Is the virtual travel agent going to takeover the industry? Priceline Executive Vice President Glenn Fogel thinks so.
"Fogel envisions a time in the not-so-distant future when booking a trip can be done with virtual assistants like Amazon's Alexa and a simple voice command," Yahoo reports.
He envisions a future in which these devices are able to arrange a trip when you request.
"We see things like Alexa or Google Home, this idea of just talking out loud and getting what you want," Fogel told Yahoo Finance in an interview this week at London's annual technology conference Unbound. "And the question people ask is, will we be able to do travel like that? I think probably 'yes.' Over time, will people say, 'I want to go to London,' and the device will do everything, and you won't have to do anything."
Fogel could be next in line to head Priceline. So, his views may be shaping the future of travel booking and, according to Yahoo, he "references the all-but-extinct travel agent when talking about how travel could be improved."
"What was so beautiful about that was that the travel agent knew you," Fogel tells Yahoo. "You had a relationship with that person. They knew who you were. They knew your family, your income, what types of things you liked, what types of things you didn't like. That person made all of that decision based on the history of how you've traveled in the past and other elements of you."
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Fogel believes that the future lies in virtual agents who will be able to book families of four on vacations much more efficiently than a human travel agent or the actual traveler.
"Because if you have a family of four, and you're trying to book travel all by yourself, it's still a time-consuming event, particularly if you have to go to an airline you've never used before, because you have to re-key in all of your family's data, all of your personal identification data, your passport, your birthdates, your address, etc.," Fogel tells Yahoo.
For more on the future of the virtual travel agent, read on here.
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