The activity people want to do most on vacation isn't what you’d expect. According Skycanner's 2024 travel trends report, quality sleep is the activity people are most excited for. Naomi Hahn, VP of Strategy at Skyscanner joined TheStreet to discuss this growing trend as well as how artificial intelligence is revolutionizing the industry.
Full Video Transcript Below:
J.D. DURKIN: Does your data tell you much I wonder about people booking elsewhere, looking to the United States as a destination that could be New York. Or you have some people who may say, hey, I'd love to get out and not necessarily be in a crowded city. Is there an interest in the American Southwest or areas like that?
NAOMI HAHN: So I don't know. I'm trying to think if you've got anything specific on that. What we are seeing, there's an interesting trend that I think persisted from last year, which was last year. You had people going on a lot of solo travel, which was to do with well-being and space. Linked to that you had a lot of people not doing the city stuff but wanting to go and reconnect with nature. And this year the trend we're seeing is sleep destination, sleep. I
know. And I'm like, I get it when I go on holiday. I want to sleep too. But the number one activity that came through in the research was that 33% of people said the first thing that they wanted to do on holiday, the most important thing was sleeping. So this is the whole thing around kind of combining holidays with experience, but also recuperation, which is quite an interesting move.
J.D. DURKIN: Talk to us a little bit about the role that AI is playing when it comes to making travel plans for 2024.
NAOMI HAHN: Yeah, so AI has always been a big part of what Skyscanner does. So in terms of machine learning and using data intelligently to be able to crunch 80 billion different prices every day, to be able to serve them to travelers so they can decipher them and figure out what's right for them. So AI has always been important. As we go into next year, we're finding that travelers are proactively searching for generative AI suggestions for where they should be going on holiday. And I think I don't remember the specific stat, but there's a high number of Americans who have actually actively used generative AI to search for things on their mobile phones. And they're the highest they were the highest out of the whole globe that we interviewed.
So it was America who were trending more towards using that. And the great thing about generative AI is that they can identify different sources of information and pull them together really, really quickly. For a consumer like you or I to say, well, what's it actually going to be like in that destination? Or if I want to go somewhere where I can see Taylor Swift I can get a good night's sleep and I can go to a Michelin star restaurant that isn't going to break the bank like this can all come back to you.
