CITY TOURS Online Booking Engine & AI to Predict Travel Demand
**The Client**
Founded in 1978, CITY TOURS® USA, Inc. has been a leading player in the receptive organized travel sector in North America. Based in New Jersey and with branches across the US and Canada, CITY TOURS has accumulated over three decades of travel expertise, offering a comprehensive range of products for individual travelers, groups, and incentive programs.
**The Need**
CITY TOURS faced challenges with its booking platform’s slow loading times, which adversely affected its conversion rates. Additionally, its team devoted several hours trying to forecast future tour demand and occupancy rates using Excel spreadsheets and historical data, prompting the search for a more efficient solution.
**The Solution**
To predict tourist demand, CITY TOURS collaborated with two full stack developers and a project manager from Dynamia over a six-month period to develop an AI algorithm utilizing neural networks specifically designed to forecast customer behavior for better business decision-making. Dynamia’s engineers meticulously tagged and organized CITY TOURS' historical data to effectively train the algorithm. They also optimized the software’s core technology to enhance speed and migrated to Amazon Web Services (AWS) for greater reliability, a crucial step given the processing demands of the AI.
**Results**
We successfully decreased the platform’s loading and processing times by nine times (from 30 seconds to just 3 seconds on certain pages), which lowered CITY TOURS' overall costs and significantly boosted online sales. Moreover, our algorithm began to identify trends and vacation demand in specific regions, enabling the CITY TOURS team to prepare special arrangements and pricing up to three months ahead of time. With improved predictive capabilities, CITY TOURS was able to secure more business and minimize expenses. Currently, our team continues to refine and enhance the algorithm by incorporating new data sources such as social media (Twitter, Facebook), user preferences, and previous booking history with CITY TOURS to further increase the AI's precision.