The psychology of travel decisions. What does the “Top Destination” mean for me?
There is a point in a frequent traveler’s life when there are no more obvious choices left untouched.
The place which we want to visit might be new and unvisited yet, but it should also match a bunch of our personal criteria. Climate, pricing, distance to travel, and now safety and availability to enter.
I’ve been there. So as many of you, fellow travelers.
We are constantly under heavy information overload. There are myriad options, combinations, places to visit, things to experience.
Life is simply too short if we want to enjoy everything which is on the table.
And still, there are so many moving parts that the traveler needs to hold in his head. Destinations, trends, flights, hotels, deals, prices… and now travel restrictions and new regulations.
Analysis Paralysis
“More options to choose from, the longer it takes the user to make a decision on which one to interact with. Users bombarded with choices have to take time to interpret and decide, giving them work they don’t want.” Hick’s Law
The cognitive load on the human brain is constantly increasing. While anxiety is increasing too, as the anticipation of better user experience and client satisfaction.
In the modern technological era, we take for granted blazing fast loading time, apps performance, and availability, exceptional design, and response time.
But we still do manual searches. Sometimes dozens of them (in fact up to 48 times on average before we book, according to Expedia/Mongodb case study). Hopping from one device to another. Saving results in notes, where they become obsolete within a minute.
“When in doubt, users tend to not take action unless they understand exactly what will happen (check this amazing storyboard on airbnb personalization).” Status Quo Bias
People tend to make an emotional decision where to go next, often because the travel research sometimes is exhausting. Sometimes they end up making no decision at all when presented with too many choices.
The Modern Era of Travel Tech
Fortunately, there are modern travel companies out there who pay attention to overly increasing user needs, modern technological trends and get the advantage of it.
Machine learning and destination recommendations systems could significantly decrease the time which we travelers regularly spend on travel research and preparation.
Extensive user researches in modern travel companies like Hopper give us golden insights:
“People don’t want filters. They don’t want a list of even more options to sort through. People want better, more relevant content and help making difficult trade-offs, in as few steps as possible..” by Hopper Blog
Human Intuition vs Machine
With more computational power available nowadays modern AI and machine learning algorithms could instantly recognize patterns at scale.
The human decision-making process heavily biased on past experience and often just instinctive, emotional, or simply called intuition.
“Artificial Intelligence is nothing but intuition inside a machine”. Oleg Roginsky, CEO of People.ai
On TravelRank if the user chooses to share the historical data with the platform (past travel history or travel preferences) it could instantly make the accurate predictions and recommend what is the best place to visit next.
No more filters, search clicks, clicks, clicks… and hours of tedious research.
Future is Not Evenly Distributed
The future of the travel industry is in a machine powered, artificial intuition. Manual search will not be completely replaced though (yet), but it will be heavily augmented with AI and contextual data to reduce any friction and cognitive load.
Eventually, algorithms and formulas that run on data will replace human intuition. While the travelers will regain time and could spend it (safely) traveling the world more frequently (again).
Is this the kind of future which you want to be a part of?
Alex Shevchuk, Founder of TravelRank.
