TAGTHAi unveils AI-powered personalized travel planner with Google Cloud AI

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, 2024

‘Design My Trip’ helps travelers plan their trips to Thailand within seconds, supporting the country’s international tourism resurgence

TAGTHAi, Thailand’s official travel super app, and Google Cloud, announced a strategic collaboration aimed at simplifying and enhancing the travel planning experience for visitors to Thailand.

Utilizing Vertex AI, Google Cloud’s enterprise AI platform, and Google’s first-party foundation models like Gemini – TAGTHAi has built ‘Design My Trip,’ a generative AI (gen AI)-powered capability accessible through the TAGTHAi mobile app.

This innovative tool enables travelers to create personalized trip itineraries within seconds, facilitating the discovery and exploration of Thailand's diverse tourism offerings.

Thiratida Kuvantharai, Chief Executive Officer, Thai Digital Platform Social Enterprise Co., Ltd. (TAGTHAi), said: “TAGTHAi is committed to harnessing data-driven technologies to offer curated journeys that resonate with every traveller. This aligns with the Tourism Authority of Thailand's (TAT) goal of digitally transforming the local tourism ecosystem to reinforce Thailand’s position as a leading destination and drive high-value growth across the sector. With Google Cloud as our AI innovation partner, we’re proactively addressing a major pain point faced by international visitors: navigating where to go in Thailand, and how, due to the overwhelming complexity associated with finding reliable in-destination-related information that’s scattered across numerous online platforms.

We’ve developed Design My Trip to distil these complexities into personalized trip plans that guide travellers every step of the way, reducing travel anxiety and ensuring that they can easily discover and enjoy the rich tapestry of high-quality attractions and experiences that Thailand has to offer.”

The early-access version of Design My Trip helps travellers create tailored one-to-three-day itineraries for visits to the Bangkok Metropolitan Region. Users simply select their specific interests, such as “massage and spa,” “Michelin food,” or “Skywalk,” and the AI-powered tool instantly generates a personalized trip plan.

As a result of seamless integrations with Google Maps APIs, the tool also prioritizes convenience by considering distances between recommended locations to minimize travel time while providing easy access to directions, reviews, and other useful information.

Since its initial release in June 2024, Design My Trip has already generated unique itineraries for thousands of active TAGTHAi app users, highlighting the strong demand for this user-friendly tool.

An enterprise-ready data and AI foundation for Thailand’s national travel platform

Design My Trip's ability to curate authentically local and well-coordinated travel journeys stems from its integration with TAGTHAi's vast and continuously updated databases of travel insights.

These databases, enriched with points of interest, recommendations from locals, and other relevant information, are sourced from TAGTHAi’s 48 public and private sector partners across the country.

This wealth of information is streamed in near real-time to BigQuery, Google Cloud’s unified data platform, to ensure that the app has access to the most up-to-date insights when crafting itineraries. When a traveler selects their specific interests on the Design My Trip interface, the tool leverages this integration to generate itineraries using the reliable data from the TAGTHAi databases.

Kanokwan Boonchai, Chief Operating and Technology Officer, Thai Digital Platform Social Enterprise Co., Ltd. (TAGTHAi), said: “Google Cloud's integrated data and AI capabilities and deep expertise in gen AI operations were instrumental in bringing Design My Trip to life. We were able to go from concept to production-ready solution in just four months – a feat we initially believed would take years. This was made possible by Google Cloud's ability to streamline the creation of data-to-AI workflows that power Design My Trip while efficiently processing the massive volume of data from our numerous partners.

Most importantly, Vertex AI provides built-in tools for monitoring and evaluating model performance, which is crucial for maintaining the quality and accuracy of AI-generated itineraries. The early-access version of Design My Trip has already delighted users, with 90% expressing their satisfaction with the tool in a recent survey. We now look forward to continuing our collaboration with Google Cloud to innovate quickly and deliver new features that exceed user expectations.”

Annop Siritikul, Country Director, Thailand, Google Cloud, said: “TAGTHAi’s adoption of gen AI to power Design My Trip has resulted in positive user sentiment and increased purchases of its all-in-one travel pass offerings. This success is an example of the real-world business impact that organizations are seeing as they move their gen AI projects from proof-of-concept into production. TAGTHAi recognizes that successful AI adoption goes beyond just having access to capable models.

It’s about grounding the models in high-quality enterprise data and using these connections to steer model behaviour, thereby creating more accurate and relevant gen AI-powered experiences for customers. As Thailand looks to sustain its growth in international tourism, we look forward to continuing to help TAGTHAi and the broader travel ecosystem elevate their digital competitiveness and drive tangible business results with the industry’s most enterprise-ready gen AI platform.”

The full-featured version of Design My Trip, slated for release later this year, will offer expanded capabilities, allowing users to generate itineraries for longer trips and cover more points of interest and Thai provinces, such as Chiang Mai and Phuket. It will also allow users to further customize their AI-generated itineraries and share them with others for easier group travel planning.

The itineraries will offer the option of directly purchasing and storing e-tickets to attractions and activities within the TAGTHAi app, ensuring a secure and convenient booking experience with all travel confirmations in one place.

Design My Trip is currently available in English and Thai. In the future, TAGTHAi plans to leverage the Gemini models’ multi-language capabilities to generate travel itineraries and other content in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and other languages, to cater to a broader range of overseas visitors.