Giselle and Stephen Jiroch of California have been traveling full-time for the last four years. The couple said these U.S. destinations are must-see spots. Costco is rolling out new ways to deliver perks to its customers while tapping into the travel industry's knowledge and insight. In collaboration with Travelport, a global technology company that connects travel suppliers, Costco Travel has introduced new features for members. The partnership will expand the flight options available to members.

In the year that Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey turns 50, you could be forgiven for asking where is the space-age future we were promised? Many still choose to travel to meetings in favour of using videophones and we don't have a permanent colony on the Moon, let alone Jupiter. Teleconferencing technology is improving though as just a few weeks ago Canadian researchers unveiled the TeleHuman 2, a 3D holographic projection system that smacks of the Star Trek holodeck. The system is based on a ring of intelligent projectors mounted above and around a reflective, human-sized cylindrical pod. The display projects a light field composed of many images, one for every degree of angle, so users need not wear a headset or 3D glasses to see each other.

The travel industry is transforming with emerging technologies, new business models and changing consumer expectations. Travellers now have a wide range of options when it comes to planning their trips. While it might have once been common to visit your local travel agent to plan a trip after seeing a neighbour's vacation snaps, it's now more likely that vacation pictures on social media are leading someone to browse for a getaway online. People can perform their own search and use a travel-booking website to compare the vast amount of options available. In turn, travel suppliers and sellers must work hard to keep travellers engaged throughout their trip.

This talk was recorded in London on October 30th, 2018. Slides from the talk can be viewed here: https://www.slideshare.net/0xdata/nea... Session: Travelport is a leading travel commerce platform that has truly huge data and many complex needs in terms of processing, performance and latency. This talk will demonstrate how we were able to harness big data technologies, H2O and cloud integration to deploy AI at scale and at low latency. The talk to cover practical advice taken from our AI journey; you will learn the successful strategies and the pitfalls of near real-time retraining ML models with streaming data and using all opensource technologies. Bio: As principal data scientist at Travelport, Levi Brackman leads a team of data scientists that are putting ML model into production.

TD's own Brett Henry will be presenting at ITB Asia in Singapore on 17 October. Henry will interview guests Ken Kuguru, managing director, Asia Pacific at Egencia (based out of Singapore), and Samantha Williams, regional director, account management Asia Pacific at Travelport. They will talk about how the inevitable advent of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), combined with the already-mainstream use of big data,will affect our industry, with a focus on corporate / business travel. Egencia together with its global alliance partners cover 15 countries in Asia Pacific with Egencia dedicated points of sale in China, India, Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore and New Zealand. Kuguru is focused on driving growth throughout the region and optimizing technology and innovation to enhance the customer experience.

IBM was one of the first to bring voice search assistants into the travel experience with the launch of their Watson-enabled robot concierge, "Connie" in Hilton Hotels in 2016, but leaps in technology will see more and more travel apps and hardware integrating voice and natural language search into their user interfaces in 2018, sparked by the mainstream success of the Amazon Alexa. Consumers will be able to talk to their digital assistant, whether through their smartphone, Alexa or other device to check flight details, search for a hotel or book tickets immediately. The difference in adoption of voice search across different parts of the world is significant. Travelport's recent Digital Traveller research showed that while just 33% of consumers in the UK had used voice Search, 72% in China had. But in the US, the number of smartphone owners using voice assistants has doubled to more 60% in just 2 years.