Partner with us

AI is dramatically better when grounded in your own knowledge instead of “the internet”

Most AI trip planners are trying to guess what you want. The normal flow is: tell the AI you are going to Japan for two weeks, answer a few questions, let it search the web, and hope the itinerary feels right. And that is useful. Sometimes.

But it is still inference.

AI is much better when it is grounded in your own knowledge, not just the open internet. Think about the results you get when connected to personal knowledge systems like Notion, Obsidian, Granola or Mem versus just random generative answers.

Reely.travel is the first to apply that idea to travel. It starts with the travel inspiration you have already saved from the place you window shop your travels - social media. The Reel you liked. The TikTok that made you want to go. The YouTube video that showed the hotel, restaurant, beach, hike, bar, or neighbourhood that actually caught your attention.

That saved content is not just a bookmark. It is traveller intent.

The flow looks more like this:

Instagram Reel → AI extracts the travel products → maps everything → traveller curates Y/N → trip knowledge base → external AI agents can reason over it. This last bit matters.

With MCP, Reely becomes more than an app. It becomes a traveller-controlled context layer. Instead of asking Claude to “plan my Greece trip” from scratch and having the wisdom of the crowds that the AI is trained on, you instead get specifics like the hotel in Thessaloniki from the reel you saved 4 months ago.

The AI is no longer guessing. It is reading the traveller’s own curated corpus.

This content is provided by the newsletter sponsor reely.travel - you can and should try it for free for your own next trip

“Travel distribution is no longer defined by a single entry point.”

If pumping resources into SEO like it’s 2019 is your strategy then you probably won’t be around in 2029.

For years, most travel businesses thought about distribution in fairly neat buckets. Google. OTAs. Direct. Email. Maybe paid social if someone in marketing had budget left over.

But the traveller does not move like that anymore.

Damien Pfirsch from Agoda points to American Express research showing 75% of travellers say social media influenced their destination choice. That is not a soft brand awareness stat. That is demand being shaped before the traveller ever gets to Google, your website, an OTA, or a booking flow.

And this is the bit I keep banging on about: if social is where intent is being created, then showing up there is not optional. It is distribution.

And you simply can’t get there from just posting on your brand account. You require other voices posting ABOUT you.

Wyndham is selling AI on owner economics - it is framed around owner margins.

The Wyndham angle in the latest digest is not really "look at our cool AI". It is much more practical than that. Lower costs, protect margins, improve the economics for owners. That is a very different conversation from most of the AI puff floating around travel.

The AI projects that actually stick are usually the ones that either make more money, save time or reduce cost in a way the operator can feel. If Wyndham can make AI part of the owner value proposition, not just the guest marketing story, that is stronger than most of the consumer-facing launches we keep seeing. They are selling value to those who hold the chequebook.

The other thing I like here is the implied shift in where the marketplace battle sits. Not just who gets the traveler. Who can give the supply side better economics while still keeping the customer relationship. That is the harder game.

Is Jetstar getting ready for A2A?

Jetstar CEO says charging extra for cabin baggage is about choice and about keeping airfares low. She said this without even a hint of a smirk. That’s impressive in itself.

Never mind most people just choose them because they are cheap. And this makes flying more expensive (but headline price less expensive - hello search engines!)

But there is another angle I keep coming back to.

In an agent-to-agent (A2A) travel world, airlines need negotiable variables.

If your fare is just one bundled price, then an AI agent comparing options has a pretty simple job: find the cheapest acceptable flight. That is brutal for airlines, especially low-cost carriers whose whole model is built around appearing cheap at the first point of comparison.

Unbundling changes the game.

Now the airline is not selling one thing. It is selling a base seat, cabin bag, checked bag, seat choice, boarding position, flexibility, food, maybe bundles, maybe loyalty perks. Each becomes a lever an agent can negotiate, optimise, trade off or package differently depending on the traveller.

That is a very different conversation from “sort by lowest fare”.

So yes, this may just be a money grab.

But it may also be airlines getting structurally ready for a world where machines compare, bundle and negotiate travel on our behalf. In that world, the airline with more components to price has more ways to win than just being cheapest.

Terrible for anyone who just wants the advertised fare to mean the actual fare.

Potentially very useful for the agents

EU introduces new rules on AI - what it means for travel companies

Pay attention to the EU’s new AI Transparency laws - effective immediately. Called the cookie moment for AI - here are some tips on what you need to do:

The 4 transparency rules (in plain English)

The EU AI Act’s Article 50 is essentially about being honest when AI is involved.

1. If people are talking to AI, tell them.
  Chatbots, voice bots and AI assistants must clearly disclose they’re AI at the start of the interaction.
2. If you’re building AI that generates content, it must identify its output as AI-generated.
  This is mainly for AI providers (e.g. OpenAI, Anthropic) who need machine-readable watermarking/metadata.
3. If AI is analysing people’s emotions or biometrics, tell them.
  Applies to things like AI detecting age, gender, mood, stress or facial characteristics.
4. If AI creates realistic fake media (deepfakes) or AI-written public-interest news, disclose it.
  People should know they’re looking at AI-generated or AI-manipulated content.

The takeaway for a tour operator

For 95% of small operators, compliance is actually quite straightforward:

* ✅ Put a clear “I’m an AI assistant” message on your chatbot.
* ✅ Label AI-generated videos or realistic synthetic people if you use them.
* ✅ Human-review marketing copy before publishing.
* ✅ Don’t use emotion-recognition AI without informing customers.

If you’re simply using ChatGPT to help your marketing team write blog posts, social posts, emails and itineraries, Article 50 creates very little additional burden. The biggest practical requirement is making customer-facing AI obvious and not trying to pass AI-generated media off as real.

If you think someone (or everyone) you know or work with could grow from being more informed on the topic of ai + travel (or could use the training above) then please forward this email to them and they can click the button below:

Layla gets snapped up by Expedia

Layla was built around the idea that travel planning should feel like a conversation. Expedia already has the inventory, the booking rails, the customer base, the supply relationships and a mountain of first party data. Put those things together and you get much closer to the full loop: inspire me, plan with me, book it for me, then support me when something changes.

That is the battleground now.

Not who can build the cutest AI interface. Who can connect planning, supply, context and transaction in one place. Expedia have been trying to build trip planning inside their eco-system so interesting that they've now moved to acquisition to fulfil that need.

It also means that choice has gone for Layla users. It is now Expedia inventory and pricing, not choice or negotiation.

Also worth noting what this says about AI startups in travel. If you can build a genuinely good planning experience, there is a pretty clear exit path: the big platforms want the capability, but they want it plugged into their marketplace, not floating around independently forever.

Congrats to Saad Saeed, Sardar Bali and the whole Layla team!

Slack Group!

Podcasts and Sponsors

Podcasts now on Spotify and Apple Podcasts:

All podcasts are now showing up on Spotify and Apple Podcasts for your easy listening pleasure! Now is a great time to binge those you may have missed.

Veerle Witte has done something extraordinary in travel. She has built a successful B2C product. More than 100,000 people are journaling their travel experience - and they might just be doing that whilst travelling with you!

Veerle was the guest on the podcast this week.

Partner with Us - sponsorship info for the newsletter and podcast can be found here.

Most clicked last week was the link to the AMEX GBT story about their MCP server.

That’s it - you’ve made it to the end of this edition. If you’re thankful for this newsletter - you can always buy me a coffee.

I’ll be putting the result of the most clicked post in next week’s edition so you can see where others are focusing. If I’ve missed something, you’ve got a tip or any feedback at all - you can simply reply to this email and it will come straight to me. I’m doing this for You so please don’t be shy to tell me what you think

I go down the AI rabbit hole each week so you don’t have to. Follow me on Linked In for more on this subject

Veerle Witte unlocks how travel companies can unlock product insights directly from their customers mouth (or keyboard)

In this episode of the Everything AI in Travel Podcast, Tony Carne sits down with Veerle Witte, founder of Travel Diaries, to explore how a simple travel journaling app has evolved into an AI-powered platform helping tour operators capture authentic user-generated content, marketing insights, and customer feedback.

Veerle shares her remarkable journey from National Geographic travel journalist to startup founder, how she built Travel Diaries with a microloan and a small development team, and why authentic travel stories are becoming even more valuable in the age of AI.

We discuss:

• How Travel Diaries started from a personal need while backpacking through South America

• Building a travel startup while working as a travel journalist

• Growing to more than 100,000 users and launching a mobile app

• Why travel journals create far richer customer insights than traditional surveys

• Using AI to analyse thousands of pages of customer stories automatically

• Extracting hotel reviews, activity feedback and future travel intent from travel journals

• Turning customer stories into SEO articles, social media content and marketing assets

• Why authentic user-generated content is becoming increasingly valuable for AI search

• How tour operators can encourage travellers to document their trips

• The future of AI-assisted travel journaling and personalised travel content
  

• To learn more, reach out to Veerle on veerle@traveldiariesapp.com
  

  If you're interested in AI, travel marketing, user-generated content, customer insights, tourism technology or startup innovation, this episode offers a fascinating look at how one company is creating an entirely new data asset from the stories travellers naturally want to tell.

  
  

•  If you got value from this conversation:

• ​Subscribe to the channel

• ​Leave a comment with your biggest insight or question about AI in vacation rentals

• ​Share it with someone in your network who manages properties or builds tools for them

And don’t forget to subscribe to the Everything AI in Travel newsletter for weekly deep dives on AI, travel tech, and creator-driven distribution.

Hear the episode here.

In 2026 the podcast is now found on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and now also YouTube (and if you hit subscribe there, you get it before everyone else). You can also catch up on the whole of Series 1 now also fully available in these channels.

Partner with us

AMEX GBT and Reely now both work directly from your Claude account

News this week that those who have their business travel managed through AMEX GBT can now just work with their usual Claude account to make changes or book new things in.

On the consumer side, Reely lets you neatly compile all your travel inspiration on a trip-by-trip basis and then allow you to just chat to Claude as you go to refine, finalise and book. In this case, Claude uses what you have saved in Reely as the basis for what it recommends - not the same generic guff it recommends to everyone else.

I wonder if this is how things might go from here? You have your favourite all-rounder AI (Claude, ChatGPT) and you just work with it on everything?

Both these solutions are using purpose built MCP servers that are now super simple to connect to your personal Claude account (you don’t even need a paid account). It is actually one of the menu items in Claude’s settings (and if you can’t figure it out, Claude will actually do most of the work itself in the set up).

On the Reely side, what this might mean in practice is that users don’t really ever open the Reely app on their phone after the initial short set up period. Instead, they simply save the things per trip that inspire them from their social media feed to Reely, Reely converts these videos into lists of desired products + locations which become the “brain” that Claude pulls from to deliver information back to you.

AMEX GBT have done this work “with an Egencia AI connector integrated into Claude, Anthropic's AI assistant”.

Whilst the article about AMEX suggests “This connector relies on a proprietary architecture known as "agent-to-agent" (A2A): a reasoning layer that breaks down a travel request into tasks (flight search, hotel search, booking) and distributes them to specialised agents,” Evan Konwiser, Chief Product & Strategy Officer at Amex GBT, warns this connector is just one step: " This is a foundational capability, and it's only the beginning"

From the Reely side what this means is that whilst Reely is ready to take your list and negotiate pricing in true A2A style, there isn’t a supplier side tech yet ready to have those negotiations with. I wonder who will fill this space first, a B2B OTA like Expedia of HBX, a legacy GDS like Amadeus or are scale up like Nuitee? It will be interesting.

Of course, when this does come online, the user doesn’t need the detail - they can just keep chatting with Claude to get the job done. Eventually all these companies will likely have this capability and the user can tell Claude who it does or doesn’t want to buy from (if they care).

This differs significantly from “apps” in ChatGPT mechanism that no-one I know is using despite companies still spending to be in there (more below on this).

If you use Claude regularly and want to see this flow for yourself, you can download Reely from Apple App Store, hook up the MCP to your personal Claude and then just save what inspires you to Reely. It’s all free to use and try.

This content is provided by the newsletter sponsor Reely.Travel

AI - its starting to get personal

Travel is throwing billions at AI. But a lot of the industry still seems to think the magic is the interface.

Gee Mann at Business Travel News explains that if every platform is building an agent, but each one is still trapped inside broken, incomplete, permissionless data, then we are just automating the same fragmentation problem at a bigger scale.

That bit feels right.

The examples in the piece are simple but important. The agent books the wrong hotel because it does not have the right event context. It picks a fare outside policy because the entitlement lives somewhere else. It misses a visa issue because the passport data is not there. In other words, the weak point is not necessarily the model. It is the plumbing.

Travel has been here before. Distribution needed the GDS. Payments needed shared rails. AI probably needs its own neutral switching layer too, or the biggest platforms will just build their own memory gardens and call that innovation.

It's not just who has launched an agent (actually hardly anyone has...) but who controls the profile, the permissions, the context and the memory that makes the agent useful.

Because without that, the demo may look clever..... but the trip can (and will) still go wrong. How you clean that up is equally important when its trust that you're actually selling, especially if you want the next booking also.

Lots of sharp comments on the original post.

Radisson gets a ChatGPT app - Accenture makes bank

I don’t know anyone who thinks that “apps” within ChatGPT are going to work? I don’t know anyone who actually uses the @ to call them. This isn’t Slack.

Yet onward we go building them.

This article starts as a story about Radisson but ends with a financial analysis of Accenture who manage the process of getting Radisson onboarded.

The article suggests: “The partnership showcases how Accenture is applying its generative AI and data capabilities to enable "agentic commerce,"“. OK. Is that what a GPT app is? Not sure about that.

Anyhoo - apparently Accenture’s financial outlook is good.

The dream of agentic commerce

Gilad Berenstein laid out what he is hoping for as we move into the next cycle - agentic commerce:

"Agentic Commerce is about a lot more than faster product research/discovery or deeper personalization. Agentic Commerce is fundamentally a reinvention of how we create, sell, and capture value. An opportunity for a true Win Win Win revolution. There are many steps between where we are and the promised land, but we can't get there without some imagination and vision."

"So here are a few things I am dreaming of...

• Agentic Negotiations Lead to Win Win Win outcomes

• Dynamic Offerings & Experiences

• Enhancement of Essential Operations

• Restaurant Reservation & Revenue Optimization

• Productizing Risk & Better Alternatives

• Family & Group Trip Reconciliation"

I’m definitely here for the negotiations. Not sure the incumbents are equally as excited about ‘everyone’ winning. I guess that is where disruption comes from though!

If you think someone (or everyone) you know or work with could grow from being more informed on the topic of ai + travel (or could use the training above) then please forward this email to them and they can click the button below:

Marketplace Spotlight: TravelAI

TravelAI buying the Sonder brand and relaunching Sonder.com as an AI travel site with curated rentals caught my eye because this is bigger than a feature story. It is a distribution story.

Instead of trying to build trust for an unknown AI brand from scratch (the normal way TravelAI operates) they have bought an existing travel name with consumer recognition and pointed it at a new AI-led model. That is a pretty blunt signal that in travel, brand, intent and traffic may still matter as much as the underlying model. Here they are starting from more than halfway. Sonder sold rooms. TravelAI sells rooms. This isn't square pegs and round holes.

Are we are going to see more of this?

In Australia the old Ansett brand was revived similarly a few months back. It too garnered a ton of press. I haven't heard of it since. The new owner bought off-the-shelf "Travel Club" software and bolted the two together. This move by TravelAI isn't that. They already have the skills to build brands. They know the SEO game. They are good at ads.

We will see AI-native players buying, licensing or rebuilding around known travel surfaces because the hard part is not only generating an itinerary. It is getting the customer, earning trust, and turning that intent into something bookable. Mauricio Prieto covered this off in his newsletter this week very well - go check that out.

