The emerging trend of inspirational Digital Travel Assistants (DTAs) is rapidly gaining prominence in the tourism industry yet remains underexplored in academic literature. This paper examines how inspirational DTAs can be designed to facilitate travel inspiration through autonomous and efficient co-creation at scale. Grounded in the literature on co-creation within the domain of travel planning (Schmidt-Rauch and Schwabe 2014) and the framework of customer inspiration (Thrash and Elliot 2003), this study employs a design science research (DSR) methodology to explore how to offer personalized travel inspiration through co-creation, catering to the evolving needs of modern travellers. We present an artefact of an inspirational DTA, named Heidi, as one example of how to facilitate this. Heidi was developed by Swiss International Airlines (part of the Lufthansa Group) in collaboration with Google. The evaluation was conducted via semi-structured interviews with three members of the HEIDI initiative and eleven users engaging with the design artefact. This research makes three contributions. First, we demonstrate a means–end relationship between co-creation (means) and inspiration (end) to conceptualise inspirational DTAs. Second, we propose actionable design principles for the development of inspirational DTAs. Lastly, this study extends the academic discourse on information systems in travel advice from IT-enabled human agent setups to IT-enabled virtual agent configurations, positioning inspirational DTAs as a novel paradigm in the evolving landscape of travel inspiration.
