This week, Speakspots.com, the smart travel planning platform, introduced its innovative Smart Budgets feature, powered by AI to offer travellers personalised spending advice in real time.
Speakspots.com eliminates the stress of trip planning by streamlining the process. Instead of sifting through endless webpages or juggling multiple tabs, Speakspots.com’s AI does the heavy lifting. In less than a minute, it scans thousands of travel websites to create a fully tailored itinerary based on the individual’s specific needs and preferences.
With the launch of Smart Budgets, the platform takes it a step further, providing real-time, custom budget recommendations that help travellers optimise their spending according to their budget preferences.
Founder and CEO Andres Martinez-Artal said, “Bankers remember the revolution ignited by digital Personal Finance Managers (PFMs) in 2009. Fifteen years on and the travel industry has yet to experience a similar transformation. I’ve travelled to probably 100 different destinations and I can’t recall one time where I stayed on budget. Flights, hotels, activities, eating out… it’s nearly impossible to keep track of all your travel expenses in one place. Recognising this gap, we drew parallels between the roles of PFMs in banking and identified the need for a TFM (Travel Finance Manager) in travel. Over the last six months, we’ve developed real-time data integrations with accommodation and flight suppliers to feed our classic AI, initially built for things to do and places to eat. Rather than trying to create a superapp integrating all content into one platform, we focus on the opposite; Speakspots.com combats choice overwhelm, reducing millions of options into a few that are tailored to the individual traveller’s personal requirements.“
Thanks to integrations with travel leaders Skyscanner, Booking.com, Viator, GetYourGuide and Civitatis, travellers will receive recommendations on which dates to fly on for the best price, how to secure better rated hotels or even how to save money on tours and activities.
Smart Budget recommendations can help travellers:
- Understand if the budget they’ve set for themselves is realistic based on Speakspots.com’s real-time analysis of flight data, and hotel and activity options in a given-location.
- See which dates offer the best value for money in terms of flights and accommodation.
- Choose free tours or sightseeing opportunities as alternatives to paid attractions.
- Identify opportunities for spending trade-offs, for example adjusting their planned attractions budgets in order to get a hotel with a higher rating.
Why it works:
Purpose-built AI
The AI that powers Speakspots.com is completely proprietary. Developed over the past five years, the AI includes over 70 purpose-built algorithms and over 50,000 lines of code, as well as direct integrations with leading global travel suppliers. The AI was designed specifically for a travel use-case, unlike most other travel planning companies and apps leveraging ChatGPT or other generative AI services. Speakspots.com’s extraction and analysis technology is fed by more than 90,000 attractions, over 28 million accommodation options, 20 million places to eat and airline data across five continents to provide fully customised recommendations to each user.
Now the platform has incorporated leading tech innovation from the world of personal finance management to launch Smart Budgets.
An AI assistant where you need one
Once generated, travellers can save their itineraries to WhatsApp where they also have access to an AI travel assistant. The chatbot, using LLM technology, can make adjustments to the itinerary, resolve any issues in real-time and even act as a travel guide. If a traveller wants to know more about the monument they’re visiting, what the best local foods are or how to navigate public transport, all they need to do is ask!
Tackling overcrowding
Speakspots.com’s founder has seen first hand the benefits and challenges that come with mass tourism. Rather than pretending that travellers will stop visiting the world’s most popular cities, Speakspots.com encourages travellers to seek out lesser-known experiences and include nature getaways in their trip itineraries. The AI uses distance algorithms to incentivise walking rather than taking cars between sites, orient travellers towards accommodation options that won’t hurt local economies and recommends secret spots that are likely to have fewer crowds.
Simple, fast and free
The platform is incredibly user-friendly, meaning anyone can use it. There’s no app to download, no email sign-up necessary – simply visit Speakspots.com, say where you want to go, when and how much you might like to spend and the AI does the rest. Available in 36 languages, with curated travel data for over 200 destinations worldwide. Best of all, it’s free.
