Sleep Tourism // Learn More about LLM's // Travel and Tourism Research

Exploring Sleep Tourism and AI's Impact on Travel

In this episode of Digital Tourism Insights, Pat introduces the concept of sleep tourism, a growing trend where travelers seek vacations focused on rest and rejuvenation. He discusses the importance of sleep for overall well-being and how tourism businesses can tap into this lucrative trend. Additionally, the episode delves into the role of AI, specifically large language models like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude, in revolutionizing travel planning and customer interactions. Pat also shares insights from a recent attitudinal study on how travelers select destinations and the tools they use.

00:00 Welcome to Digital Tourism Insights
00:49 Exploring the Trend of Sleep Tourism
02:12 Who Benefits from Sleep Tourism?
03:12 Opportunities for Tourism Businesses
04:23 The Future of Travel with AI and LLMs
05:29 Deep Dive into Leading LLMs
10:29 Practical Applications of LLMs in Travel
13:56 Attitudinal Study on Travel in Appalachia
18:11 Conclusion and Contact Information

Transcript

Pat: 0:13

Hello and welcome to Digital Tourism Insights, a podcast by Digital Relativity. I'm your host, Pat Strader, founder and CEO of Digital Relativity, with 25 years of experience in travel and tourism marketing. I invite you to join me each episode for a quick look at industry trends, research, emerging technologies, and more. And real talk on what works, what doesn't, and why. Grab a coffee, a beer, or a cocktail. There is no judgment here. Let's have some fun with an honest and irreverent look into the nitty gritty of travel and tourism marketing. Today we're diving into a trend that is catching the attention of travelers and the tourism industry alike. Sleep tourism. Now, I know what you're thinking. Sleep? Isn't that what we should do at home? Why would we pay to go somewhere to sleep? Well, buckle up, because the concept of sleep tourism is shaking up how we perceive travel and wellness. In today's world, where stress and burnout are rampant, the allure of a vacation dedicated to rest and rejuvenation is simply irresistible to some. A recent article reveals that this booming industry is projected to grow by nearly 8 percent and surpass 400 billion between now and 2028, for good reason. Sleep experts emphasize that sleep is the cornerstone of overall well being impacting your physical and mental health, and so imagine a design not just to see new places, but to enhance your sleep quality. And leave you feeling refreshed and revitalized. This isn't just about comfy beds and blackout curtains, although they help. We're talking about hotels, lodging properties, offering sleep enhancing amenities and services from high tech mattresses and sound machines to personalized sleep consultations and wellness programs. It's a tailored experience that caters to individual sleep needs, whether you're a late sleeper or struggling with jet lag. So let's break down who is seeking out these sleep tourism experiences. First and foremost, we have stressed professionals. Overworked, often dealing with high levels of burnout, these travelers are looking for a way to unwind and recharge. Then there are health conscious individuals who understand the vital role sleep plays in maintaining overall wellness. Frequent travelers, such as business people, often suffer from disrupted sleep patterns and are eager to find ways to reset their internal clocks. And then lastly, older adults who may face declining sleep quality are increasingly drawn to sleep tourism, seeking restorative experiences to maintain their health and vitality. So think about it. We've all returned from a vacation feeling more tired than we left, right? The hustle and bustle of sightseeing, navigating unfamiliar environments, adjusting to new schedules can leave us drained. Sleep tourism flips the script and prioritizes rest and relaxation as the main attraction. For savvy tourism businesses out there, this is a golden opportunity. Just think about this, transforming your hotel, resort, lodging property. Into a sleep sanctuary, upgrading your bedding, invest in sleep technology, offering curated wellness programs, partnering with sleep experts to provide personalized consultations and treatments. Think of it as crafting an experience that caters to the growing desire for restorative travel. The payoff, what goes beyond the financial gains of attracting a new niche of travelers by promoting sleep tourism, you're championing the importance of wellbeing and redefining what a fulfilling vacation looks like. An imagined guest returning home from the trip not with a suitcase full of souvenirs, but with a renewed sense of energy, focus, and overall health. It's a win win scenario. Travelers get the rest they crave. Tourism businesses tap into a lucrative and impactful trend. Sleep tourism is more than a passing fad. It's a reflection of our evolving needs and desires. And as an industry, we have the power to shape the future of travel by embracing this trend and providing experiences that prioritize both adventure and well being. In today's tech spotlight, we are once again venturing into the exciting realm of artificial intelligence, specifically looking at large language models, or as we always refer to them as LLNs. These are sophisticated computer programs that are transforming how we interact with technology and are poised to revolutionize the travel industry in ways that we are just beginning to imagine. Before we dive into LLMs, let's just break down the basics quickly. What exactly is Artificial Intelligence, or AI? In simple terms, AI refers to the ability of machines to mimic human intelligence. This can include tasks like problem solving, learning, decision making, and even understanding and generating human language. And this is where LLMs come in. These are specialized AI models trained on massive data sets of text and code. It enables them to understand and generate human like language with impressive accuracy. They're the brains behind some of the most advanced AI applications that we see today, from chatbots and virtual assistants to