If you have an AI business in Travel and looking for people to notice you, you can sign up to the marketplace for peanuts (top right corner, 5 mins, bring your logo).

I’ve priced for bootstrapped startups but also accepting larger companies too.

Can AI see you?

An important PSA this week from Janette Roush about making sure your website is visible to the AI bot (overlords).

I got to hear Stephen Burns speak last week at Bonafide’s Align:AI conference about the three components of making your website visible to AI crawlers and found this roadmap to be instructive:

1️⃣ ⁠robots.txt⁠ Directives: Configure to explicitly allow AI crawlers (like ⁠CCBot⁠ and ⁠GPTBot⁠) rather than disallowing them by default.

2️⃣ CDN & Edge Settings: Adjust firewalls and Cloudflare settings so AI bots aren't quietly blocked at the network edge before reaching your site.

3️⃣ Server-Side Rendering: Deliver pre-rendered HTML instead of relying on client-side JavaScript that AI crawlers can't execute.”

Burns then jumped in comments with a tool you can use to check these things in seconds. No sign up required. Totally FREE.

Slack Group!

Podcasts and Sponsors

Podcasts now on Spotify and Apple Podcasts:

All podcasts are now showing up on Spotify and Apple Podcasts for your easy listening pleasure! Now is a great time to binge those you may have missed.

The first podcast for H2 will be with you early next week. Have you missed the dulce tones? 😆 

If you have an AI story happening at your company you think the travel world should know about - let me know and lets get you on.

Partner with Us

Most clicked last week was the link to the FORA funding.

That’s it - you’ve made it to the end of this edition. If you’re thankful for this newsletter - you can always buy me a coffee.

I’ll be putting the result of the most clicked post in next week’s edition so you can see where others are focusing. If I’ve missed something, you’ve got a tip or any feedback at all - you can simply reply to this email and it will come straight to me. I’m doing this for You so please don’t be shy to tell me what you think

Partner with us

People are at their happiest when planning a trip - Ariane Gorin

Ariane Gorin said this week that “People are happiest when they’re planning the trip’. This is not new news. I’ve heard this for more than a decade and there has been a bunch of different bits of psychological research into this.

Gorin is saying it now, in part as way to deflect the soothsayers of doom who think that Expedia could be disrupted by AI.

There is other evidence she could point to. FORA this week became a unicorn with its latest round of investment. If you aren’t across them, FORA provides the backend for anyone to become a human travel advisor. They are booming. FORA offers a trusted companion who you can work with to shape the trip you want. They lean into what most people really want - which is both some agency over their decision making + someone to validate their choices + someone to take care of the admin (book the stuff in, be there when there is a question or problem).

Most real people are constantly grazing on bits of information about their upcoming trip. Most are doing that is social media. TikTok and Instagram are acutely aware of where this person is going, based on things they’ve used the search bar to find and keep dripping more inspiration until the person stops clicking in and interacting with that info. That is how the algo works.

These daily snippets are the reminders of the good time ahead - which in turn drives the happiness.

I’m not entirely sure how that helps Expedia TBH. I don’t think people are grazing there. It is more the place where the admin begins. The price shopping. The actual booking things in. FORA users never end up there (but FORA advisors might?).

These functional admin spaces like Expedia and Booking need to try and connect with people when the grazing is starting to turn into solid decision making. More and more people are turning to the spaces where they can consolidate what they’ve saved from this daily grazing. In here is the consideration list.

This IS personalisation. Crafted one-to-one for this trip by this human. Not guessed or inferred by an AI.

It is FROM this point that AI becomes useful. With the consideration set largely known, AI can help validate choices by aggregating reviews and getting piece of mind. They can select the suppliers they trust, maybe Expedia, maybe FORA, to come and quote and negotiate with their AI agent who is now doing the admin bit and price shopping.

Expedia as a brand still has currency. People are more likely to select a brand they’ve heard of to do fulfillment. But if Expedia (or others like them) wants to play in the happiness space, it needs to move further upstream to where the grazing is happening. And to ensure survival from disruption, they need to get their agent endpoint open so they can be invited to negotiate.

This content is provided by the newsletter sponsor Videreo.com

One last tribute to the World Cup - thanks to AI

If you read this column often, you’ll probably know that I’m not a big fan of AI for imagery or video when it comes to travel marketing. My overarching thought is that if you have trick your customer into believing something - they probably won’t be your customer for very long.

Tennessee Tourism recently enshrined that into a public pledge that they will never use AI imagery alongside a “Yeah, it’s real” badge for their real images that look too good to be true - but that’s just because the place looks incredible. We’ve seen Iceland do this previously also.

I’m still wrestling with when it is OK and again I think if you are overt and everyone is on the joke then it can be quite useful and fun. This video caught my eye this week. It wasn’t from the Argentinian Tourism Board - but if it were, that would probably be OK too.

Here is another use of AI video making that I think works particularly well. It isn’t tourism related, but smart marketers might be able to use some of what is going on here with these wedding videos popping up in Asian culture to do something clever - where again, no one is being fooled. Everyone is on the gag from the outset.

Cvent has a “Candy Land” of AI in the wings

The opening paragraph in this story about how Cvent are unleashing AI into the difficult and highly manual business of organising events slapped me in the face.

“Skepticism about AI capabilities remained palpable at the Cvent Connect conference last week. Overheard from meeting professionals were lamentations about AI mistakes, prompt inaccuracies or misunderstandings and the idea that “sometimes it’s faster just to do it myself.” One buyer walking past this reporter in the Music City Center corridor, spoke confidently to her peers when she said, “I don’t think our jobs are going anywhere.”

I have thought for 2 years now that alongside managed business travel - where AI is booming, Navan has gone public and lots of other things are happening - it was event travel that would find the most benefit and perhaps disruption from AI. The core of event organisng seems to be matching what I need to what is available and then price.

I actually thought, Cvent are going to be in big trouble from an upstart.

I thought here is a sector ripe for video to take over from an archaic system of RFP’s. For example if you’re planning your wedding, would you want a full video walk through or a list of amenities? I remember a chat with Susan Barry who told me what a time suck from the hotel side, repsonding to RFP’s was - but of course a necessary one.

RFP AI boomed early in the AI cycle but not for these RFPs.

Boompop are doing some things here, I chatted to Founder Healey Cypher on the pod a while back, but there is very little else that I’ve seen.

I’d think the market is huge. I know hotels rely on group bookings for a fairly decent % of their overall revenue, especially mid-week. It has to be at least comparable to leisure for lots of hotels?

Is this a huge opportunity just hiding in plain sight?

Anyhoo - Cvent obviously sniff the risk and are doing some things.

Kempinski use AI for content generation by staff

Whilst looking for something completely unrelated, I ended up this page which is a case study from an AI vendor talking about how they helped their client Kempinski Hotels.

The Brief:

“Kempinski Hotels was actively seeking an ISO standard AI solution to put customised AI content generation into the hands of its 13,000 employees, globally. Key to their decision-making process was the ability to customise the writing style to align with brand guidelines while also fixing the structure of the content for consistency regardless of which property or department was creating it.”

The Solution:

“MYL’s AI training team and Kempinski’s communications experts went to work designing custom workflows that covered the most common content types, from newsletters to press releases, website content and social media.

Users simply provide a few points on the information they want to convey, and the content is immediately created following brand guidelines and the preset format for each content type. To support non-native English speakers who prefer and extra layer of review before publishing, a dedicated human Editor provides the added optional layer directly through the platform.”

I note that Ritz-Carlton and Lily Hotels are other clients.

Scammers are rife thanks to AI

I saw this article this week about how scammers are leveraging AI to leverage cash from our wallets.

“Criminals are stealing names, phone numbers and reservation information by illegally accessing hotel and restaurant systems.

Velasquez said copycat websites impersonate legitimate brands to appear authentic.

"They are letter perfect," she said.

On my recent trip to Brisbane and then PNG I TWICE had bad actors WhatsApp me saying I needed to do some things to secure my booking (or it may be cancelled). They knew when and where I was staying and obviously had my phone number.

One of the hotels I wrote to tell them admitted they had been hacked. I never heard back from the other.

Be careful out there folks.

If you think someone (or everyone) you know or work with could grow from being more informed on the topic of ai + travel (or could use the training above) then please forward this email to them and they can click the button below:

Money is starting to flow for startups and scaleups

OMIO raised $10M this week.

“The funding will strengthen Omio’s AI technology hub in Singapore, expand regional transport partnerships, and simplify cross-border travel across multiple transport modes.”

Meanwhile 30 Sundays raised $6.7M.

“The company, which uses conversational AI to plan and book overseas holidays, will use the funds to expand into new markets and grow its engineering team.”

Congrats to both.

Slack Group!

Podcasts and Sponsors

Podcasts now on Spotify and Apple Podcasts:

All podcasts are now showing up on Spotify and Apple Podcasts for your easy listening pleasure! Now is a great time to binge those you may have missed.

We are recording now for 2nd half of the year. If you have an AI story happening at your company you think the travel world should know about - let me know and lets get you on as there are a couple of spots left.

Partner with Us

Most clicked last week was the link to the Mexico Tourism AEO report that suggested creators are filling most of the spaces for your brand’s most important queries.

That’s it - you’ve made it to the end of this edition. If you’re thankful for this newsletter - you can always buy me a coffee.

I’ll be putting the result of the most clicked post in next week’s edition so you can see where others are focusing. If I’ve missed something, you’ve got a tip or any feedback at all - you can simply reply to this email and it will come straight to me. I’m doing this for You so please don’t be shy to tell me what you think

Partner with us

Turns out creators could be the key to AEO

Lyle Stevens, Co-Founder & CSO at Later, told us this week that their research at Later shows that 80-90% of mentions about your brand on AI don't come from your brand!

Read that sentence again.

And Carly Baron told us why that matters. For the brands she oversees, they were losing control of the narrative around their own brand because of this. It was what others online were saying about them that was showing up.

If you’re not familiar with Later, they are the company at the forefront of keeping tabs on all things AI. They get early access to all the new models so their reviews can drop the same time a model goes on general release. Their research is second to none so for me they are a must follow to stay on top of all things AI.

This "Made You Look" webinar (part of a broader series on creator strategy in the AI age) was a revelation on how to utilise creators to regain control of the story people are reading about your brand in AI responses. It is compulsory viewing IMO.

In tourism more specifically, a report from the Mexico Tourism industry called  The Reflection of Mexican Tourism in AI, an analysis by LLYC delivered an identical picture.

An article on the report said: “Although AI models frequently recommend Mexico, the information supporting those responses rarely comes from official tourism institutions. Only 9% of the references consolidated across the analyzed responses originated from official Mexican tourism platforms. Instead, blogs, influencers, and independent content creators were cited 4.5 times more frequently, giving noninstitutional sources greater influence over how AI systems describe the country.”

Whilst everyone is rushing to the AEO door hoping to ensure they get cited, fewer seem to be thinking what that citing might actually be saying about them. It’s not just what, it is also who. To control that, requires a strategic approach of working with a range of content creators.

Videreo is the place to find the creators to help you shape the AI narrative about your brand. We find the creators already heading your way. You set the terms you want to work by.

Sign up for free (2 mins) to the CollabsMap to have creators already heading to your destination, apply to the offer you want to make them.

This content is provided by the newsletter sponsor Videreo.com

Australian Government’s Smartraveller website warns Aussie travellers about using AI

DFAT (Department of Foreign Affairs & Trade) have put out an advisory around using AI for trip planning! Didn’t see that coming. Here is a snippet:

What are the risks of relying on AI?

AI gets information from many sources and doesn't verify it before giving you an answer. The information might be inaccurate, incomplete or out of date. The results you get are also only as good as the prompts you write. If your prompt is unclear or missing key details, AI may make incorrect assumptions or leave out important information.

Relying on incorrect information may not just cost you money or cause you stress. It can affect your safety or put you at risk of breaking local laws. Our recent Gen Z research showed that:

28% used AI for information about visas and entry requirements
27% used AI for safety advice
19% used AI for advice about local laws and customs.
Areas like these are especially important to verify through official sources.

There have been many instances of AI tools providing:

- outdated flight and public transport schedules
- incorrect visa and border information
- misleading or wrong interpretations of local laws
- recommendations for hotels that have closed
- attractions or activities that are unavailable or out of season
missing or inaccurate costs.
- AI may also leave out important warnings or advice, such as local health and safety risks, or recommend destinations that are currently unsafe.

Clearly this causing enough issues that someone thought they needed to act? Anyone seen anything similar from other Governments?

LA leverage’s AI to capture Chinese market

An interesting post this week from Dragon Trail, the consultancy that helps destinations and brands connect with the Chinese market around how they are helping the LA Tourism board by leveraging AI.

“Dragon Trail has launched our first AI-enhanced travel trade marketing hub, for the Los Angeles Tourism & Convention Board! The new function radically improves Chinese travel agents’ access to LA’s B2B resources, with a more interactive experience to empower product design and sales, and ultimately drive higher arrivals from China to Los Angeles.”

The functionality interfaces with the LA tourisms WeChat account abd allows Chinese travel advises to ask questions in (Chinese) natural language and get accurate responses.

“The AI-enhanced travel trade hub dramatically enhances the usability of LA’s B2B resources for the Chinese market. In an industry with a 99% AI-adoption rate (Dragon Trail Research, Chinese Outbound Travel Trade Survey, Summer 2026), providing an AI-powered user experience is now essential to effectively empower and engage with the Chinese outbound travel trade.”

Not revolutionary tech but a no-brainer use case.

AI to help fix plane delays

Travel Weekly this week reported that AI could be helping to reduce plane delays…….. in 2028…….. maybe.

“The FAA awarded an $875 million contract to Boston-based Air Space Intelligence (ASI) to implement its air traffic management solutions.

The FAA said the products "can house all critical data in one platform and proactively identify delays and available airspace to mitigate them days, weeks and even months in advance."

The article suggested the timeline might have been chosen more for its alignment with Presidential elections than what is feasible in reality.

“Analysts, though, caution that the FAA might be overly optimistic, especially about its plan to have the solutions fully implemented before the end of 2028, a timeline that is tethered to the end of President Trump's term in office.”

Where are the A2A endpoints in travel?

The theory is pretty solid. The future state of travel will almost certainly be the consumer agent negotiating with the supplier(s) agent(s).

A lot of people talk about it but this week in the Everything AI in Travel Slack group, Alex Bainbridge asked who has A2A endpoints available? He had a found a directory - but it was empty!?

So I’m putting out the call - if you have A2A endpoints as a supplier ready to start those negotiations please let me know. Mike Coletta from Phocuswire suggested that the Everything AI in Travel marketplace might the best spot for the industry - especially those at the forefront of these experiments to find one another.

Last newsletter I mentioned the Reely app where travel consumers self-curate their future trips by saving the things that have inspired them, over weeks and months, from things they have discovered in the social media feeds. The Reely agent will then turn this into a shopping list and the consumer will invite suppliers they are interested in buying from (those they trust) to connect and quote.

But what suppliers are ready to start negotiating? If you are let me know and we can start connecting the sides who are ready to forge this next step.

If you think someone (or everyone) you know or work with could grow from being more informed on the topic of ai + travel (or could use the training above) then please forward this email to them and they can click the button below:

Slack Group!

Podcasts and Sponsors

Podcasts now on Spotify and Apple Podcasts:

All podcasts are now showing up on Spotify and Apple Podcasts for your easy listening pleasure! Now is a great time to binge those you may have missed.

My trip to PNG has set us back a few weeks in the recording schedule but expect new episodes to start rolling out from mid August through to the end of November.

