Enhancing Travel and Hospitality: The Need for AI Translation and 6 Examples of Real-World Applications

With hundreds of languages spoken worldwide, companies have increasingly relied on hiring bilingual and multilingual staff to bridge the communication gap. In fact, companies like Air Canada boast that over 60% of their employees are bilingual. However, this increased demand has made language-skilled staff a scarce resource in the industry.

This has led travel businesses to seek alternative solutions to maintain excellent customer service without breaking the bank. That's where AI solutions for translation and multilingual content generation come in.

These tools have become increasingly popular in the industry due to their ability to provide accurate, timely translations with minimal effort and high-cost optimizations. In this blog post, we'll explore the role of AI translation in the travel and hospitality space and look at real-world use cases on how it can help businesses maximize profits and reduce costs.

Understanding the Role of AI Translation in Travel and Hospitality and Its Benefits

Customer service plays a pivotal role in the travel industry, from airports and airlines to hotels and tourism centers.

When it comes to AI translation, the travel and hospitality field has some unique needs. Travelers often require translations in multiple languages when traveling abroad or interacting with foreign services. This means that businesses are expected to provide high-quality translations quickly (while staying cost-effective). Below are the top benefits of AI translation in travel and hospitality.

1. Improve Customer Experiences and Loyalty. Customers expect personalized experiences. With AI-driven translation solutions, businesses can offer customers this, leading to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty. By providing a seamless and multilingual traveling experience, businesses can foster confidence to retain their customers across borders. This trust can then be leveraged into greater engagement with customers over time, leading to increased ROI and revenue potential.

2. Maximize Profits and Reduce Costs. AI-driven translation and multilingual content generation offer significant cost savings for businesses in the travel and hospitality space. By leveraging highly efficient AI technologies and large language models, businesses can optimize their localization programs when working with solutions with a consumption-based pricing model. Contextual AI enables Lilt to deliver competitive pricing, making translators significantly faster and thus less expensive. Lilt is then able to pass those savings on to our customers.

3. Ensure High-Quality Translation. Through instant retraining, AI translations can deliver with higher accuracy, ultimately driving improved translation quality and increased translation velocity. The instant retraining of the models further enables higher accuracy, greater consistency, and closer alignment to each customer’s specific brand voice. Regardless of the solution you chose, skilled linguists need to be part of the process. They will review AI-generated translation suggestions to guarantee quality and power continued adaptation with real-time feedback, and drive In-Context Learning for the AI.

4. Improve Translation Speed. It’s important to note that AI translation is augmenting—not replacing—human linguists. By leveraging large language models and In-Context Learning, human translators only need to review and correct any mistakes or inconsistencies, resulting in faster delivery of translated content. This hybrid approach is particularly effective when AI-generated translations are already of high accuracy.

AI Translation Use Cases in the Travel Hospitality Industry

AI translation technology is revolutionizing the way businesses operate in the travel and hospitality industry. By leveraging AI, companies can reduce costs, increase customer satisfaction and expand their reach into new markets.

Here are some of the use cases where AI translation can be utilized in this industry:

1. Creating multilingual booking interfaces: AI-driven translations allow companies to create a multilingual booking interface for customers. This makes it easier for travelers from different countries to book their trips and tickets with ease. The system should also be able to support local payment options and currencies, ensuring a seamless user experience for all travelers.

2. Providing real-time translations in airports and train stations: AI translation can provide real-time translations at airports and train stations, making it easier for international travelers to navigate their way around the station or airport. This can help reduce wait times and confusion for travelers who don't speak the local language.

3. Translating menus, room amenities, and other services into multiple languages: AI-driven translations enable hotels to quickly translate their menus, room amenities, service descriptions, and other information into multiple languages so that global guests have an easy time understanding what's available at the hotel or tourist center.

4. Quickly translating promotional materials and websites: With AI translation technology, businesses can quickly translate websites or promotional materials such as brochures or videos into any language needed. This helps businesses reach a wider audience and increase bookings and customer satisfaction—all while staying consistent with their brand message across different markets.

5. Servicing global travelers with translated FAQ and customer support: Since travel and hospitality companies need to be able to effectively communicate with global customers, translated FAQ and customer support can help global travelers find the information they need quickly and easily, making it easier for travelers to plan and book their trips. Translating your customer service content can also reduce the number of customer support tickets, as travelers can find the answers to their questions themselves.

6. Align your global teams and partners with translated knowledge bases: In addition to global travelers, businesses also need to support global teams. This can be challenging, as team members may speak different languages and have different cultural backgrounds. Translated knowledge bases can help team members find the information they need quickly and easily, improving internal communication and collaboration within the team and making it easier for team members to do their jobs.

Conclusion

Overall, businesses in the travel and hospitality space can stay ahead of the curve with the right AI translation strategy. AI translation holds great promise for the travel and hospitality industry, offering significant cost savings, improved customer experiences, increased engagement, and greater profits. As you continue to train your AI translation systems and implement integrations into your workflows, you’ll be able to provide a seamless and multilingual customer experience for your travelers all with a few clicks of a button.