content generation and translation tools. Today we're focusing on four major players in the LLN space. Chad GPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude. We're going to delve into their unique strengths, explore how they're already making waves in various industries, including travel and tourism. First up, we have Chad GPT by OpenA. This is like the Swiss Army knife of LLNs. It's incredibly versatile, can handle a wide range of conversational tasks, from answering questions and providing explanations. To engaging in creative writing and even generating travel itineraries. In the tourism sector, ChatGPT is being used as the backbone to power chatbots that can assist customers with bookings, answer travel related queries, and even provide personalized recommendations. Next is Gemini by Google DeepMind. Gemini is the brainiac of the bunch. It's designed for tasks that demand high accuracy, deep comprehension, making it ideal for applications like complex data analysis, research, and in the context of travel, generating highly accurate and nuanced travel guides. Next we have Perplexity. Perplexity is a fantastic research tool, but it's known for its ability to handle a broad spectrum of language tasks effectively. It can generate detailed text, answer complex questions, And provide concise summaries and even site sources, which is incredibly important. And when we see how people are using this in the travel and tourism space, perplexity is being used as a replacement in some cases for traditional searches that have been done in the past. Finally, we're going to take a look at Klot by Anthrop. Claude is the LLM with a Conscious, and it was designed with safety and ethics in mind, and can help ensure that travel information is accurate, unbiased, and respectful of cultural sensitivities. To sum it up, each of these LLMs bring unique strengths to the table. For example, ChatGBT. This is what we would call the customization champion. TET GPT 4 stands out in particular for its ability to find and tune custom GPTs. GPT stands for Generative Pre trained Transformers. This means that you can tailor its responses to specific domain styles, brand voices, and if you need to get an LLM that can be highly specialized and adapted to your particular use case, ChatGPT4 is pretty powerful. It allows you to create custom chatbots, brand specific content generation, specialized customer support interactions. One example that I can think of for these custom GPTs that we have been considering is working with our travel and tourism partners. And creating a custom GPT that is strictly based upon the content and the information about your areas, which can serve as an assistant to your phone representatives as they're answering questions from prospective travelers. Anthropic Claude. This is the creative writer. Anthropic Claude boasts impressive writing capabilities. Its strong grasp of language, nuance, context, and storytelling makes it an ideal tool for generating high quality. Written content across various formats, whether the articles, marketing copy, creative stories, or even code. It's best for content creation, copywriting, writing projects, code generation, and I want to stress this. This is, again, these tools are intended to help create the content, not do the content creation from scratch that you simply copy, paste, and publish. Next, Google's Gemini. This is the critical thinker of the group. Again, we referred to it just a moment ago as the Brainiac. The Gemini is well suited for tasks. It requires complex problem solving, deep comprehension of information, and generating insightful responses. This one, you know, again, best for complex things, data analysis and interpretation. And it generates really in depth reports and summaries. Next, with Perplexity, this is a research assistant. Perplexity AI is designed with research in mind. It can quickly search through vast amounts of information. It can synthesize key points, present findings in an easily understandable format. And it's a valuable asset for anyone needing to gather and analyze data efficiently. So, what is this best for? I think a lot of folks would consider this. Uh, fantastic for academic, market research, fact checking, and just quickly exploring really complex topics. One thing to note is that best here is subjective, right? The best LLM ultimately depends on what you're specifically trying to do. Considering experimenting with different models, and I've got an exercise for you here in just a moment, to find one that aligns best with your goals. Uh, but again, it's looking at this from the travel and tourism marketing perspective. I think that we need to put ourselves in the shoes of our potential visitors and just think about how they might be using these tools, how we can leverage that knowledge and put the information that we know about our areas and present them in ways to help prospective travelers plan a trip. Potential applications for the travel and tourism industry are vast and frankly, they're quite exciting. You know, AI powered virtual travel agents that can personalize trips from booking flights and accommodations to crafting a customized itinerary trip based on the potential traveler's interest and preferences. I'm going to make a key point here. When I'm referring to agents in this respect, it's not travel agents that we think of in the traditional sense, but rather these AI agents that can take action. On your behalf. Okay, those things are coming and I think that this is going to be really interesting. So, for example, if somebody is using the AI tool to plan or to research potential destinations. When these agents do come into play, they can then go and book these trips for you. Just a few examples of how LLMs are poised to revolutionize how travelers plan and book. And so let's just kind of quickly look at an example of how prospective travelers can be using these tools. I would encourage you to go to all four of those LLMs and use these exact same props. And just look at the ways that the information comes back to you. How it's presented to you, how it's cited, what are the sources that are being used, what opportunities exist for us