Marketing in the News: Expedia Integrates ChatGPT Into Mobile Travel App
I was interested in this article for a few reasons. The first reason I was interested was because being a college student right now, I have heard a lot about ChatGPT and have used it before for simple things like making citations and other menial tasks, not cheating on work. I am interested in how things like ChatGPT and other AI services will integrate themselves into our daily lives, and this looks like the first of many changes coming in that regard. I was also interested because I want to see how well it will actually work once it gets to be all up and running, I haven't heard of many other companies doing anything like this so I think it will be cool to see how it turns out.
The first main point of the article is that Expedia is testing out this idea to try to make it easier for customers to get recommendations for travel, with asking more specific questions about what the customer wants and doing things like saving places in conversations about certain trips to make things easier to find. Thes second main point is that the company that created ChatGPT, OpenAI, is taking note of companies doing this and they are working on initiatives to make it easier for companies to do things like this and integrate ChatGPT into their website. The third main takeaway from the article is that while this idea is currently being worked on there is still a ways to go. In early testing phases there were some strange interactions with the AI and Expedia and other companies trying to integrate ChatGPT are working on ways to prevent this from happening and making the AI more user friendly.
The value proposition of Expedia is pretty simple. Figuring out how your trip will go and planning things for the trip like flights, hotels, and activities can be difficult and overwhelming. Rather than going across multiple websites and checking things like prices and times, you can find it all on Expedia. The company does all this and then you pay a fee for their service of making the process easier.
This marketing is relevant because it is one of the first initiatives of a company that is using AI to improve the service or product the company provides. AI is also a piece of technology very new to all of us. It has been around and we all have known about the idea of it but we are living through the first time that AI has been available to anyone and as it is starting to be a bigger part of all of our lives. The point of this marketing strategy is to make a product that acts as a person to help make recommendations and converse with customers rather than hiring people to actually do this. The fact that AI is constantly learning also helps with this because it can get better and better at doing this and become more and more useful for the company and customers. They are working towards implementing this by using ChatGPT, a product of the company OpenAI, and testing this implementation out before fully releasing it to the public.
There doesn't seem to be any other online travel agencies like Expedia trying this initiative. The article mentioned a few other companies experimenting with the idea, like Instacart and Shopify, but none that would compete with Expedia. The main challenge is familiarizing the AI with the company and making it able to understand all the things customers are looking for, like price, time, and other variables people take into consideration when making travel plans. So the main obstacle right now is just making the AI able to understand the ins and outs of Expedia itself before it can help other people understand it.
The only buyer persona this really caters to is to people that travel since those are the people that use Expedia. There are some people that are probably against this idea because they are scared of the capabilities of AI and don't think the risk of using AI is worth the reward of getting real time recommendations on the website. This strategy is unique because it is one of the first big companies to do this. We talked in class about how American Airlines has a team of people that do sort of the same thing as AI will with Expedia, answer questions online and such, it is more intricate than that and there are some aspects of the American Airlines strategy that AI might not be able to replicate at the moment, rather than having a team of people to interact with customers Expedia just wants to have AI do it for a much cheaper price with the only expense being paying to use the service from OpenAI.
I think it is a good marketing strategy. I think that they are ahead of the curve and more companies will start to mimic this idea capitalize on the capabilities of AI with things like communicating online. I think that there is definitely a bit of hesitation with AI, but people will slowly start to warm up to using services like this and the time it takes for people to warm up to it will be worth it for Expedia since they are so far ahead of the curve. On the visual we saw in one of our videos about who we want to market to I think that Expedia is in the Early Adopters category, and they will benefit from being early to doing this.
If I were in charge of this marketing strategy, I would probably not have thought of this idea in the first place. I think that I would be worried about people being skeptical of AI and dismissed the thought of using AI like this out of fear of people not wanting to use a service that includes AI. If I did happen to start this marketing campaign thought, I would be unsure of how to promote it. I don't know how you would really advertise this and get the word out. I think the main thing to do would be to have a chat bar on the home screen of the website to make it an obvious and easy feature for people to use.
From this article and assignment, I learned that in the tech-forward world we live in, it will become easier and easier to automate simple jobs like this and this will be a big thing for companies to start doing. Companies will be looking for ways to cut spending and if they can just use a computer instead of paying a person or multiple people for a job, they will choose the computer. It's a little scary to think that jobs could be taken over by robots, but I think that we haven't had enough of that happen to really judge the situation at this point.
Here is Expedia's current help page and it mentions that you can ask a virtual agent questions but at some point, they may have to connect you to a real agent. I imagine that with the implementation of ChatGPT it will be fully automated, and you won't have to be transferred to a real agent.
This is the article I used:
And this is the website for Expedia:
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