Connie, a robot being tested at the Hilton near Washington. Connie answers guests’ questions about amenities and services, and also suggests local attractions.
Another city I have been in recently was Orlando. The VisitOrlando app is yet another great use case of this type of personalisation – as shown below:
All of the above examples are great case studies of better personalisation and relate well to the theme I am most interested in currently – real time personalization. IBM’s cognitive capabilities are not just Watson and the scenarios that some of the companies out there have engaged in are not at all just related to cancer studies and Jeopardy – which is a common and very old misconception about what we do here at IBM. Cognitive capabilities are going to change what we do and if it is related to travel – I am going to be a happy spokesperson for that change. Change by the way that is not just great for the sake of better customer experience. Change that is also very successful.
Last, but not least – how personal this experience will become for the people using these capabilities is another great example. Something that you can see being presented by Ciera Raines at the Customer Engagement Forum in Melbourne and Sydney this week.
You can still register for the event here and have a look at the agenda. Feel yourself invited.
And me? Well – I have enjoyed Maui very much – despite all the travel search pain – but have a look yourself:
