AltexSoft Enabled Natural Language Search for Tours with ChatGPT

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.”

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.

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”).