FROM BOOKING TO BOARDING: CREATING HUMAN-CENTRIC AI EXPERIENCES ACROSS THE TRAVEL JOURNEY

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming the travel sector by offering more personalization, operation and convenience throughout the travel cycle, i.e., at the beginning of the purchase all the way to after-travel activities. Nonetheless, until now, the majority of implementations are automated and scalable rather than human-oriented. The study seeks a more human-oriented way of AI design within the travel journey to improve the satisfaction of travelers without losing the dimensions of trust, inclusivity, and emotional responsiveness. This paper takes up a multi-level approach of system analysis, user experience mapping, and AI model integration to study how the system could be adapted to the understanding of context, interpretability, and cultural sensitivity. The paper provides a phased framework that indicates how AI facilitates the traveler in every stage during their journey, such as booking, pre-departure, in-transit, and post-flight. The examples of airlines, airports, and hospitality platforms are compared as a case study of the potential positive effects of AI implementation and the neglected experiences people may undergo. Natural language processing, recommender systems, facial recognition, and predictive analytics are further broken down and analyzed to make them into an adaptive system that can read user emotion, intend, and behavior alongside human-centered design principles. The results indicate that the offer of travel providers with empathetic, context-sensible AI applications develops a substantial enhancement of engagement, satisfaction, and customer loyalty, as well as minimizes service friction. There are also ethical and implementation topics: trade-offs connected to privacy, bias in algorithms, and other topics, the difficult equilibrium between automation and human interaction. The study provides strategic learning opportunities to design the future generation travel experiences that can be not only optimized in logistical terms, but also to celebrate the human aspects of transport, feeling, and memory.