This photo taken on Oct. 20, 2022 shows the Lianhua Peak of Huangshan Scenic Area in east China's Anhui Province. (Photo by Fan Chengzhu/Xinhua)
BEIJING, May 15 (Xinhua) -- Using DeepSeek for travel guides and artificial intelligence (AI) personalized itinerary customization services before traveling, scanning the QR code to have a one-on-one personal tour guide in the scenic area, viewing the underwater world constructed by AI and "dance" with whales at the museum ... With the accelerated implementation of application scenarios, AI is igniting new sparks in the cultural and tourism industries.
-- AI-customized travel is increasingly popular
Nowadays, more and more tourists are choosing to use AI for personalized itinerary customization. On social media platforms such as Xiaohongshu, there have been hundreds of thousands of posts related to topics such as "using DeepSeek for travel guides" and "AI-customized travel".
During this year's May Day holiday, Shanghai resident Ms. Liu tried to use AI personalized itinerary customization services to complete her long-awaited trip to Yunnan.
"Previously, before every trip, I had to search for a large number of guides on various platforms, screen attractions, and constantly search for various flight and hotel information, which was too exhausting," said Ms. Liu, adding that in this trip, AI helped her solve the big problem of making guides and book cost-effective flights and hotels, greatly improving the efficiency and allowing her to truly enjoy the fun of traveling.
Many tourism platform companies have also captured this market trend and are making related layouts.
In April this year, the "AI assistant Xiaoniu" tourism application independently developed by Chinese online travel agency Tuniu was officially launched, combining vertical travel application scenarios and open-source models to provide users with one-stop services such as intelligent search, automatic price comparison, personalized recommendation, and booking of products such as flight tickets, hotels, and train tickets. The entire process from receiving a request from a user to completing the search, comparison, and intelligent recommendation by "AI assistant Xiaoniu" only takes 10 seconds.
In the same month, Chinese online travel platform Fliggy launched its AI product "wenyiwen" which includes multiple professional assistants involving itinerary, route customization, intelligent transportation, hotels, travel guides, local tour guides, budget management, service guarantee, etc. The product supports multi-modal input, allowing users to interact through texts, voices, and even communicate in dialects. What is generated for users is a travel plan that combines images, product cards, and links to attractions.
In the view of industry insiders, travel consumption demand is often highly personalized, with various services involving flight tickets, hotels, entrance tickets and conditions like arrival and departure time, transfer and catering making users face high decision-making costs. With the support of AI, large-scale customized tours are expected to truly become accessible services.
-- Industry intelligent transformation accelerates
From personalized itinerary customization to virtual scenic area guides, from AR real-life navigation to immersive experiences ... As the application scenarios are becoming more and more diverse, AI is injecting more vitality into cultural and tourism innovation.
A report released by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology shows that in the analysis of the maturity matrix of AI plus vertical industry application, the contribution of AI in culture and tourism ranks among the top in the service sector. AI application continues to expand, generating products that subvert traditional cultural and tourism ecological scenes, breaking the conventional experience of tourists, and creating new consumption growth points, says the report.
It is learned that recently, many scenic spots in China have announced access to the DeepSeek big model and achieved comprehensive upgrading in intelligent interaction, scene services, travel experience, etc. At the same time, multiple tourism companies have also widely applied AI to intelligent customer services, virtual tour guides and other fields, promoting transformation and upgrading of culture and tourism.
Not long ago, Lenovo Group signed a cooperation agreement with two cultural and tourism companies to jointly release an intelligent agent in culture and tourism, the first of its kind in China. It is introduced that this intelligent agent can collaborate with intelligent agents in multiple fields such as transportation and security, and meanwhile, by relying on Lenovo's full-stack hybrid AI solution and services, it can achieve full-chain empowerment of government regulation, enterprise operation, and tourist experience, becoming the first entrance to one-stop smart culture and tourism.
The integration of culture and tourism with AI has broken through the initial stage of technological superposition and is giving rise to the reconstruction of a new service ecosystem, said Zhu Keli, a standing director of the China Information Industry Association and founding director of the China Institute of New Economy, adding that on the demand side, AI-driven personalized services are reshaping tourist decision-making modes, and the transformation on the supply side is more profound, as AI is restructuring the value chain structure of culture and tourism.
-- Deep integration still has a long way to go
An action plan on innovative development of smart tourism jointly issued by relevant authorities points out that by 2027, the scale of smart tourism economy will further expand, with the infrastructure more complete, the management level significantly improved, the marketing effectiveness more obvious, the supply of high-quality products more abundant, and the services and experiences more convenient and comfortable.
The prospect of "AI plus culture and tourism" is broad, as it can provide personalized, convenient, and intelligent services for tourists, enhance tourist experience, and help cultural and tourism enterprises optimize management, realize precision marketing, improve operational efficiency, and promote industrial innovation and development, said Hong Yong, an expert from the digital-real economies integration Forum 50.
Zhu believes that the next three to five years will be a critical period for AI to reshape the landscape of the culture and tourism industry.
However, some experts also pointed out that there are still some key bottlenecks in the deep integration of AI and culture and tourism.
Firstly, there is the problem of data silos, where the data standards for scenic spots, transportation, hotels, and other links are not unified, making it difficult to form a complete tourist behavior graph, and secondly, the cost of technology adaptation is too high, and small- and medium-sized cultural and tourism enterprises lack customized development capabilities, Zhu said.
In addition, there is a serious shortage of cross-disciplinary talent teams that understand both the laws of tourism operation and the characteristics of AI technologies. The combination of these issues has resulted in many AI applications remaining in the demonstration stage, unable to form a sustainable business closed loop, Zhu added.
He suggested cultural and tourism enterprises deeply match technologies with scenes, establish dynamic governance mechanisms for data application to find a balance between protecting tourist privacy and exploring commercial value, and jointly set up innovation consortia with technology companies and research institutions to share the risks of technology research and development.
Cultural and tourism enterprises should choose AI application scenarios reasonably based on their own actual situation, and avoid blindly following the trend, Hong said, noting that attention should be paid to user experience, combining AI technologies with humanized services to create unique smart culture and tourism brands.
Experts generally believe that the ultimate test for the transformation of "AI plus culture and tourism" is whether it truly creates irreplaceable tourist value and activates innovative expression of cultural heritage, and when the tourist experience empowered by AI allows tourists to touch the true pulse of culture through digital interaction, such integration can truly reach the essence of industrial upgrading.
(Edited by Gu Shanshan with Xinhua Silk Road, gushanshan.1987@163.com)
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