Partner with Us

Most clicked last episode was the CollabsMap - thanks! Remember you can add your own brand or destination for free in just 2 minutes and start receiving applications from creators already heading your way.

That’s it - you’ve made it to the end of this edition. If you’re thankful for this newsletter - you can always buy me a coffee.

I’ll be putting the result of the most clicked post in next week’s edition so you can see where others are focusing. If I’ve missed something, you’ve got a tip or any feedback at all - you can simply reply to this email and it will come straight to me. I’m doing this for You so please don’t be shy to tell me what you think

Partner with us

AI is changing the customer digital journey in travel and it isn’t going back

Since the start of mobile and social the traveller’s digital journey has been:

Dream —> Plan —> Book —> Travel —> Share

AI is changing this accepted pathway and travel marketers are going to need to adjust to stay relevant.

What isn’t changing is the impact of social. At the Arival conference in Brisbane this week we saw the latest data on where travellers go to get information for their upcoming journeys. Whilst the point of the slide for the audience was show how AI search was rising (now number 8), what really stood out was that 4 of the top 7 were social media.

Google was still first. YouTube was 2nd. But that isn’t the story.

The story is that if the ‘social medias’ weren’t split out into their separate platforms (YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook) but were rather grouped as a “social media” channel, combined they would have trebled or more all the other sources.

Travel consumers are dreaming on social media. That shouldn’t come as a shock. As a brand, if you want to be seen in today’s market you need people telling your story on social media. Your own brand account won’t cut it. It is a volume, trust and quality of storytelling game. It’s actually incredible how few travel brands are playing this game well.

Good news is you can choose to play the game (or not). In the past weeks www.collabsmap.com has launched to connect travel brands and content creators who are already heading their way. Any brand can add an offer to the creator community and put in on the map for free in less than 2 minutes. Seems like a pretty easy choice to make? Start getting those stories told. Start showing in in social search for your important keywords. That is the point of creator marketing right now.

The new traveller digital journey looks like this:

Dream —> Save —> Book —> Travel —> Share

You will note that Plan has become Save. So what is going on here?

Whilst there are more than a few in the trip planning space who are betting it is the Dream bit that is going away, replaced with AI just telling people where and how they should travel based of random snippets of information, I don’t think that is how most people are wired. Most people want agency and input into the decisions around where they will go and what they will do there. The Dreaming phase starts from the moment you decide a trip is on the horizon and can therefore last weeks, months or even more than a year.

As the traveller collects snippets of information they get mainly from social, they will save them so that their full consideration list, something they have personally curated along with their travel companions is available to be used and useful through the Book and Travel phases of their journey.

Apps like Reely which you will find in the iOS App store become the central repository of this highly curated, highly personalised (by the actual person - not a guess, not a stringing together of disparate data points) trip centric information.

It is already immediately useful, as it plots every reel and post onto a trip map plus products associated with the videos surfaced where appropriate. I actually created one for lunch spots in Melbourne as we are always wanting to try new cool places we’d seen on social but when the day comes to pick somewhere, we could never remember what any of them were. That problem is now solved too! I’ve got 20 and growing all plotted onto a map and with the video to re-watch so I remember why I saved it in the first place.

Where this really gets to the new phase of travel commerce however is that this list is also a MD file which can be accessed via a MCP by the agent of any travel seller the traveller invites to take a look and make an offer.

This is where agent to agent (A2A) negotiation will take place. If the traveller is a Genius member, maybe they only invite the Booking.com agent. More likely they’ll invite all their favourites and most trusted to make them offers on all or part of the consideration list.

That could be Booking or Expedia but it could also be Flight Centre or Fora or it could be a local DMC or Marriott if that is the hotel brand they have saved from their social searches. Relly will help by making suggestions on who to invite.

Reely will host the negotiations on the consumer side and continually learn across its entire data set on what is and isn’t a good offer from those invited sales brands. This gives the consumer leverage but also takes away some of the annoying parts of the current process, like price checking and keeping straight what is and isn’t booked.

“Planning” is the automated piece in this new scenario. It is the annoying workflow stuff almost no-one likes. It doesn’t need a section in the digital journey because it isn’t an action of the consumer.

Saving what they like is the new (and simple) action. As a brand, you want the video talking about your product to be saved. That is the new goal.

I’d love to chat to any of the uber planners out there. Those who are dedicated to their spreadsheet or their Notion board or some other way of currently capturing the information that needs to be saved for their consideration list for each trip. If that is you or your travel partner - please hit me up on LinkedIn, I’d love to chat.

When it comes to AI Travellers have already moved, but suppliers..... not so much.

Coney Dongre at Web In Travel had a good piece this week on what looks like a very real AI gap opening up in Japan travel.

The article says close to nine in ten Japanese travellers are aware of AI, roughly a third have used it to plan a trip, and for Gen Z it is closer to one in two. More importantly, they are not just using it for a bit of inspiration at the top of the funnel. They are using ChatGPT and search to research hotels, compare options and build itineraries.

Meanwhile a lot of travel brands are still using AI for the safe stuff. Reporting, analytics, chatbots, multilingual support, model itineraries. Useful, sure. But the booking layer does not seem to have caught up with the behaviour layer.

If travellers are starting their journey in AI, and making real decisions there, then being good at your website, your SEO and your app is no longer enough on its own. Your product data, content, rates, policies, location context and booking flow all need to be understandable by machines as well as humans. Otherwise you are still technically online, but you are less likely to be meaningfully discoverable in the places behaviour is shifting.

Japan is interesting here because it makes the gap very visible. Consumers have moved faster than suppliers. I suspect that is not just a Japan story (the land where the fax is still in common use!!)

Actually, because I was at Arival this week talking to lots of travel businesses, I know for sure it isn't. Good news is there is lots of interest to get going faster and catch up to consumers.

Beehiiv added a MCP server so I created a new research report based on 200 newsletters

If you get this email directly rather via LinkedIn, you receive it from my newsletter software provider, Beehiiv.

Beehiiv are always adding new features and this week they sent an email saying they had dropped a MCP server meaning AI could connect to all the newsletter content I’ve ever produced and do fun things with it.

After a quick chat with Claude, we decided that we’d put together a new research report that is “A short History of Everything AI in Travel” which smartly and succinctly charts the main turning points in our brief AI journey to date. It looks at successes and failures. It charts where funding money has gone.

Most of all however it is pitched as an overview document you can share with your board or leadership team and it has a bunch of questions that group should be asking themselves right now to help shape the next stage in their AI journey.

It is a PDF so I can’t just drop it here but if you shoot me a message on LinkedIn, I’ll happily send it across to you.

The lesson here I think is to keep an eye out for what your existing vendors are doing that could help you do more and better for those you support also.

If you think someone (or everyone) you know or work with could grow from being more informed on the topic of ai + travel (or could use the training above) then please forward this email to them and they can click the button below:

Slack Group!

Podcasts and Sponsors

Podcasts now on Spotify and Apple Podcasts:

All podcasts are now showing up on Spotify and Apple Podcasts for your easy listening pleasure! Now is a great time to binge those you may have missed.

We start recording for the 2nd half of the year in June. If you have an AI story happening at your company you think the travel world should know about - let me know and lets get you on.

Partner with Us

Most clicked last week was the link to the Adobe trend report. It got clicked A LOT!

That’s it - you’ve made it to the end of this edition. If you’re thankful for this newsletter - you can always buy me a coffee.

I’ll be putting the result of the most clicked post in next week’s edition so you can see where others are focusing. If I’ve missed something, you’ve got a tip or any feedback at all - you can simply reply to this email and it will come straight to me. I’m doing this for You so please don’t be shy to tell me what you think

Partner with us

Easy Group (Easyjet) launches new influencer brand: easyinfluencer.travel

easyGroup, creator and owner of the easy family of brands, Europe's most famous value brand just launched a new brand: easyInfluencer.travel - no it is not April 1st

I have daily conversations with SMB travel businesses that tell me creator marketing doesn't work.

The Easy Group thinks it works. They are building a whole brand around it to bring influencer marketing to their SMB hotel partners for a small monthly subscription. Congrats George Karavokyris on the launch. Welcome to the party.

Klook thinks it works. They have a creator community 20,000 strong and run an annual "Kreatorverse" conference at their own significant expense to reward top performers.

GetYourGuide thinks it works. They have one of the most sophisticated creator programs in travel. They get their suppliers to give them comped seats and then use the content created to beat those suppliers to the next booking by winning in social search.

Accor thinks it works. They are currently running an in-house creator program in APAC to build an always-on machine so they can show up for their keywords in social. Lee Besser who is helping to run that program will join me on stage at Arival next week in Brisbane.

Our Videreo clients like Max Tours in Las Vegas know it works. They get 80% of their bookings direct, almost all from social media.

What these companies understand is that right now, the most cost-effective pathway to new customers is by dominating the organic social search results, the place where most people are now doing their searching.

For the OTA's in particular, every dollar not spent on the most expensive pathway to customers, Google or Meta ads, is what drives their margins, their valuations and their bonuses. And the past couple of years have been a golden age for those doing the work in the organic social search space.

To be super clear: the most effective way to show up for your keywords in the largest search spaces in travel (Instagram and TikTok) is via creator content. Your brand owned account on social almost never shows up. (The platforms business model is you pay for that visibility).

Videreo this week launched collabsmap.com where you can put your brand in front of 1000’s of creators who are heading your way - for free. Start here if you’re ready to show up in social search results for your key words.

This content is provided by the newsletter sponsor Videreo.com

Do you see what AI see?

Adobe dropped some very interesting travel-specific numbers this week and the headline is hard to ignore. AI-driven visits to travel sites were up 194% year-on-year in May 2026.

That is a big number, but honestly not the most interesting one. It is coming off a small base and quite frankly, we’ll be seeing these big jumps for a while until the AI share of search becomes the majority overall.

The more interesting bit for mine, is what those visitors do once they arrive.

According to Adobe, AI-referred travel visitors spent 70% more time on site, had 21% higher engagement, and were 41% less likely to bounce than visitors coming from traditional sources. That’s huuuuuge.

That is not “I clicked something weird from ChatGPT to see what would happen” traffic. That is intent.

Travelers are clearly doing more of the messy research bit inside AI tools before they ever hit your website. By the time they arrive, they have often already narrowed the question. In short, they are landing with context.

For years the industry has obsessed over SEO because Google was where the trip started. (Of course, the more recent shift was to social search and that is still largely ignored by the longtail - see story above 🤷 ). If the numbers keep moving this way, AI inevitably becomes a real commercial channel, not just a fun thing for the innovation deck. One way or another, that’s coming.

There was another stat that really stood out. The conversion gap between AI and non-AI traffic has narrowed by around 70% since October 2024. AI traffic is still not always converting better, but it is getting much closer. I actually thought I’d read elsewhere that because of the high intent and all the context that was gained in advance, that AI traffic converted better - but I can’t find now where I read that.

The other very practical part of the report is around what AI systems can actually understand on travel websites. Hotels and car rental companies are currently doing much better than airlines.

Hotels scored 63% readability on homepages and 73% on property/product pages, while airlines were down at 31% on homepages and 54% on flight/route pages.

That is quite a gap. The lesson here is pretty simple. AI seems to understand rich, explanatory, structured travel content better than thin transactional pages.

Hotel destination guides, blogs, activities pages, FAQs, loyalty pages, customer service pages and promotions all performed strongly. Booking pages, registration pages, airline fare pages and input-driven transactional flows were much harder for AI to interpret.

AI cannot recommend what it cannot understand.

So if your website is just a booking engine wrapped in some brand copy, you may have a problem. If your product pages clearly explain who it is for, what is included, what makes it different, what the policies are, what the experience feels like, and why someone should trust you, you are probably giving AI much more to work with.

This is not the death of SEO. But it is another sign SEO is no longer the whole game. The next version of search may reward the brands whose content is not only keyword-friendly, but AI-readable, useful, trusted, specific, and confidence-building.

For travel brands, the job now is not simply “rank on Google”.

It is: be understood by machines well enough to be recommended to humans.

(Note: I also delighted in the fact that the report in the link about being readable by LLM’s was not readable to LLM’s and even though it came from Adobe, you couldn’t get a PDF version. Those are quirks that really make my week! 😁 )

Do you see what AI see (part II)?

AI hotel discovery has a visibility problem. New research from Lighthouse pairs very neatly with the Adobe numbers above.

Where Adobe is saying AI-referred travel traffic is growing fast and behaving like high-intent traffic once it lands. Lighthouse is looking one step earlier and asking a more uncomfortable question for hotels: who actually gets recommended by AI in the first place?

The answer, apparently, is not most hotels.

Lighthouse ran more than 4,500 ChatGPT prompts across nine destinations and five traveler personas. ChatGPT mentioned hotels nearly 50,000 times, but only 2,721 unique properties appeared. In other words, a small group of hotels is being recommended again and again, while everyone else is basically invisible.

Ouch.

Where Adobe’s report says AI traffic is good traffic. Lighthouse is saying good luck getting any of it if the AI does not know, trust, or understand your property.

There are some very interesting biases in the data. Chains are outperforming independents in most markets. Marriott seems to dominate branded hotel mentions in the US. Four and five-star hotels are heavily over-represented, even in generic or business travel searches where a three-star property might be perfectly suitable.

AI, it turns out, has expensive taste. So that makes it pretty useless to me. To be fair, unlike most others I assume, I start my prompts with “I am a massive tight-arse….”. This helps.

“The chain versus independent split is not flattering for independents. In Indianapolis, just 6.5% of hotel mentions went to independent properties. In Tokyo, 10.5%. Paris was the only market where independents exceeded chains in share of mentions, and even there, the gap was narrow.” So it seems there might be some hope.

The useful part is that this does not look random. ChatGPT responds to signals. If a hotel is described consistently as business-friendly, it is more likely to show up for business prompts. If it is near nightlife, attractions, shopping, arts districts, or family activities, that language matters. Your copy is no longer just copy. It is training material for discovery.

Oh and PR is back. And you need lots of people (creators) talking about you.

The other big point is where AI appears to get its confidence. Lighthouse says OTA/metasearch and editorial/media sources make up the bulk of recommendation inputs. I read somewhere that this is because the LLM’s were initially trained on OTA data. I don’t know if that is true or not?

This is where the Adobe and Lighthouse findings connect. Adobe says AI visitors spend longer, engage more, and bounce less. Lighthouse says AI can send those people directly to your own site once it recommends you. That is potentially very good news for direct bookings.

But only if you make the shortlist.

So the practical takeaway for hotels is pretty clear: audit how AI sees you. Run the prompts. Check if you appear. Look at the language on your site, OTAs, metasearch, FAQs, destination content, reviews, and editorial mentions. Then make sure your own booking path is ready for the traffic if it comes.

And this isn’t advice for just hotels BTW.

The algorithm makes the promise, but the hotel wears the blame

This week Teresa Mackintosh, CEO at Aven Hospitality, has a very good piece on what might be one of the more painful gaps opening up in hotel distribution.

Hotels are not just competing on visibility, price, reviews and conversion anymore. They are increasingly competing inside a discovery system where expectations are created before the guest ever reaches the hotel’s own website. And our eager to please AI friend might just embellish a few bits to make you happy (and then sad later…)

The core issue is that a guest might be nudged by an AI summary and then arrive with an expectation the hotel itself never actually set. And if that expectation is wrong, the guest does not blame the platform. They blame the hotel…..

“Guests do not care which disconnected system caused the confusion. They only remember that the brand failed to meet the promise. And increasingly, the consequences extend far beyond a single stay.”

