AI travel assistant Romie assists with planning, shopping, booking and even lends a hand when something unexpectedly changes during a trip — serving as customers’ travel agent, concierge and personal assistant, all in one.
Expedia Group announced a comprehensive release of 40+ new products and features, of which one of them is an AI travel assistant.
“At Expedia Group, we embrace the transformative power of AI to create personalised travel experiences. Our long-standing investments in this space enable us to capitalise on the breathtaking pace of AI innovation,” said Ariane Gorin, CEO, Expedia Group.
Romie, Travel Industry’s AI assistant
Travellers now have that option with Romie™, an AI travel assistant designed to ‘roam’ the world with you and have your back at every step of your trip.
Romie assists with planning, shopping, booking and even lends a hand when something unexpectedly changes during a trip — serving as your travel agent, concierge and personal assistant, all in one. Romie gets progressively intelligent — learning who you are, remembering what type of trips you like, and even if you prefer Italian food and boutique hotels or an afternoon hiking through nature. The alpha version of the Romie experience is currently available on EG Labs™, a hub for experimental products:
- Group Chat Trip Planning: Invite Romie to join your SMS group chat and listen to your vacation plans. If you want some advice, just @Romie to get suggestions on where to go or what to do, like you would a travel agent.
- Smart Search: Ask Romie to summarise your group chat and bring what they learned about your trip straight into your Expedia shopping experience. Personalise your search even more by adding your own filters like rooftop views and early check-in to find your ideal hotel faster.
- Building Your Itinerary: Like any good concierge, your new AI buddy is eager to help you build your perfect trip. Romie can pull in travel information from your emails and suggest restaurants and activities near your hotel that they think you and your group will enjoy.
- Dynamic Service: You can rely on Romie to troubleshoot with you when things don’t go as planned. Like the perfect personal assistant, Romie monitors weather changes or last-minute disruptions that may impact your plans and has alternative suggestions ready that are convenient for you.
- Intelligent Assistance: Throughout your trip, Romie updates your itinerary in real time so anyone in the group chat with FOMO can see what you’re up to, and anyone that needs to pick you up from the airport can simply @Romie to check what time you land.
“We believe in re-imagining the traveller experience, and then using the latest in AI to bring it to life, and with Romie, we’ve done just that,” said Rathi Murthy, CTO, Expedia Group. “We created an AI travel assistant with hyper personalisation in mind so that travellers can choose when they want Romie’s help on their own terms. Romie can assist throughout dreaming, planning and travelling or even when things don’t go as planned, all while getting more intelligent as the traveller interacts.”