How automated text generation makes content production in the tourism industry scalable

Due to digitalisation, the tourism industry is experiencing a significant change in its customer demands. Tourist products must be individually tailored and digitally bookable; first-class communication of travel offers and good online service are moving into focus in Tourism 2.0. Intelligent technologies play a major role in meeting new, intangible needs. It’s as if AI-based technologies are predestined to meet the emerging challenges of the tourism industry.

‘Content is king.’ With these words, Bill Gates summed up more than 20 years ago the situation in the digital marketplace today. For a long time now, this wisdom has also applied to success in the tourism industry. The big advantage: every company, large or small, can generate significant competitive advantages with elaborate content management; with high-quality and always-up-to-date content tailored to the interests of the target group. In tourism, this content consists of descriptions of hotels, travel, leisure activities and sightseeing highlights. Richness of detail, topicality and the right way of addressing the target group are rewarded. The following arguments illustrate how natural language generation efficiently automates content creation in the tourism industry.

1. Increasing visibility

The key to greater visibility is to ensure that the entire offer is always up-to-date and attractively written. For example, different content recommendations and text elements for offers in the summer and winter seasons are ideal. Thanks to automated text generation, these can be regularly adapted or newly created. The optimisation for specific keywords is automatically taken into account. Natural language generation thus provides a significant competitive advantage for generating more coverage, especially in the long tail.

2. Customer approaches that are specific to channel and target group

Families, couples, individual travellers or even business people prioritise different needs when booking their travel. Instead of excluding individual target groups by defining focal points and formulations, automated text generation enables each everyone to be addressed individually.

3. Multilingualism

In no other industry is internationalisation as essential as it is for companies in the tourism industry. The direct availability of the offer in the language of the customer is the first and most effective measure to achieve this goal. Natural language generation allows an individual target group approach across different languages on a native speaker level. Hotel and environment descriptions and travel offers are translated at the push of a button, thus enabling consistent communication with international target groups. In addition, visibility in search engines is increased, as searching customers prefer to do this in their own language.

4. Increased conversion

For their final purchase decision, customers need all the facts and figures relating to their planned trip to be presented transparently and attractively. All the information included in the structured data, for example on the furnishings of the hotel room, the available leisure facilities, the surrounding area (e.g. the proximity of the beach or the next shopping opportunity) therefore finds its way into the automatically generated text. Data-driven, environmental information can also be composed: the proximity to the beach, the mountains or the city centre is automatically included by geodata. External data, for example on the current weather or typical travel time, can also be incorporated directly into the text. The desired holiday atmosphere is created at the very first digital touch point.

5. Release of resources

Using less capacity to create a larger and more individual offer is made possible by using AI-based speech technologies. Especially when composing content for tourism products, supporting editorial offices (be they internal or external) with intelligent tools is a good idea. NLG applications create hotel descriptions, sightseeing highlights and seasonal offers on demand at any time.