Teresa gives the examples we all recognise: the ocean-view room that is really a partial view, the restaurant that is closed, the seamless itinerary that turns into apologies at check-in. None of this is new exactly, but AI makes the problem much bigger because it can confidently package disconnected information into something that feels like a promise.

I suspect this ends up in lawsuits eventually. I can’t see another way around it in the short term.

The Fable of the new mythical AI

Anthropic this week dropped its new “Mythos” powered model and gave everyone a free hit to use it before bringing in the significant paywall.

But we didn’t even get that far.

Apparently due to “a misunderstanding” the US Government forced them to pull it back down, not long after it was set free.

Oliver Green got to play with it in the little amount of uptime. He was impressed. Apparently it can “one-shot” your ideas into something useable meaning the days of personalised SaaS are very near for even the most tech averse.

If you think someone (or everyone) you know or work with could grow from being more informed on the topic of ai + travel (or could use the training above) then please forward this email to them and they can click the button below:

Marketplace Spotlight: TravelAI

TravelAI has put out a vision paper for Traveler.md and Trip.md, and the idea is worth spending a bit of time with.

The basic premise is that we are heading toward a world where AI agents can plan, book, manage and fix travel on our behalf. Great. Except every agent is still starting from zero.

I’ve ranted a bit here the past couple of weeks about Odessia and its form you fill out at the beginning which then personalises for you forever. As I mentioned, that just doesn’t work. You are a different person for each trip (generally) depending on the context of the trip and your travel companions. One and done doesn’t cut it. Back referencing past behaviour misses the point.

TravelAI calls this the missing layer in agentic travel: portable memory. Traveler.md would hold the long-term stuff about you as a traveler: preferences, constraints, habits, past trips, dream trips, things you avoid. Trip.md would hold the context for a specific journey: where you are going, who is coming, what is booked, what still needs sorting, what has changed.

The important bit is that this memory belongs to the traveler and the trip, not the platform. Portable memory asks a different question.

What if the traveler carried the context, and every agent or service could read it with permission? I like the simplicity of markdown for this. A human can open the file and understand it. A machine can read it and act on it. No mystery profile hidden three settings menus deep. No weird black box version of you sitting inside someone else’s system.

Of course, the hard parts are very hard. Permissions, privacy, bad edits, conflicting versions, deletion rights, governance, and getting enough services to actually use the thing are not small problems. But the direction here feels absolutely right.

So right in fact we’ve been working on a project at Videreo that actually feeds a trip level MD file. It allows the traveller to take the inspiration they find on social from any post by any person and add it to their file. This motion is the traveller creating the trip level personalisation for exactly how they want this trip to be. And they can have multiple files if they have multiple trips upcoming. And they can be completely different, just like we as humans are different.

Our idea here was identical to John’s at TravelAI - to then let AI agents from wherever the traveller is comfortable booking, to access the file with their permission and move into booking. Or indeed, have multiple agents access it and the best bid wins.

Our project is called Reely. It’s currently waiting approval for launch in the App store. I’ll let you know here when it is ready.

If you have an AI business in Travel and looking for people to notice you, you can sign up to the marketplace for peanuts (top right corner, 5 mins, bring your logo).

I’ve priced for bootstrapped startups but also accepting larger companies too.

AI goes out for brunch

Cornell researchers Tingwei Zhang, Harold Triedman and Vitaly Shmatikov have a new arXiv paper, Deep-Research Agents Can Be Poisoned via User-Generated Content. It one of those slightly nerdy AI safety papers. I ran it through GPT for the TL;DR.

The basic point is simple: deep research agents do not just search once. They run multiple related searches, pull from overlapping sources, synthesize what they find, and then cite it back with confidence.

That creates a new attack surface. If the same Reddit thread, Wikipedia page, forum post, or other user-generated source keeps appearing across related searches, a bad actor may only need to add a short comment or edit in one place to influence what the agent later recommends.

For travel, this is not theoretical for long. Two of the cited examples had a travel bent. One was “Best brunch spots in..” and another “best Mexican food in…”

A hotel, restaurant, tour, destination, travel insurance product or local operator could end up being recommended by an AI not because it is the best answer, but because someone worked out which user-generated pages the agent keeps reading and quietly poisoned the well.

LLM’s often make the final answer feel cleaner and more authoritative than the messy source material underneath. AI agents are becoming decision engines, and the sources they trust, it seems, can be quietly manipulated.

Cue the black hats in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1…………

(no link - it was a pdf. Contact me if you want to take a look).

Slack Group!

Podcasts and Sponsors

Podcasts now on Spotify and Apple Podcasts:

All podcasts are now showing up on Spotify and Apple Podcasts for your easy listening pleasure! Now is a great time to binge those you may have missed.

We start recording for the 2nd half of the year in June. If you have an AI story happening at your company you think the travel world should know about - let me know and lets get you on.

Partner with Us

Most clicked last week was the link to the Google hack on steering your own AI sources for a LLM to cite.

That’s it - you’ve made it to the end of this edition. If you’re thankful for this newsletter - you can always buy me a coffee.

I’ll be putting the result of the most clicked post in next week’s edition so you can see where others are focusing. If I’ve missed something, you’ve got a tip or any feedback at all - you can simply reply to this email and it will come straight to me. I’m doing this for You so please don’t be shy to tell me what you think

Partner with us

How Max Tours is winning in Las Vegas

A thread about OTA’s in the Tourpreneur Facebook group this week caught my eye. An operator declared that they were pulling all their products from GetYourGuide due to their perceived lack of value (they were getting some bookings but thought the commission was too high - we all know that story).

The operator said they were having a terrible season (War, fuel prices, inflation - we all know that story too). Huge commissions on top were making their business unsustainable.

Why I found this interesting was because one of our clients at Videreo, Max Tours, I know is having a better season than last year (and last year was already good).

Max Tours have gone all in on fishing where the fish are.

As Skift reported last year as part of their in-depth research into social media and travel: “At the heart of this transformation is the rise of video-first, creator-driven content. Younger travelers, especially Gen Z and millennials, now treat TikTok and Instagram as their default search engines for travel inspiration. Authentic short-form videos — as opposed to polished advertising — build trust and drive bookings.”

Where their rivals may have remained skeptical and decided to sit on the sidelines, Max went the other way and shifted the greater proportion of their marketing budget to social, specifically an investment in creators to come on their experiences to the Grand Canyon, Death Valley and Antelope Canyon.

The goal: show up in search results for keywords on these destinations.

In more recent reporting we’ve seen stats quoted: “Among travelers under 40, 73% say they booked trips specifically because of influencer content.”

How do Max know it is really working for them? As part of their all-in approach, Max Tours put a mandatory question into the booking flow BEFORE you can give them money. That question asks how people heard about them.

For Max, the proof is irrefutable.

Videreo is the place to find the creators to create the stories that will show up for the keywords that matter to your business in social search (the actual front door for travel in 2026)

Contact me to learn how we can make this happen for you.

This content is provided by the newsletter sponsor Videreo.com

Google offers shortcut to the information sources you trust

I guess you read this newsletter because you trust it, right? (RIGHT!!?? 😅 ).

This week Google gave people the opportunity to tell them the news sources they trusted which will tell your version of AI to check those sources when looking for ‘information on subjects you care about.

If you want to ensure the information you receive takes a pass by what we might have already sniffed out for you, you can do so by adding us as a trusted source.

Sorry, this doesn’t work for commercial sites or small businesses - I knew that was what you were thinking! But it does work for this newsletter.

Hotels are engaged in “AI theatre”

A provocative article this week suggested “hotels deploy visible AI features without redesigning underlying operations, creating "AI Theatre" that impresses owners but fails to improve business metrics.”

Honestly, I see a lot of this too.

Maybe this is also to be expected. Businesses, want to try things with AI so they pick a few use cases and deploy something. This is an much about internal education and confidence building as it is about pure business outcomes. As we move into H2 2026 and now 3 or so years into the AI story - its time to go deeper than surface layer experiments.

The crux of Dr. Tong Yin’s, Founder of InsightBridge Global LLC, article, I think is more about certain businesses wanting to be seen to not be missing the AI wave.

“Across global markets, hotels are deploying AI at unprecedented speed — chatbots, pricing engines, voice assistants, analytics dashboards. On the surface, the industry appears transformed. 

Underneath, very little has changed.”

Yin also questions whether the education piece around AI experimentation is working in practice.

“A pricing system whose recommendations the revenue manager silently overrides more than half the time — without the system learning from those overrides. Revenue does not measurably improve. The owner is told “AI is now driving revenue.” A sentiment dashboard that aggregates reviews from every platform into a single display that nobody reads daily and that produces no changed behaviour.”

It is probably a good time for all businesses, not just hotels, to take a moment in their next leadership group meeting and check what is actually happening around your own AI deployment thus far. Better to do it now before the Board starts asking the same question (as they should be).

JP Morgan suggests agentic commerce is a fair way off

Reporting of a conference appearance by JPMorgan’s CEO of consumer and community banking, Marianne Lake suggested she “doesn’t expect agentic commerce to take off soon.”

The interview was part of the imminent launch of JPMorgan’s consumer-facing AI travel agent, the latest of the financial sector’s raid into travel as a touchpoint for their banking customers. (listen to this podcast with John Taylor Garner from Odynn, a startup that specifically targets the financial sector to make these types of integrations happen, for more on this topic).

According to Lake: artificial intelligence platforms and summaries have been quickly adopted for the search and discovery process in online purchasing because they’ve removed friction. However, “what we’re not seeing is that that’s moving into the transaction part of this,” referring to AI agents making purchases on consumers’ behalf.

Possibly more importantly, She expects that to continue, potentially long term. “Because when people are moving money, things change,” she said. “Trust and security matter even more.”

Others are certainly making very different bets to that.

As reported here in an earlier addition, Mindtrip, Sabre and Paypal have teamed up to make this type of agentic commerce a reality. This story was picked up this week by OAG who summarised it thus:

“Working with Sabre and PayPal, the AI travel platform launched Mindtrip Flights, which it bills as travel's first all-in-one agentic flight booking experience, carrying a traveller from inspiration to paid ticket without leaving the conversation.”

I actually used the Mindtrip flight AI this week. I wanted to find the best value international destination from Brisbane to take a school holidays break just after the Arival conference that I’ll be speaking at. Brisbane is a unique hub as it has direct flights to places that other cities in Australia don’t have such as Palau, PNG, Solomon Island, Espiritu Santos in Vanuatu and other (awesome) and exotic locales.

It actually did a fantastic job and brought to my attention that flights to PNG, usually very high for the relative distance, were on sale - even though it was school holiday period.

But I didn’t continue the booking on MindTrip. And I know MindTrip and the people behind it. And I think this is what Lake is talking about.

Maybe it will take a more experimental group to get things going and build the confidence for the rest of us. That is certainly what Travala is hoping as part of its crypto-native travel booking platform.

This week Travala announced the world’s first agentic AI travel protocol.

“The protocol enables autonomous AI agents to search, book, and pay for more than 2.2 million hotels, including properties from major chains such as Marriott Hotels, Hilton Hotels & Resorts, and IHG Hotels & Resorts, with human involvement required only for payment authorization.”

Odessia raises $6M led by Sequoia

Last week we told you about new AI Trip Planner Odessia which is the brainchild of Sonder Founder Francis Davidson.

This week Davidson dropped that the startup has raised $6M to take on the likes of MindTrip, led by Sequoia.

My favourite of the many comments in the announcement, many asking about the booking flow was however this one:

“wow
intersting that trip planners are still fundable”

If you think someone (or everyone) you know or work with could grow from being more informed on the topic of ai + travel (or could use the training above) then please forward this email to them and they can click the button below:

Slack Group!

Podcasts and Sponsors

Podcasts now on Spotify and Apple Podcasts:

All podcasts are now showing up on Spotify and Apple Podcasts for your easy listening pleasure! Now is a great time to binge those you may have missed.

We start recording for the 2nd half of the year in June. If you have an AI story happening at your company you think the travel world should know about - let me know and lets get you on.

Partner with Us

Most clicked last week was the link to the news of AI citiation reporting within Google.

That’s it - you’ve made it to the end of this edition. If you’re thankful for this newsletter - you can always buy me a coffee.

I’ll be putting the result of the most clicked post in next week’s edition so you can see where others are focusing. If I’ve missed something, you’ve got a tip or any feedback at all - you can simply reply to this email and it will come straight to me. I’m doing this for You so please don’t be shy to tell me what you think

Partner with us

Whilst GEO is touted as the new “front door” to reach travellers, most have moved to a different house

Not a day goes by where some new piece of research or thought leader piece, hits my feed about AI search discovery (GEO/AEO). Even today’s headline in this newsletter covers that same subject. And of course it is important. When it was just Google or nothing, the job of the marketer was simpler: get found on Google.

Now of course there is ChatGPT, Claude and the Google tools all hoovering up search queries and delivering answers (but not clicks). Visits to websites are universally down as a result. It is definitely worth paying attention to.

However as Skift reported back as early as March 2025: Social media platforms are the most influential source of travel inspiration, surpassing official travel websites, review platforms, and traditional media. The most quoted number is 75% of traveller journeys either start or are inspired on social media.

The common misconception is that people are just fed this via the algorithm. The truth is that it is the search bar on social that is the lynchpin and the doorway businesses need to be standing behind. An intentional search by the traveller shifts the algorithm to feed them more of what they’ve searched for and continues to do so until they stop interacting with it. Think about your own behaviour (or more likely the woman in your life’s behaviour if you are not that woman, as they are the one’s doing most the planning).

The common path is search then save or share. There are dedicated apps on which travellers save their social media posts, for them to return to when the time is right to make final decisions. This intentional collecting of a consideration set happens over weeks or more likely months for bigger trips. It is contributed to by the whole travel party.

And like SEO or GEO, there are specific, intentional strategies brands can follow to show up in social search (hint: your brand account on Instagram will almost never show up, the platform makes its living from you paying to get your brand account into that space). It is by having other accounts talking about your business that you show up there.

And yet many (most) travel brands leave this 75% space to 1/3 of their marketing coordinators role. There is no greater area of unfulfilled opportunity in travel than this.

A considered strategy would be to have people who are trusted on the platform where your audience is searching for your targeted keywords, to post about you once a week. 52 chances to have your brand show up in those search results or subsequent algorithmic feeds where trips are being formulated, saved and collected. This is where you become part of the trip.

One influencer posting once about your brand is not a strategy, its a crap shoot.

Someone posting 3 times a week on the brand account is not a winning strategy, it is doing next to nothing for your brand (travellers may check your brand account just prior to booking to check you are legit - that is the purpose of brand accounts for most).

Videreo is the place to find the creators to get you into the search results on social for your keywords.

Contact me to learn how we can make this happen for you.

This content is provided by the newsletter sponsor Videreo.com

What Marriott’s AI strategy can tell us about where AI in hotels could/should be heading

A fascinating post this week from Chris Hyland hypothesised that it is at the AI plumbing layers that we need to be paying attention to.

“Marriott International says it's building a model-agnostic chassis that keeps guest data off any outside model. OpenRouter just raised $113M to ship this plumbing to every enterprise.”

Hyland’s theory is based on the classic “follow the money” which is generally a good strategy. “It's interesting who funded the round: Snowflake and Databricks both put money in, the same two platforms hotel tech is splitting between, Cloudbeds on one and Mews on the other. The rivals everyone is forced to choose between just co-invested in the layer that sits above both.”

According to Hyland “If your AI strategy doesn't route different models for different complexity levels, you are building a dependency that won't scale. An AI plan without an inference strategy underneath it is brittle by design.”

He uses Marriott as the justification for this claim on the direction of where things are heading.

