AI Travel Concierge

This project is developing a map-first AI travel concierge that brings together trip discovery, decision-making and booking into a single platform. It aims to make travel planning faster and more efficient by providing highly relevant and privacy-conscious recommendations based on real-time data and user preferences.

Start & End Date

15.06.2026 - 15.12.2027

Main Applicant

Hennebert, J., iCoSys HEIA-FR - Haute école d'ingénierie et d'architecture

Co-applicants

Etemad-Sajadi, R., EHL Hospitality Business School

External Funding

Innosuisse

Partner

Place & Purpose SA

Project Description

Travel planning is fragmented and inefficient. Travelers spend significant time across multiple platforms (maps, reviews, social media, booking sites), leading to decision fatigue, low conversion, and suboptimal choices. Existing AI solutions optimize engagement, not trust or privacy, and fail in cold-start and real-world contexts.

Place & Purpose is a map-first AI travel concierge that unifies discovery, decision-making, and booking in a single interface. Trip planning is reduced from hours to minutes with a 40–60% higher recommendation relevance.

The needed research is three-fold:

Dynamic Spatial-Temporal Reasoning, leveraging graph-transformer AI to fuse real-time data (weather, crowds, social signals) with map knowledge for superior, personalized travel recommendations.
Interactive Explainability (XAI) engine with a novel "map-first" reasoning loop, exposing the reasons of a recommendation and enabling "human-on-the-loop" interaction.
Privacy-Preserving Intelligence, enabling a guest's "taste graph" to persist and dynamically combine with hotel recommendations.