tour search

AltexSoft Enabled Natural Language Search for Tours with ChatGPT

Business domain
Travel
Technology
APIAI & Data Science

Background

An Australian travel startup partners with AltexSoft to build a booking platform that automatically combines tours from available flights and hotels. Customers can choose from a variety of vacation packages and tailor their holiday by opting for another flight, adding a transfer, or upgrading a room. The company is constantly refining its technology with new capabilities. One of the recent innovations is ChatGPT features. 

Challenges

By introducing ChatGPT functionality, our partner addressed the following business challenges. 

Enhance customer experience with natural language interactions

Increase the conversion rate of the platform

Value Delivered

Allowing travelers to use everyday words when looking for the dream vacation

Allowing travelers to use everyday words when looking for the dream vacation

Our team integrated the platform’s search bar with OpenAI API to access a ChatGPT language model, which among other things, can process real-life human queries. By doing so, we let travelers describe their ideal holiday in simple words and do a search, even if they don’t know where they want to go. You may formulate your request as you wish — like “Where to eat a bowl of pho,” “I want to ski,” or “Fly to some beautiful islands with the family.”

Teaching ChatGPT to produce relevant answers

Teaching ChatGPT to produce relevant answers

The most challenging part of the project was not the API integration per se but prompt engineering — or crafting instructions for ChatGPT so that it produces answers relevant to your goals. It took numerous iterations and about two weeks to finetune a prompt that resulted in the desired output. Following the orders, the model uses the list of destinations to choose three top options that match the request. It also decides on the best month for vacation in each place. Then it returns the answer in the CSV format.

Generating a list of relevant tours

Generating a list of relevant tours

The system extracts names of destinations and corresponding months from the ChatGPT response and inserts this data into a standard request form to search for tour packages. As a result, a traveler gets a list of available holiday options relevant to the natural language request. The platform will suggest trying a different query if no options are found (say, you want to “communicate with a white bear” or “fly to Mars”).

Approach and Technical Info

Implementing the ChatGPT module involved one solution architect. 

The technology stack includes OpenAI API and the GPT-3.5-Turbo model.

APIAI & Data Science