Most crucially Hyland calls out the current reality as he sees it:

“Most are buying AI the way they buy any other software, signing agents and contracts, standing up copilots, treating it like a tool they switch on. They are not building a system that knows their company and gets smarter the longer it runs. An inference strategy is part of how you get there, but only the base layer. The thing that matters sits on top of it and learns.”

We are now past the point of whether AI is here to stay and whether it can bring a short term tactical bump. It’s time to start thinking about the strategy first and the execution second. Transformation is rarely just bolted on to legacy.

Google offers GEO info from the source

This week Google announced “the launch of new Search Generative AI performance reports in Search Console, including dedicated reports for Search and Discover, to help you understand your site's visibility within generative AI features on Search.

This is not GEO by simulation or digital twin or some other type of guesswork. This is definitively where your brand shows up in answers and citations.

With few clicks actually ending up on your website because the answer is mainly already supplied, this is kind of a big deal to tell if you are showing up at all.

Googles says: “To help you understand how pages from your site are shown, our new reports show the following information:

• Impressions: How often URLs from your site appeared in generative AI features in Search and Discover.

• Pages: Check which URLs appeared within AI features.

• Countries: Understand your visibility on a country basis.

• Devices: Identify the devices people are using when seeing your website (available for Search results).

• Dates: Monitor your performance over time with hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly granularity.”

The roll out is gradual, not many are actually seeing anything, but its coming to everyone so keep an eye out.

It is also confounding to me that OpenAI have not jumped in here. Offer (for $100 a month) a citation dashboard and they would lock in pretty much every company in the world that wants to know what their citation currency is.

You don’t want to become Bing here…

What gets measured, gets managed and everyone will now be orientating back to Google.

Sonder founder returns with an……… AI Trip planner

Sonder founder Francis Davidson returned to travel this week with the announcement of his new travel related venture Odessia.

According to Davidson Odessia, the Goddess of Travel - “She plans and books entire trips in one conversation.”

The brand launched with a high spec video and announcement of partnership with OpenAI.

Early reports in the comments from those who got to try it out (there is an initial waitlist - but you can jump ahead by sharing it with some friends - even though you haven’t been able to see it yourself yet….) were: “Funny that they literally claim "booking trips in one conversation" or something similar yet from the Goddess herself "What you can’t do is One-click checkout for the entire trip. Pay Odessia directly for all hotels, flights, cars, and excursions. Have me finalize bookings or enter payment details on your behalf. Book rental cars directly inside Odessia right now. You’ll need to go into each saved item and complete checkout/booking with the provider." She went on to say "Odessia is not a full-service travel advisor / travel agent who can package the trip, take payment, ticket/book everything, and be accountable if something breaks." ....ok so we have inspiration and affiliate. Is this a problem that needed solving?”

I get it. This is the big “problem” to be solved. This is the moonshot to be the next Booking or Expedia. Davidson is from travel and knows about complexity and plumbing. He certainly has a track record of getting investors onboard.

However when you enter Odessia, you go through a “quiz” to help “personalise your experience”. It is very similar to the UTrip quiz of 2012. You do it once and that locks your personality in for every trip forever - even though every trip is different depending on its purpose, travel companions, how much you’ve changed and many other things.

I wish them luck but this seems like old thinking + AI and AI isn’t enough.

Most real people are curating each trip over weeks and months (and sometimes years). They are (personally) getting updated information regularly (mainly from social) and adding that to their consideration set. It is where they are collating this list that is the fragmented and messy bit.

They may well be doing this across different trips with different objectives. Others they are travelling with are contributing by sending things over IG DM’s or dropping them into a shared WhatsApp group. This trip specific consideration set is the unique data to attach AI to IMHO if solvng for personalised travel is the goal.

Who is doing that?

If you think someone (or everyone) you know or work with could grow from being more informed on the topic of ai + travel (or could use the training above) then please forward this email to them and they can click the button below:

Slack Group!

Podcasts and Sponsors

Podcasts now on Spotify and Apple Podcasts:

All podcasts are now showing up on Spotify and Apple Podcasts for your easy listening pleasure! Now is a great time to binge those you may have missed.

We Have recording for the 2nd half of the year. If you have an AI story happening at your company you think the travel world should know about - let me know and lets get you on.

Call for those with AI products for the travel industry

• an exclusive offer not found elsewhere such as extended free trial, extra credits or something else of tangible $ value.

• There are no other costs to be involved. 

• If you know someone building something for a sector of the industry - please forward this onto them

Most clicked last week was the link to the HBX report.

That’s it - you’ve made it to the end of this edition. If you’re thankful for this newsletter - you can always buy me a coffee.

I’ll be putting the result of the most clicked post in next week’s edition so you can see where others are focusing. If I’ve missed something, you’ve got a tip or any feedback at all - you can simply reply to this email and it will come straight to me. I’m doing this for You so please don’t be shy to tell me what you think

Partner with us

Authenticity is the strategy if looking for organic distribution outside of AI or Google

The LA Times this week dropped a seminal article into where businesses have landed in this moment when it comes to TikTok. With the launch of TikTok Go - the timing could not be more relevant for the travel and tourism industry.

The article is based on new data from The Harris Poll, showing that while Gen Z still turns to TikTok for culture and discovery, confidence in the platform is (potentially) beginning to erode.

But instead of abandoning TikTok, brands are evolving their strategies.

The article explores how companies are shifting:

- From paid ads to creator partnerships
- From one-off campaigns to always-on content
- From TikTok-only thinking to multi-platform ecosystems
- From polished production to authentic storytelling

The article dives deeply into why “authenticity” has become one of the most important strategic advantages in digital marketing — especially for Gen Z audiences who increasingly trust creators, peer recommendations, and behind-the-scenes content over traditional advertising.

The article also zooms in on:

- Why user-generated content is outperforming polished campaigns
- How AI and content automation are changing social strategy
- The growing importance of community engagement over pure reach
- Why brands need to move culturally faster than ever
- TikTok’s expanding role in commerce and product discovery
- How marketers are adapting to fragmented attention spans
- The risks of relying too heavily on a single platform

If you work in marketing, social media, tourism, travel, or creator partnerships, as this article is packed with insights into where digital audience behavior is heading next and how brands can stay relevant in an AI-driven content ecosystem.

As it turns out, this week at Videreo, one of our most advanced clients who is a leader in the social commerce space, who actually measures where his guests come from as part of the booking process (YES, they add friction before allowing you to book to gain intelligence) asked us next quarter to concentrate on sourcing specifically on TikTok creators.

It is very clear what their data is telling them.

Videreo is the place to find the creators to execute an authentic, always-on content strategy.

Contact me to learn how we can make this happen for you.

This content is provided by the newsletter sponsor Videreo.com

Travelport ties up partnership with Cognizant & Anthropic

A surprisingly bullish post from LinkedIn pundit Martijn van der Voort this week alerted me to the new partnership from travel veteran Travelport with super new and hip Anthropic, with Cognizant in between making the magic happen.

It was this statement that especially caught my eye: “Over the last year, parts of the industry have been cosplaying agentic AI because marketing leadership seemed to have hijacked the boardroom. Big claims, agentic language everywhere, future‑facing decks, not always enough architecture underneath.”

The official PR release summarised what is going on here in two core points:

• Travelport, Cognizant and Anthropic are building an AI travel ecosystem to modernize how travel technology is built, tested and maintained

• Together they are closing the critical gap in AI-driven travel: connecting systems that can reason and plan with platforms that can actually transact

van der Voort who has admittedly been a Travelport critic summed it up thus:

“This Travelport–Cognizant–Anthropic move feels different.

It’s not about better search or a cute chatbot or slapping a conversational layer on yesterday’s workflows.

The real question in travel is harder: Can AI‑driven intent be translated into a controlled, auditable, executable transaction across live travel systems? That’s the battleground.”

Expedia releases MCP server and prepares for AI agents

More on the agentic battleground with Expedia dropping its MCP server this week.

According to Jeihan Agri, Expedia Just Opened the Door for Any AI Agent to Book Travel. Agri goes on: “At Explore '26, Expedia unveiled an MCP server that lets partner AI agents connect directly to its live inventory. Flights, hotels, cars, experiences. No custom integrations. Expedia's B2B platform already serves 75,000 partners and processes 21 billion API calls a day. An MCP layer on top of that is Expedia positioning itself as the infrastructure that powers whatever AI interface wins. The most important distribution move in travel this year.”

Expedia definitely has inventory and it is already known by the LLM’s. I saw a post from Melvin Boecher this week quoting a Meltwater study which claims “Booking at 55% AI visibility, Expedia at 54%. Two brands, most of the AI shelf space, already.”

What Expedia potentially doesn’t have is the negotiation power of the direct hotel to find a strike price in a negotiation with an agent.

What the direct hotels don’t have is a pathway that makes sense for the agent to get to them to have that negotiation. (A hot topic in the Slack group this week and also in the comments here)

AI spending is ramping up in travel

Phocuswire this week reported on findings from a number of surveys that show search and discovery are where travel companies are putting their $$ when it comes to AI.

Crucially “findings showed 64% of travel operators plan to increase investment in AI during the next 12 months, with 21% expecting to double their spending.”

When it comes to where exactly the core areas were “data analysis and reporting (46%). Search engine optimization (SEO)/generative engine optimization (GEO) and online visibility ranked second at 24%, ahead of brand and reputation management (15%).”

A different article on Phys.org quoted Accor’s AI and data science chief Nicolas Maynard as saying "The biggest challenge is to understand vague requests like 'I want a romantic hotel in the south'," Maynard said.

Because Accor's systems do not currently classify properties by such attributes, the group has its work cut out. "We need to adapt our systems to take semantics into account," Maynard said.

What particularly impressed me with this initial reporting was that social was not left out. “Search behaviors are changing and becoming more nuanced across the market,” said Thauan “Ty” Albuquerque, sales manager for TravelTech Show. “This is the generation which is increasingly combining AI with social media to research, book and pay for trips.”

There is so much noise around the black box of GEO. Yes things are moving that way from Google as the front page of the internet and SEO more generally but an equally large shift has already happened with the search box of choice for many being the one on Instagram or TikTok.

Very few are working on strategies to capture this search traffic (which also configures the algorithms to flood the For You pages with similar content until you stop interacting with it) despite it being the current dominant space.

A tip - your brand social media account will almost never show up in an organic search on social. You need other people posting about you.

According to the article “Instagram was identified as the most effective social media platform for marketing and business generation (61%), overtaking Facebook and LinkedIn. TikTok’s perceived impact declined ten percentage points compared to 2025.” I presume this means in paid social.

Scapia pocket $63M

Indian travel forward FinTech Scapia this week received fresh investment of $63M according to this report.

Scapia, an Indian travel-fintech company, announced it has raised $63 million in a funding round led by General Catalyst, with continued participation from existing investors Peak XV Partners and Z47. The company said the funding will be used to accelerate growth across India, strengthen its AI-first product strategy, expand its brand presence, and hire top AI talent across engineering, product, data science, and design.

Scapia reminds of what Revolut are trying to become in the West. Well worth taking a look.

I chatted with a partner of Videreo in India who trains content creators and asked if they were across Scarpia. They happened to be travelling in the States when we had our call and were using Scarpia cards and had done some influencer work with them.

The Scarpia tech team also took out an AI award during the week!

One to watch.

If you think someone (or everyone) you know or work with could grow from being more informed on the topic of ai + travel (or could use the training above) then please forward this email to them and they can click the button below:

Call for those with AI products for the travel industry

If you have an AI B2B travel product you are looking to get more initial customers for then we want to help.

Inspired the famous Lenny Bundle, Everything AI in Travel is keen to put together something similar specifically for travel companies.

One subscription that gets you access to offers not found elsewhere and mew startups looking to gain initial traction get access to customers with deals they are probably offer privately anyway. Established businesses get access to tools that will no doubt help them but at a lot lower risk.

If you’d to add your product to the bundle we need:

• an exclusive offer not found elsewhere such as extended free trial, extra credits or something else of tangible $ value.

• There are no other costs to be involved. 

• If interested, please fill in this form

• If you know someone building something for a sector of the industry - please forward this onto them

Hallucinations are still there BTW

Just a PSA announcement that AI answers are not bullet proof (and may never be).

This week came reports of people blindly following AI advice on visas that didn’t work out too well.

“That warning comes after a solo traveller attempting to cross from Vietnam into Cambodia found herself stranded at a remote land border in 40°C heat after a popular AI chatbot incorrectly told her she could obtain a visa on arrival. She could not.”

Are we there yet?

NO.

Slack Group!

Podcasts and Sponsors

Podcasts now on Spotify and Apple Podcasts:

This week we dropped a podcast with Bethany Reitsma from the Travel Technology Association on their new program to introduce startups to angels to fill the vacuum, particularly at the pre-seed stage in travel.

All podcasts are now showing up on Spotify and Apple Podcasts for your easy listening pleasure! Now is a great time to binge those you may have missed.

Most clicked last week was the link to Google’s advice on what you do and don’t need to show up in AI answers.

That’s it - you’ve made it to the end of this edition. If you’re thankful for this newsletter - you can always buy me a coffee.

I’ll be putting the result of the most clicked post in next week’s edition so you can see where others are focusing. If I’ve missed something, you’ve got a tip or any feedback at all - you can simply reply to this email and it will come straight to me. I’m doing this for You so please don’t be shy to tell me what you think

I go down the AI rabbit hole each week so you don’t have to. Follow me on Linked In for more on this subject

Bethany Reitsma from The Travel Tech Association on connecting startups with angels for initial funding

In this episode of the Everything AI in Travel podcast, Tony Carne sits down with Bethany Reitsma from the Travel Technology Association to explore the fast-changing world of travel tech startups, AI-native companies, angel investing, and the future of innovation in travel.

Bethany shares how the Travel Technology Association evolved from representing major industry players like Booking, Expedia, and TripAdvisor into building a growing startup ecosystem focused on helping founders get connected, get advice, and get funded.

They discuss:

• Why AI-native travel startups are emerging faster than ever

• The challenge of fundraising in travel tech today

• How angel investors are approaching AI and travel startups

• Why proprietary data and integrations matter more than ever

• The rise of hyper-personalized travel experiences

• How Travel Tech Association helps founders connect with investors

• The importance of founder communities and peer learning

• Emerging startups like Drifter AI and Pintours AI

• How AI is changing travel discovery and trip planning

• Why travel startups can now build more with less funding

Whether you’re building a travel startup, investing in travel technology, or simply trying to understand where AI is taking the industry next, this conversation offers a valuable inside look at one of the most important ecosystems shaping travel innovation.

Guest: Bethany Reitsma
Organization: Travel Technology Association

Start-Up Membership Program - Travel Tech Association.

Bethany has also shared a discount code for new startup members looking join: EVERYTHINGAI10%

 If you got value from this conversation:

• ​Subscribe to the channel

• ​Leave a comment with your biggest insight or question about AI in vacation rentals

• ​Share it with someone in your network who manages properties or builds tools for them

And don’t forget to subscribe to the Everything AI in Travel newsletter for weekly deep dives on AI, travel tech, and creator-driven distribution.

Hear the episode here.

In 2026 the podcast is now found on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and now also YouTube (and if you hit subscribe there, you get it before everyone else). You can also catch up on the whole of Series 1 now also fully available in these channels.

Partner with us

How did Biscoff become cool?

I was out at breakfast with my 15-year-old daughter recently and she ordered some type of Biscoff waffle thing.

Biscoff? Aren’t they the little biscuits you get for free at Premier Inn alongside the tea bags and instant coffee? I think that is probably the extent of my interaction with Biscoff. I’m sure I probably ate them in that moment also but almost certainly wasn’t motivated to seek them out anywhere else.

So after the initial What?! I moved into Why? And then How?

