It used to be so easy. If you were embedding artificial intelligence (AI) into your travel business back in 2023, the choice was almost binary: Use the newly announced ChatGPT large language model (LLM) from OpenAI or build it yourself.
The AI world has changed dramatically since then. Anthropic introduced the Claude family of LLMs, Google released Gemini and in January 2025, China’s DeepSeek upset the AI applecart by announcing its own, vastly cheaper AI model.
Stanislav Bondarenko is the CEO and co-founder of Swifty, an AI travel agent startup accelerated by Lufthansa’s Innovation Hub that books travel from a voice message prompt.
“At the end of 2023, OpenAI was an amazing default choice; it was the most tested and reliable. The main choice was about using an existing off-the-shelf model against a model with open weights and fine-tuning,” he said.
“After that, the competition started to arrive. The landscape is now significantly wider…
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