as traveling toys and marketers to make the most of these opportunities. So, I would encourage you to use a prompt such as this, using air quotes here. I will be traveling with my spouse and our three children. They are ages 12, 15, and 19. We are seeking a destination with great local food options, moderately adventurous activities, and the travel dates will likely be in August. Can you suggest locations within a day's drive of Washington, D. C. to consider? Now, you can modify that however you choose, okay? But, I would really encourage you to put that into each one of these different LLMs. And again, just look at the differences and the similarities in the results that you get. And here's another example. Going again to each one of these LLMs and being very specific. Okay, where should I eat when visiting Bryson City? Something as simple as that. And you can even, like, take that a step further, describe, you know, the, the persona, if you will. Provide specific times and dates, just as we did in the first example. And again, put the same query prompt, if you will, into each one of these LLMs. And just look at the opportunities that exist. So, what can we learn from this? Quite a bit. I know that we're still trying to wrap our heads around just how to leverage these opportunities, but they are opportunities. And so Let me know what you find, what you learn, did you see anything interesting, unexplainable, would love to hear from you. Send a text with what you learned, 209 300 5017, and we'll continue the conversation. In today's research roundup, we're going to take a slightly different approach instead of Reviewing published research, I'm going to talk a little bit about a recently completed attitudinal study that we have completed here at Digital Relativity with the help of our friends at Audience Audit. We're extremely excited about this study so that we can have more information to learn about how people are Selecting their destinations, the types of things that they are searching for in a destination, the tools that they're using to find them. And we're going to be covering the results of this over the course of the next several months. We will have a presentation coming up soon, and of course a special presentation for our participating partners, and to help everybody understand the things that we've learned about this. The focus of this study, again, an attitudinal study, was to look at the perceptions that people have about traveling in Appalachia, but then digging into the tools that they use, the types of information that inspires them to choose destinations, and we found some really interesting things. First of all, the confidence in the results is extremely high. This has an overall margin of error of plus or minus 3. 4 percentage points. This is at a 95 percent confidence level. So, what that means is 95 percent of the time, repeating the study would generate results within the 3. 4 percentage points of the results reported within the study. Very exciting. That gives me a high level of confidence in the responses that we received. And there's a couple of different things that I think are really interesting. First of all, I'll share with you just a couple of the sample questions that we asked, such as, I'm always looking for new opportunities to travel. I am interested in the local culture of Appalachia. I want to, quote unquote, live like the locals when I travel to a new destination. And when we started looking at, like, how people plan, one of the questions we asked was, I want expert guidance in planning my travel. Some other questions we asked about tools that they use while they're in market. We also asked about the types of things that they avoid. One of the questions was, I prefer to avoid crowds when making my travel plans. And again, the respondents would rate these things on a scale. This has all been synthesized, and one of the really interesting pieces of this is that we have identified four distinct attitudinal segments among the respondents. Of the 100 percent of this, if you will, it is broken down almost exactly equal across four different segments that we've identified. Immersive, spontaneous, cautious, and avoidant. Okay. What does that mean? So, the way that we have looked at this, the immersive, they experience local culture, activities, and experiences, place a high priority on that. The spontaneous travelers rely on an instant and opportunity for traveling, prefer not to plan, and embrace surprise. One of the things about the spontaneous group that I look forward to sharing with you all as we reveal these results over the course of the next couple of months, the spontaneous group is not who you might think that it is. The Cautious Travelers. Within this segment, they want expert advice and will allow reviews to learn about destinations and prefer to visit areas where locals feel familiar to them. And then lastly, we have the Avoidance segment. And this group prefers to avoid crowds, popular places, and tourists. So, some very interesting things that we have uncovered. I really look forward to sharing this information with you again. This is a focus on travel in Appalachia, about how people feel about the Appalachian region, and then again diving more into the tools and the resources that they rely upon to plan their travel. So, if you're interested in keeping up with this, send me a text 209 300 5017, and we'll be sure that you're on the list as we start revealing these results. Over the course of the next couple of months. That's all for today's episode. I hope that you found one small piece of information to help you along your marketing journey. If you have any questions, a topic that you'd like to hear covered, or a great example of travel and tourism marketing in the wild, I'd love to hear from you. Just drop me an email. TTI at DigitalRelativity. com That's TTI at DigitalRelativity. com Or you can text 209 300 5017, that's 209 300 5017, or message me on X at Pat Strader. I'm your host, Pat Strader, signing off, and I invite you to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and join us next time as we continue to explore the future of travel and tourism marketing.