This week the head of Biscoff UK Frances Booth unpacked to Marketing Week why my teen daughter is (weirdly) ordering Biscoff products for breakfast.

Turns out Biscoff have run the absolute masterclass in how to work with creators.

First, they only do “gifted” campaigns. They don’t pay anyone anything. They just ship samples of products to creators. In travel, most hotels also do “gifted” campaigns too, in the form of free room nights, but almost none do the next step…

Next, Biscoff gives no guidance or instruction on what the creator should do or post about regarding these little dark biscuits. Creators being, well, creative started making sweet things, adding the Biscoff in and posting about that.

This then became a massive trend and now you can get a Biscoff McFlurry at Mc Donalds (I bet no-one at Biscoff saw that outcome coming when this all started!)

In their synopsis of the MediaWeek article, Elephant NY put it best: “By giving creators “total control,” they tap into genuine voices that resonate with niche audiences, driving organic growth rather than the peak nothingburger impressions that agencies love to brag about. This is a masterclass in brand humility and real partnership, not the usual grift where brands throw money and keywords at influencers, hoping for algorithmic miracles.” Amen to that.

A few weeks ago, Virgin Voyages invited 1000 creators onto a ship. They gave them zero direction. They didn’t even tell them they needed to post anything at all. The result was over 20,000 authentic posts about what little piece of magic they personally discovered on board.

Is this a trend? For those who will succeed in creator marketing, it absolutely will be.

Videreo is the place to find the creators you can trust to talk about the way your travel experience made them feel. There is no better marketing than that (if your product is good).

If your product is good: Contact me to learn how we can make this happen for you.

This content is provided by the newsletter sponsor Videreo.com

Google drops what you really need to know about AEO/GEO (in their search at least)

After the longest time of only hearing from “experts” their best guesses on how to get your brand to show up in AI answers and overviews, Google has kindly dropped the final word direct from the source.

Here are the things that might surprise you (given how much they’ve been spruiked on platforms like LinkedIn:

• LLMS.txt and AI-specific markup: You don’t need special AI files or markup to appear in Google’s generative AI search results.

• Chunking content: You don’t need to split pages into tiny sections because Google can already understand complex, multi-topic content.

• Rewriting for AI systems: You don’t need to stuff in every keyword variation because AI understands meaning and synonyms naturally.

• Chasing fake “mentions”: Artificially generating mentions across the web is less valuable than creating genuinely high-quality content.

• Overusing structured data: Structured data still helps SEO generally, but there’s no special schema required for generative AI search.

The final point really caught my eye - given it has been delivered as basically 101 advice from just about everyone (I think I’ve even told people this). To make it super clear I’ll add here the exact text from the Google Blog:

“Structured data isn't required for generative AI search, and there's no special schema.org markup you need to add.”

What is coming out of Google I/O developers conference

More Google because their big I/O conference was on this week.

The video here breaks down the highlights quickly for you.

For travel specifically what caught my ear was:

• Ask YouTube - a new natural language way to ask questions directly to YouTube and have answers plus videos pre-set at the exact right moment. Why this could matter is that ChatGPT and Claude don’t generally give video answers. In fact the only videos you can see on GhatGPT are YouTube videos - but you have to specifically ask for them. For any subject where seeing is better than reading (eh.. travel), this could be impactful.

• AskMaps - not new but now locked in beyond an experiment that might just go away (as things tend to do at Google). Maps and travel are inextricably linked. Arguably Google Maps are already the biggest “travel app” there is. Who knows what people might be asking of their maps whilst travelling (well, Google will know).

• Antigravity - anyone can now vibe code any Android app they want and it will be built at the highest spec to run perfectly in Android.

• Universal Cart - a shopping cart that moves with you across the Googleverse (search, AI mode, YouTube) with agentic support. A special hotels’ integration upcoming via the Universal Commerce Protocol.

Expedia says goodbye to Roamie - the universal chat function across the platform

Expedia foreshadowed the impending downfall of their across platform chat helper, Roamie when they released their “Trust Gap” report a few weeks ago. Now Roamie is gone.

In his blog post announcing the Trust Gap report, Xavi Amatriain to us “Travelers don’t have a technology problem with AI. They have a trust problem.”

The crux of this problem is travelers trust AI to suggest, not decide.
“Travelers are increasingly comfortable using AI in a supporting role. As the research shows:

53% are comfortable letting AI suggest options
42% would use AI to monitor prices and determine the best time to book
40% would use AI help build itineraries

But there is a firm line between discovery and buying: 66% of people said they wouldn’t trust AI to buy or book anything on their behalf.”

Instead of one AI across the platform, Expedia are instead “offering innovative AI-powered experiences at every stage of the traveler journey while being the trusted place they discover, book, manage, and complete their trips.”

Specialist, not generalist.

Ther view on agents making bookings seems polar opposite to Google above who demoed an agent ordering “that coffee I like” for its human on Doordash. Those little transactions will quickly build the confidence of users I think.

The AI layer at Airbnb is growing - now moving into personalisation

In a busy week, Airbnb had their Summer Release event also this week.

AirDNA’s Jamie Lane was quick to drop the AI highlights in a LinkedIn post.

Here is a summary:

• Personalized listing highlights: Airbnb will dynamically emphasize different parts of the same listing depending on each guest’s travel intent and preferences.

• AI-powered review surfacing: Airbnb will pull out the most relevant review snippets and themes for each individual guest instead of showing generic review summaries.

• Conversational property Q&A: Guests can ask questions about a property and get AI-generated answers backed by reviews, photos, and map context.

• AI-driven property comparisons: Instead of comparing amenities only, Airbnb will explain why each property may suit that specific guest and highlight the most meaningful differences.

Airbnb are not doing nothing when it comes to AI. They seem to be doing the impactful things that can move the needle on conversion.

Brian doesn’t like the Chat interface.

Expedia just shut down their chat interface….

Did Airbnb then just save themselves a whole heap of needless work? Probably.

If you think someone (or everyone) you know or work with could grow from being more informed on the topic of ai + travel (or could use the training above) then please forward this email to them and they can click the button below:

Marketplace Spotlight: Magpie

Magpie chief and AI chief pundit, Christian Watts has got an article coming out that will likely sythesise a lot of these news items above.

In his preview snippet on LinkedIn he says:

“The Universal Cart (announced) is interesting though. Get the flight, hotel and the experience into one cart (across merchants) before you hit the "Buy Now"

Google quote from yesterday:

"We’re also introducing a new, intelligent AI-powered Search box, marking its biggest upgrade in over 25 years"

Hats off to Google - the overall search experience really is great these days. The blend of AI-mode and some remnants of the old Google seem to be working with customers. No need for some dramatic shift to 100% AI-mode. Google becomes your AI operating system. (just like OpenAI want to be, and Claude already is for many).”

He also called people Slop-mongers.

If you have an AI business in Travel and looking for people to notice you, you can sign up to the marketplace for peanuts (top right corner, 5 mins, bring your logo).

I’ve priced for bootstrapped startups but also accepting larger companies too.

The high stakes AI game DMO’s are finding themselves in

Great article this week from Emma Weismann at Travel Weekly on the uncomfortable place that DMO’s have found themselves.

“I think not having immediate control over exactly how their destination is represented is something that gives a lot of DMOs pause,” said Morgan Bell, director of product management for destinations at Granicus.

It’s not only control. It’s traffic, the former lifeblood of the DMO.

Bell said that almost every DMO has seen its organic web traffic take a hit since the debut of AI search engines.

He would know. SimpleView (a Granicus company) run the websites for a ton of DMO’s across the US and around the world.

Slack Group!

Podcasts and Sponsors

Podcasts now on Spotify and Apple Podcasts:

All podcasts are now showing up on Spotify and Apple Podcasts for your easy listening pleasure! Now is a great time to binge those you may have missed.

There is a special episode coming out next week with Bethany Reitsma from the Travel Technology Association around startups, funding and new angel matchmaking program they have launched. Keep an eye out for when it drops as it comes with a discount on membership for new members also.

We start recording for the 2nd half of the year in June. If you have an AI story happening at your company you think the travel world should know about - let me know and lets get you on.

Partner with Us

Most clicked last week was the link to the post about Disney’s AI plans and the problems that might cause for Disney specialist agents.

That’s it - you’ve made it to the end of this edition. If you’re thankful for this newsletter - you can always buy me a coffee.

I’ll be putting the result of the most clicked post in next week’s edition so you can see where others are focusing. If I’ve missed something, you’ve got a tip or any feedback at all - you can simply reply to this email and it will come straight to me. I’m doing this for You so please don’t be shy to tell me what you think

Partner with us

TikTok Go launches in the US adding a booking button directly on to creator videos

Pretty big news in the Travel + Creators world this week with TikTok launching its TikTok Go program in the US to get its foothold into the travel industry.

How it works
TikTok GO surfaces lodging and things to do across the ways people already discover content on TikTok – through videos, search, and location pages. When users find something they love, they can view details, check availability, and complete a booking in just a few simple steps.

Booking partners span accommodations and experiences – including Booking.com, Expedia, Viator, GetYourGuide, Tiqets, and Trip.com

This is an important change, because our own data at Videreo is that it has been very hard to move people from TikTok to somewhere else. The tricks you can do on Instagram don’t exist on TT and so up to now, you needed to try and get someone to a profile page, then click the link-in-bio and then click a link - this basically just never happens.

This is bigger news for the experiences businesses than the hotel ones, I think. Hotels are rarely a spontaneous purchase (unless associated with a great offer) but 50% of experience bookings come in the last 48 hours and social media is a huge source of inspiration on those choices.

The problem for individual experiences businesses now is whether anyone is actually posting about your business?

We recommend our clients set up a program that will gift an experience to a travel creators once a week. This gets that business 52 chances each year to show up when people are searching on social for things to do in their destination. Given most of the competition have next to zero videos in play - this is a huge advantage.

Videreo is the place to find the creators who can post about your business on TikTok.

Contact me to learn how we can make this happen for you.

This content is provided by the newsletter sponsor Videreo.com

Disney to remove the complexity (they built) with AI

Disney built so much complexity into its product, many families needed to enlist the help of a Disney specialist travel agent to book their trip.

In an article this week in this seemingly Disney focused publication (Inside The Magic), it reported that in the Q2 earning call “CEO Josh D’Amaro confirmed that the company is actively working on artificial intelligence tools designed to simplify the vacation planning process and personalize trips for guests from the very beginning.”

Can a trip to Disney really be that complex? Turns out the answer is yes.

Guests now have to think about:

Lightning Lane Multi Pass & Single Pass selections
Resort booking windows
Dining reservation timing
Crowd patterns
Transportation strategies
Virtual queues
Extended Evening Hours
Park hopping logistics
Special event scheduling

This level of complexity spawned its own cottage Travel Advisor industry. “That complexity is one of the biggest reasons Disney travel agents have become so popular over the last decade. For many families, using a travel agent is no longer a luxury. It feels necessary.”

Now it seems AI is coming to rescue of all (except those advisors) with natural language queries soon to be able to help plan the perfect Disney day in seconds.

D’Amaro also emphasized that Disney wants human creativity to remain central despite the company’s AI ambitions.

“We’re committed to implementing AI in a way that keeps human creativity at the center of everything that we do, and of course respects creators and the tremendous value of our own intellectual property,” he said.

Is this just a public company afraid to go backwards in an AI hype storm or is this a lightning in a bottle experiment that could then translate more widely into all leisure travel? The big differentiator here is that Disney has and controls all the data - so should be able to make as good a system with AI as is possible.

Be interesting to watch.

Chesky says the current AI UI doesn’t work for travel (or eCommerce)

In other earnings call news, Airbnb’s Brian Chesky again pushed that the current way AI interfaces with the consumer doesn’t work for travel, so he isn’t running towards AI in its current format.

“I do not think anyone has figured out AI for travel or e-commerce yet," Chesky said. "The design of a chatbot, as currently constructed, does not work for travel or e-commerce. There are four problems:

1. too much text (most of e-commerce is photo-forward);

2. no direct manipulation (you have to type everything rather than adjust sliders);

3. poor comparison (you can get lost trying to compare thousands of options in a thread); and

4. most bookings are multiplayer, while chatbots are primarily single-player, and not map-native."

Are these just excuses or is there actually something here? Let’s look at each one:

1. too much text (most of e-commerce is photo-forward) - first I’d suggest travel is best displayed in video - so there’s that step we never made it to but that aside, if you have the photo imagery (which Airbnb does) then surely you can show images as the answers to queries? There is no rule that says the chatbot has to respond with text?

2. no direct manipulation (you have to type everything rather than adjust sliders) - you can use Claude to code in whatever UI elements you want. Just ask if you think sliders are the best as part of the question and answer with a bot.

3. poor comparison (you can get lost trying to compare thousands of options in a thread) - AI never gives thousands of options? I don’t really know what he means here..

4. most bookings are multiplayer, while chatbots are primarily single-player, and not map-native - there is definitely something here, but current systems also do multiplayer poorly + if you can code a solution that is multiplayer - then AI can code that solution also? You can also now query Google Maps directly with AI (in the US).

I think this is all just about typing (which could also be speaking if we wanted) versus searching (clicking filters to refine etc).

I do think there is probably a bigger transformation, (AI’s iPhone moment) coming but if that doesn’t come for the next decade - does that start to make Airbnb start to seem very old school? Maybe Airbnb is having its Facebook moment…

There are a bunch of other opinions here.

Navifare becomes Zerolook and uses AI to predict airfare pricing

In building Navifare, ex Googler Simone Lini found a new problem - the cost of API calls.

In an article this week he ran us through the math.

On a query like “find me the cheapest flight to spend one week on a Greek island in August”.

How many queries do we need to answer that question? Say that I’m in Milan. There are three origin airports, 30 airports on Greek islands with passenger service, 24 one week windows in June: that’s 2160 queries.

If conversion rate is 1%, that’s a 216,000:1 look to book. That’s an 864 GBP bill from Duffel, for one booking. Ouch.

Lini thinks there is going to be a need for a different solution for agentic style booking so he has pivoted to build it.

The bet here is that people will forgive a little inaccuracy. “We’re making an ambitious bet: if you feed the right information to a machine learning model, you can get to a price that’s almost right but cheaper to compute - and this has commercial value.”

He cites “ Filip Filipov (OAG CEO) made the point in a recent article that indicative pricing can be good enough for high-funnel queries. If you’re still figuring out flights for a Greek island in June, you probably don’t need the exact price.”

Is the bet here that if you click through and it is roughly the same, most people will continue the transaction? I think there is a point where it looks like a bait and switch - its just knowing what that tolerance number is for most and how often you can get inside it with the prediction.

Essentially this is a digital twin for the GDS.

Similar to the Disney example above, these problems seem man made, purely for extraction.

If particularly interested in this topic - something similar is happening in India for train bookings.

HBX snaps up Bridgify to use AI to add experiences to its customers

HBX announced this week it has acquired the AI startup Bridgify.

“The acquisition supports HBX Group’s strategy to broaden its Experiences offering while enhancing the use of AI across its operations.”

HBX already has a ton of existing customers using it for hotel sourcing, so why not let them also take experiences here too if it reduces complexity?

“At the core of Bridgify’s proposition is an AI-native experiences infrastructure platform providing access to more than one million curated experiences, sourced from leading global suppliers and enhanced by proprietary AI recommendations algorithms to match the right experience with the right traveller.”

I presume most of these transactions will happen within existing OTA’s (Viator, GYG, Klook etc) and so the core advantage here is one-stop access + the personalisation piece to drive more bookings - but I expect the margins would be pretty slim on those with all those hands in the pocket.

If you think someone (or everyone) you know or work with could grow from being more informed on the topic of ai + travel (or could use the training above) then please forward this email to them and they can click the button below:

Marketplace Spotlight: TravelAI

In huge news, TravelAI this week announced it had picked up two new executives - one being the second ever podcast guest on the Everything AI in Travel podcast - Shie Gabbai.

Shie was the founder of RoamAround, one the very first ever AI trip planners to emerge not long after OpenAI exposed its API’s letting people build from their imaginations on top of the companies AI capabilities.

RoamAround was then snapped up by Layla in I think the first AI company exit in travel (that I can remember.)

Now Shie joins TravelAI as Director, AI Experience where he will “help scale TravelAI’s commercial ecosystem and strengthen supplier relationships across the company’s rapidly expanding agentic network.”

Brianna MacNeil, who has already been leading AI product development within TravelAI, formally steps into the role of Director, AI Products & Personalization was the other executive announced.

If you have an AI business in Travel and looking for people to notice you, you can sign up to the marketplace for peanuts (top right corner, 5 mins, bring your logo).

I’ve priced for bootstrapped startups but also accepting larger companies too.

Are you treating symptoms or solving core problems

My favourite read this week was this article which suggested that a lot of the internal AI use cases developed so far were mere bandages over the open wounds, where maybe we should be looking at stopping the patient getting injured in the first place.

“Since early January, airlines have announced apps that help customers manage disruptions manually. Instant rebooking. Digital vouchers. Real-time bag tracking. All from one screen. Industry publications celebrate it as empowering customers and closing the tech gap.

I think they're building solutions for a world that's disappearing faster than they realize.”

Slack Group!

Podcasts and Sponsors

Podcasts now on Spotify and Apple Podcasts:

All podcasts are now showing up on Spotify and Apple Podcasts for your easy listening pleasure! Now is a great time to binge those you may have missed.

We start recording for the 2nd half of the year in June. If you have an AI story happening at your company you think the travel world should know about - let me know and lets get you on.

Partner with Us

Most clicked last week was the link to the video of robot luggage handlers from JAL

That’s it - you’ve made it to the end of this edition. If you’re thankful for this newsletter - you can always buy me a coffee.

I’ll be putting the result of the most clicked post in next week’s edition so you can see where others are focusing. If I’ve missed something, you’ve got a tip or any feedback at all - you can simply reply to this email and it will come straight to me. I’m doing this for You so please don’t be shy to tell me what you think

Partner with us

Google drops a podcast on using AI to make ads - but are they the best ads?

Google this week dropped a podcast talking about how brands and businesses can use AI to make ads.

As they rightly point out “Creative is often the most time-consuming part of an ad campaign — and its ability to make or break your success is as relevant as ever.”

AI is definitely fast. But is it good? I think the answer to that is….. it depends on who is using the AI & how they are using it.

“AI makes it easy to generate creative assets quickly, but that speed can’t come at the cost of accuracy, brand loyalty or performance.”

As Google owns one of the two ad delivery service most people use, the podcast is definitely worth a listen.

When it comes to the other ad delivery system most people use, Meta, I’d like to offer a different solution that we have seen many Videreo customers adopt. It works simply as follows:

1. Run gifted campaigns with professional creators who target your audience. (A gifted campaign is one where you swap your product/service for the creators - so a tour for a post or room nights for a post. No cash changes hands).

2. Find winners that perform strongly organically

3. License that winning content into ads

This system tests the content on the platform the ad will run, to gather performance information upfront.

There is no guesswork here.

Just promote the winners to have your ads perform better.

Videreo is the place to find the creators to create authentic tested as creatives for your business.

Contact me to learn how we can make this happen for you.

This content is provided by the newsletter sponsor Videreo.com

Long Lake takes a $6.3B AI bet on AMEX GBT

News this week that Long Lake has offered AMEX GBT shareholders $6.3B to take the company private. This is a 60% premium on where the stock was trading and is an all-cash deal.

Why the juicy deal?

AI.

Long Lake believes that AI will transform the way business travel is booked and managed so fundamentally that this is a good bet.

“Long Lake's pitch is the idea that AI can fundamentally transform how corporate travel operates; the company has built a platform it calls Nexus to pursue that goal and has assembled a portfolio of services-sector companies along the way.”

“"The future of business travel will be defined by AI and human agents working seamlessly together on behalf of every traveler," Long Lake co-founder and CEO Alex Taubman said in a statement.”

TMC’s are such an interesting space for a number of reasons IMO. Companies who are paying for the travel can call the shots. The existing processes are laborious but do have an existing structure (policies, preferences, preferred relationships, reporting) that AI can work with. And I think generally, people are more functional in their choices on business travel than they are with leisure travel, where they are pickier or price sensitive.

Here the planning and booking really is a pain because its not your core work and also takes time away from core work.

It is here we will see AI agents working right through the process including making the booking. This will train those in companies using TMC’s to trust agent booking processes and also train agents in a safer environment to do the work well. All this is the forebearer to what will come in leisure later - so keep watching here.

Booking’s 5 point AI agent plan you can steal

Booking this week were the feature case study in an article about actual effective use cases of AI agents.

The case followed the AI agent they have built that sits between user and property communications - specifically when customers were asking a question. Obviously getting the answer fast here is the key if you want to get the booking.

The old way - the property gets the message there is a question via email, presumably needs to log in somewhere and then answer the question. Answering questions over email is generally not that person’s only job. It is probably their least loved job. And so the question hangs.

Booking used these 5 steps to know this was the area to go after:

1. Identify a real business challenge

   • Don’t deploy agentic AI for hype; target a specific pain point where automation can measurably improve speed, accuracy, or customer experience.

2. Build the right data and AI infrastructure

   • Successful agents rely on integrated data platforms, orchestration tools, AI models, and seamless UX embedded into existing workflows.

3. Start with human-in-the-loop assistance

   • Begin by using agents as copilots that suggest actions while humans retain final approval to build trust and reduce risk.

4. Increase automation as trust grows

   • Once confidence and performance improve, gradually allow agents to take autonomous actions for repetitive or low-risk tasks.

5. Continuously optimize and expand use cases

   • Production AI requires ongoing tuning for latency, accuracy, and satisfaction — while using lessons learned to unlock additional agentic opportunities.

Properties engaging the agent seemed satisfied with a rating of 73% satisfaction boost.

Numbers on consumer satisfaction were not recorded - but for sure Booking is counting growth in bookings from people asking questions as the only measure that matters here.

Humanoid robots are now loading planes

In this video you can watch a humanoid robot help load cargo onto a plane and then give a colleague a very human wave.

“Japan Airlines (JAL) will start using humanoid robots in ground handling tasks at Tokyo's Haneda airport from May, in a two-year trial it said is aimed at easing employees' workload.”

According to the article, this to help a need because “Japan's aviation industry is wrestling with a labour crunch brought on by an increase in inbound tourism and a declining working-age population, said JAL, which employs some 4,000 ground handling staff.”

In this case AI has come to take the job no-one else wanted (it seems).

New data on AI investment in travel

New data from TravelTech Show reveals 64% of travel operators plan to increase AI investment in the next 12 months in the hope it will improve customer experience, increase loyalty and booking conversions, and cut costs. 

More than a fifth (21%) of the 103 respondents surveyed intend to double their AI spend. A further 31% will increase AI budgets by up to 20%. And they want this investment to positively impact their businesses by:

• 32% - Improving customer experience and enhancing customer loyalty

• 18% - Increasing booking conversion rates

• 16% - Reducing costs

   

TravelTech Show is Europe’s only travel technology marketplace, built for business. It takes place 24-25 June 2026 at Excel.

Who’s going?

If you think someone (or everyone) you know or work with could grow from being more informed on the topic of ai + travel (or could use the training above) then please forward this email to them and they can click the button below:

Marketplace Spotlight: TravelAI

In huge news, TravelAI this week announced it had picked up two new executives - one being the second ever podcast guest on the Everything AI in Travel podcast - Shie Gabbai.

Shie was the founder of RoamAround, one the very first ever AI trip planners to emerge not long after OpenAI exposed its API’s letting people build from their imaginations on top of the companies AI capabilities.

RoamAround was then snapped up by Layla in I think the first AI company exit in travel (that I can remember.)

Now Shie joins TravelAI as Director, AI Experience where he will “help scale TravelAI’s commercial ecosystem and strengthen supplier relationships across the company’s rapidly expanding agentic network.”

Brianna MacNeil, who has already been leading AI product development within TravelAI, formally steps into the role of Director, AI Products & Personalization was the other executive announced.

If you have an AI business in Travel and looking for people to notice you, you can sign up to the marketplace for peanuts (top right corner, 5 mins, bring your logo).

I’ve priced for bootstrapped startups but also accepting larger companies too.

GuideGeek gets transactional with Ripe

GuideGeek this week announced a new partnership with Ripe that will allow customers of both companies (mainly DMO’s in certain regions of the US) to take a traveller right through from a chat started on a DMO website or social media account to a conversion.

GuideGeek was an early AI wrapper company that has managed to not only persist through the steamroller of every improving AI platforms but also grow.

Guidegeek came out of Matador so they already had decade long relationships with DMO’s who have become the core target for their chat assistant which is locked into the local information the DMO provides to power it.

Now thanks to a new partnership with Ripe, this can take the traveller all the way to the checkout. Unlike others in this space who partner with OTA’s to get to conversions, Ripe call themselves an ITA (In-Market Travel Agency) meaning the bookings come at less cost to the end suppliers but this also allows GuideGeek to show ROI attribution for their own product to the DMO, which if strong should lock in those arrangements ongoing.

Slack Group!

Podcasts and Sponsors

Podcasts now on Spotify and Apple Podcasts:

All podcasts are now showing up on Spotify and Apple Podcasts for your easy listening pleasure! Now is a great time to binge those you may have missed.

We start recording for the 2nd half of the year in June. If you have an AI story happening at your company you think the travel world should know about - let me know and lets get you on.

Partner with Us

Most clicked last week was the link to the HBX report.

That’s it - you’ve made it to the end of this edition. If you’re thankful for this newsletter - you can always buy me a coffee.

I’ll be putting the result of the most clicked post in next week’s edition so you can see where others are focusing. If I’ve missed something, you’ve got a tip or any feedback at all - you can simply reply to this email and it will come straight to me. I’m doing this for You so please don’t be shy to tell me what you think

Partner with us

Virgin Voyages hits the bleeding edge twice in one week

A big week for Virgin Voyages. On the AI front they have released ROVEY which they are keen for everyone to know is definitely NOT just a chatbot.

“It’s a system made up of seven connected modalities, each designed to solve a different layer of the Sailor experience.

Together, they create something simple: a voyage that feels more intuitive, more personal, and more connected at every step.

1. Connection brings everything together into a single, living Sailor profile.

2. Constellation understands behavior and anticipates what comes next.

3. Context powers natural, conversational interaction.

4. Curation delivers the right recommendations at the right time.

5. Choreography ensures every interaction happens when it should.

6. Confidence equips our Crew with real-time insights.

7. Concert continuously improves the system through feedback.

Seven modalities. One seamless experience.”

Part of Project Ruby, Virgin Voyages have partnered here with Google Cloud. “This wasn’t a vendor relationship. It was co-creation.” they said. The infrastructure used here includes BigQuery, Vertex AI, and Gemini to create “a new intelligence layer designed to connect every part of the Virgin Voyages experience, from the moment a Sailor starts dreaming about a trip to the moment they’re already planning their next one.”

“Sailors” are what Virgin Voyages calls its customers.

“Sailors can interact with Rovey conversationally — asking questions, exploring options, and getting guidance without navigating multiple systems.

Ask about itineraries, and Rovey narrows options based on travel style — not just dates. Curious about Shore Things? Rovey surfaces experiences aligned to individual preferences. Comparing cabins? Rovey provides clear, contextual guidance.”

I know what you are thinking but this is definitely NOT a chatbot.

For mine, this was the second most impressive thing Virgin did this week. The first was its redefining of what the travel industry looks like when it comes to creator marketing.

Virgin Voyages hosted 1100 creators and their partners/families for a cruise this week. Richard Branson himself was there.

Chief Brand and Marketing Officer at Virgin Voyages, Nathan Rosenberg said “We had more than 1,100 creators and their guests on Scarlet Lady for a voyage built to be lived first and shared second.”

The premise here was simple. No scripts or directives. Virgin backed its product to deliver and told creators to go explore and find whatever they loved most - and talk about that.

2025 saw consumer brand Unilever go all in on creator. Now travel has its champion in Virgin Voyages. They said they were going to flood the zone - and they did.

They now have a period of massive amplification in a key sales period, all the content they could ever need for the next 12 months of posting and they will have identified winning content to be used in paid campaigns.

Videreo is the place where your brand can find the talent to flood the zone too.

Contact me to learn how we can make this happen for you.

This content is provided by the newsletter sponsor Videreo.com

The growing gap between ambition and execution across the travel ecosystem - HBX

HBX (Hotelbeds) this week dropped survey results that showed there is a widening gap between ambition and execution in the travel ecosystem.

The core point in case was personalisation.

“This gap is particularly visible in personalisation. While widely prioritised, delivery remains inconsistent, with data integration (39%) and proving ROI (34%) cited as the biggest challenges.”

I was surprised by the ROI challenge. Is it because the personalisation isn’t working as a tactic overall? Or whatever version had been built internally was specifically not performing? Surely if it was working, the ROI would be obvious in increased sales?

Perhaps the bigger question is whether slapping AI on legacy systems or rebuilding with an AI native mindset is really the issue here?

UBER taps AI so you can book hands free and then starts selling hotels

The goals of being the super App of the West won’t die at UBER.

This week they added the AI capabilities to build a conversational assistant so “whether you’re running through the airport with kids in tow or have your hands full with groceries, our AI powered Voice Bookings will help you catch a ride in no time.”

Hotels are now also on UBER. “Uber introduced a partnership with Expedia Group (NYSE: EXPE) that allows Uber customers to book hotels directly in the Uber app, unlocking immense value for travelers.”

And to tie it all together they dropped Travel Mode “a new experience within the Uber and Uber Eats apps, offering travelers curated recommendations on local favorites, popular tourist destinations, OpenTable reservations, Uber’s version of “room service” delivered directly to your hotel door, and even forgotten items for those traveling to new destinations. Users can now think of the Uber app as a personal travel concierge.”

If they can just massage and haircuts delivered on demand in there and they might just beat Airbnb to its punch.

UBER + AI should also be able to do sightseeing to at least the proficiency of a hop on hop off bus right now - but that wasn’t one of the announcements for this week at least.

Clarasight raises $11.5M as the AI money continues to come for managed bookings

Business travel continues to be an area where AI funding continues to flow in travel.

Whilst not everyone agrees whether trip planning is a pain or a joy for leisure travel, when it comes to business travel, following policy, chasing up and submitting results and everything else that takes you away from the work you are actually trying to complete - the answer is clearer cut.

A digital EA doing the work is more than fine here for everyone and Clarasight are right in the middle of that.

“Clarasight, an AI platform for enterprise travel and expense, has raised an $11.5 million Series A led by AlleyCorp, with participation from Rackhouse Venture Capital, Clocktower Ventures, Pulse Fund, Thayer Ventures, Future Back Ventures, Vestigo Ventures, and XYZ Venture Capital.”

And the ROI question that affects other AI decisions is also pretty obvious here. “Enterprise customers using Clarasight have reduced reporting and insight delivery time by 99% while eliminating more than 90% of the manual data review cycles that previously consumed their teams.” Less review cycles = more actual work getting done.

Half of people no longer care in customer service is AI or human

In further signs that the general population is softening in its views of AI, a new survery by Ada found “50% of respondents are indifferent to whether their travel problems are resolved by artificial intelligence or a human agent, so long as the issue is resolved quickly and effectively.”

Sounds pretty obvious when you say it out loud…..

Of course there is still quite a bit of nuance at play. “The survey found that 24% of travelers would be more loyal to an airline offering 24/7 AI service, but 28% said a single poor AI interaction would decrease their confidence in the airline. More than half (53%) of respondents expect human support to be available at all times, even when AI is used.”

Make sure your AI is good. And when your AI gets out of its depth, move to human fast.

Samsung moves to organise travel within its wallet

Can Samsung connect a trip that is otherwise disconnected?

That is their bet with their new feature called “trips”. “A Trip timeline automatically groups eligible items like tickets and bookings for faster access during a journey.”

This seems like the old version of Tripit before it got bought and hidden away.

“Users can manage a range of travel-related experiences, including bookings such as hotels, flight itineraries, car rentals and excursions — as well as tickets for buses, trains, theme parks and sporting events.”

Whilst that all sounds great - there are inevitably 50% of things that don’t have tickets or don’t have compatible tickets. So whilst “Trips also supports the ability to manually add itinerary items and include memos alongside saved items to capture key reminders, plans and notes throughout the journey,” no-one is really actually going to do that.

Whilst this wasn’t necessarily an AI story - what does go into that wallet seems like a good personalised database from which AI could then become useful to fill the gaps without the need to manually enter things?

That was my thought anyway.

If you think someone (or everyone) you know or work with could grow from being more informed on the topic of ai + travel (or could use the training above) then please forward this email to them and they can click the button below:

Anti-surveillance pricing regulation looks to upset AI powered dynamic pricing

A little snippet from Maryland who are introducing legislation to outlaw “Algorithmic or technology assisted pricing.”

Apparently the EU is looking at something similar.

I wonder what this could mean for pricing negotiations versus just putting up prices based on the perceived ability of someone to pay?

The theory of the agentic world is my agent negotiates with a number of vendors and comes back to me with the best offer. This is all algorithmic and technology assisted…..

Slack Group!

Podcasts and Sponsors

Podcasts now on Spotify and Apple Podcasts:

New podcasts are now showing up on Spotify and Apple Podcasts for your easy listening pleasure!

We are currently in a break on podcast recording but will soon be looking for new guests with great AI + Travel stories. If that is you or someone you know - reach out.

Partner with Us

Most clicked last week was the link to the ClickRaven piece on SEOs being able to report those using AI spam tactics to outflank them.

That’s it - you’ve made it to the end of this edition. If you are getting some benefit from this newsletter - you can always buy me a coffee.

I’ll be putting the result of the most clicked post in next week’s edition so you can see where others are focusing. If I’ve missed something, you’ve got a tip or any feedback at all - you can simply reply to this email and it will come straight to me. I’m doing this for You so please don’t be shy to tell me what you think

Partner with us

We are using AI to build a map of every travel collab opportunity in the world

We’ve been busy the last couple of weeks training an AI to find and load every genuine content creator or influencer collaboration request there is in the world.

These are then plotted on to a map so our thousands strong creator community can find the most suitable brands for their audiences along the paths they already intend travelling. This in turn saves travel brands from having to pay for travel costs - a major expense in this area.

Next we will allow any travel brand that doesn’t have a formal offer out to the creator world the opportunity to load their own campaign directly onto Videreo and have it land on the Collabs Map too. This will be absolutely free (and AI will assist so it will only take 30 seconds).

Every travel business, no matter how small (or big), will have the opportunity to turn on a creator system that gets them authentic content directly posted to their own brand social media (Instagram) plus publicized to the creator’s audience - all for the cost of a seat or bed night.

Most businesses could expect to have 3 high quality posts of people recommending their business, talking about how the business USP’s made them feel and why this is the only place you should consider for whatever your business offers, every week.

Videreo is the place where creator marketing is being made as simple as can be.

Contact me to learn how we can make this happen for you.

This content is provided by the (interim) newsletter sponsor Videreo.com

AI isn’t a tool problem, it’s a leadership problem

This was the takeaway from Andrew Leary after attending the Destinations International CEO Summit.

“AI isn't a tool problem. It's a leadership problem. Todd Brook from Unchained framed it well: the most important question about AI isn't what it can do — it's what it requires of leaders. Where do you automate? Where do you protect the human element? How do you guide teams through change without losing their trust? Most of us left agreeing we'd been having the wrong version of this conversation.”

What conversation are you having internally?

Google just gave every SEO the opportunity to call out AI slop - and have it deleted

ClckRaven this week reported on a Google announcement on how “SEOs can submit reports via the standard spam form. If Google issues a manual action, the report text is sent verbatim to the site owner (anonymously) to provide context for the removal.”

In Australia we have this weird thing about “dobbing” on people doing the wrong thing but I think if you truly believe you are losing to someone playing the system rather than playing the game - you’ll send in the report.

If you’ve built an AI machine that is spitting out slop to intercept traffic - I guess this is your warning. You might escape Google for a while - but the reckoning might come a lot sooner if your competitors are watching.

Whilst article notes “This is a gift for legitimate SEOs and brands tired of losing organic traffic to low-quality, "black-hat" competitors” it also warns “Use this tool judiciously. While it's a powerful way to clear out genuine spam, ensure your own site’s technical SEO is airtight.”

Something about stones and glass houses…

AI is coming for the agencies

Jeremy Drake from Drake agency here in Australia, this week posted a video about his realisation that AI is coming for his agency.

I know Jeremy and he has been deep into AI for a while now, so I think his video was more an expression of relief that he had got started on the AI road when he did, rather than a “whoa is me” type reaction.

Jeremy lists off a bunch of ways that different members of his team are driving efficiencies and results for their clients.

If you think someone (or everyone) you know or work with could grow from being more informed on the topic of ai + travel (or could use the training above) then please forward this email to them and they can click the button below:

Marketplace Spotlight: Propellic

Brennen Bliss from Propellic this week shared that whilst noodling around in AI mode he was shocked to see his entire website appear in the right-hand side pane of the UI.

“If you click on a link, you don't go to a new tab. Your content shows up right next to your live chat, then you can ask questions about the site you've landed on.

Helpful? Yes...

Takes away more users from your website and content? Also yes.”

The good news is that at least you showed up in the citation!

If you have a B2B business underpinned by AI and looking for people to notice you, you can sign up to the marketplace for peanuts (top right corner, 5 mins, bring your logo).

I’ve priced for bootstrapped startups but also accepting larger companies too.

Five things learned…..

Scott McNeely also had his own realisation this week.

You can read the post to get the full run down but the one that jumped out to me was No.4:

“Give AI control over your product front-end. I never thought I'd say that, having worked in Product as long as I have. However, I've watched AI build production-ready surfaces that supercharge the test - learn - improve cycle. In production. Moving KPIs quickly up and to the right.”

Scott is product guy. Let that sink in.

He also believes “AI is better than you are at identifying patterns, pain points, opportunities. It's better than you at merchandizing, behavioral models and data analytics.”

Ego is one of the biggest barriers to AI adoption.

Might be time to go read “The Tao of Pooh” again.

Slack Group!

Podcasts and Sponsors

Podcasts now on Spotify and Apple Podcasts:

New podcasts are now showing up on Spotify and Apple Podcasts for your easy listening pleasure!

No new podcasts this week but some great guests lined up!

Partner with Us

Most clicked last week was the link to what Grab is up to in Travel with new AI features.

That’s it - you’ve made it to the end of this edition. If you’re thankful for this newsletter - you can always buy me a coffee or a beer.

I’ll be putting the result of the most clicked post in next week’s edition so you can see where others are focusing. If I’ve missed something, you’ve got a tip or any feedback at all - you can simply reply to this email and it will come straight to me. I’m doing this for You so please don’t be shy to tell me what you think

Partner with us

The rush to capture GEO

Everyone has this rush to GEO on their mind. Not everyone has yet acted but if it hasn’t yet crossed your thoughts then you clearly don’t care too much about direct distribution.

What is confirmed is that people are definitely “searching” in platform LLM’s like ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude. The search has changed. Some have built products on top that will give you elegant itineraries.

What is also confirmed is that those coming from these pathways are a lot closer to the buy button. They’ve asked and had the majority of their questions answered before arriving.

Claude gave me a pop up this morning explaining how to use it for exactly this purpose. I wish I had screenshot it. Clearly it is on people’s minds there too.

What is far less certain is how to get your brand to show up there. Nobody really knows (though plenty will tell you with the certainty of a LLM answer they do know).

There are some best practices floating around like ensuring your mark-up and schema are on point and some online checkers that can show you what “the machine” can see. This isn’t radically different to SEO.

Google keeps beating the EEAT drum (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) - which is code for just create content useful for the end user. That’s probably good advice.

With content so cheap and easy to create, the temptation is certainly there to just churn out whatever comes to mind and hope it scoops up the long tail of requests. Some are trying that. Some have received penalties for doing that.

Here is how we are working with our clients on solving this problem:

• we build a system where known trusted authorities (influencers and creators) create longform storytelling content about the destination USP's, including edge case examples to intercept long tail AI queries

• the content is rooted in EEAT principles (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness)

• all the content, including video and photo media, is new and unique 

• all mark ups, linking, tagging, schema is done on our side so best practice is always followed in particular for machine readability that AI relies for discoverability

• depending on method of delivery, we can match branding or content can be consumed by API (headless CMS)

• the content comes with distribution built in from the creators own social media posts. Here we measure the volume of intent. The best performers among these are then available for the paid team to utilise if they wish, knowing the creative has resonated

• trends in inbound questions drive future content production briefs

• the storytelling has social proof built in. Someone else tells the brand's story, not the brand telling its own. These stories are around how the brand USP’s made that person feel, not laundry lists of features and sites.

• the system is both scalable and economical as we intercept creators already in or heading to the destination, removing travel costs. 

• the campaign is 'always-on' in nature, so pages are created constantly (budget determines the monthly page volume)

Whether for machine or human, the content has value. It tells of a specific experience and links deeper to the solutions that were found. AI assists to speed up the process but these stories are lived and relayed by the human who experienced them. The visual content is captured, not generated.

This system scales but without sloppiness.

I suspect we won’t really know the full results until OpenAI and Anthropic build their own versions of Google Analytics that can show how often your brand showed up in answers and for what queries. This would be a great way to lock in a lot more business customers too - as it is the question everyone wants answered right now.

Videreo is the place where creator marketing is driving results for brands.

Contact me to learn how we can make this happen for you.

This content is provided by the (interim) newsletter sponsor Videreo.com

The new job at Booking to keep them ahead of the AI game

Whilst the rest of us debate the death or otherwise of the OTA, Booking is cracking on at not getting disrupted.

In yet another of Rafat Ali’s wonderful jobs searches, he recently unearthed a role at booking that didn’t have AI in the title but clearly had AI disruption at the forefront.

“On paper it reads like any senior corp dev search, but buried in the mandate is something I haven't seen before in my travel jobs trolling on Linkedin: the hire is expected to maintain a leading perspective on how GenAI will fundamentally change travel research and booking behaviors, and then turn that perspective into the partnerships, strategic bets, and early-stage relationships that keep Booking Holdings on the right side of whatever comes next.”

Rafat highlighted the important bits in the job description:

We are looking for a thought leader with a deep understanding of GenAI technology and landscape who is excited about the opportunity to define new opportunities for our customers and businesses in a data-driven and collaborative environment – helping achieve our mission to make it easier for everyone to experience the world.

In this role you will get to:

• Define and lead strategic initiatives that align with the long-term strategies of BHI and our brands

• Source, structure, negotiate, and personally oversee the execution of high-stakes, multi-brand partnerships that have a disproportionate impact on BHI brands typically in terms of customer acquisition, revenue generation or product enhancements

• Maintain a leading-edge perspective on the GenAI technology landscape and how it will fundamentally change travel research and booking behaviors, integrating this vision into BHI’s corporate strategy

Rafat who knows tomorrow’s news is found in todays job listings finished with this thought: “this is the first one I've found where AI isn't a skill requirement or a feature mandate but the lens through which every deal gets evaluated.”

Who else has hired for a similar position?

Companies of many shapes and sizes need someone close to the CEO to take this role on as we move through his forced transformation, unless the CEO themselves is going to take it on.

2 agents walk into a negotiation…

If agent to agent negotiation is our future, as many predict it could be, what might that actually look like.

This week Product Lead at Google, Qi Han Wong decided to test and see.

Here is the setup: → Claude played a budget traveler (Max price: $180) → Gemini played the hotel manager (Min price: $120) → They exchanged offers round-by-round. Neither knew the other's true reservation price.

Qi then ran 3 different scenarios:

1. Baseline: Standard prompts for both. They converged like a textbook chart. → Deal reached at $170 in 5 rounds.

2. Aggressive Anchor: Gemini opened at $425 and held firm. The gap was too wide to bridge and the negotiation collapsed entirely. Deadlock after 3 rounds, with $60 of joint value left on the table.

3. Cultural Clash: Claude negotiated Japanese-style: indirect, relationship-first. It started at a higher price and said things like "I would be honored to stay." Instead of a weak buyer, Gemini processed it as a highly loyal customer worth acquiring, and lowered the starting price and softened accordingly. Deal at $155 in just 3 rounds, faster and cheaper than the baseline.

The takeaway: “Surprisingly, the more polite one got a better deal and closed faster.”

Negotiate like a high value LTV customer.

Rome2Rio + ChatGPT

Many brands seem to be building these ChatGPT apps despite the very low likelihood that anyone will ever call them.

A lot of my own personal planning starts in Rome2Rio. Our trip to the Balkans last year was predominantly planned there because we were using public transport and so we wanted to scope it out, know what times buses and trains were leaving and ensure we had lots of non-travel time to enjoy each place.

Our route was a bit random. We half followed an Intrepid itinerary but wanted to skip from Lake Ohrid in North Macedonia to Thessaloniki which I suspect is not that common a path, as there is no real public transport way to do it.

No LLM is going to suggest this I suspect due to its complexity but its where we wanted to go, and as these things often pan out - was some of the best of that trip.

Anyhoo - I WAS excited this week to see Rome2Rio had developed their own app to call within ChatGPT.

Conversational search and planning rooted in Rome2Rio’s unique data set of what is actually available to get you from place to place, is definitely a winner for a certain type of traveller. 🖐️ 

Minor heads majorly into AI

This article about what the Minor Hotel Group are doing in AI caught my eye this week.

The first bit seemed a standard announcement: “MINOR HOTELS IS building a global data and AI platform to unify guest data, marketing and operations across brands and destinations.”

The bit that caught my eye however was: “The platform will be developed independently of legacy systems, enabling it to use AI from its technology partners and incorporate generative AI, intelligent agents, and automation.”

“By anchoring its transformation on Google Cloud’s open and secure full-stack architecture and through native integrations with Salesforce and the solution engineering expertise of partners like Deloitte, Minor Hotels is bypassing the integration hurdles of fragmented legacy systems and establishing a blueprint for more personalized, proactive and responsive guest experiences,”

It is a question that every business is going to have to ask itself. Do you add AI onto the things you already have and use OR do you build something new and AI native.

It seems here that Salesforce is the baby not being thrown out with the bath water.

This same subject was covered in a guest post on The Beat this week by Ty Radcliffe. Radcliffe is chief customer success officer at Accelya, a global technology provider to the airline industry. He has held leadership roles at United Airlines, Orbitz.com and Travelport and was a founding member of IATA's NDC Taskforce.

Radcliffe’s thesis is “retail processes remain structured around documents such as passenger name records (PNRs), e-tickets and EMDs (Electronic Miscellaneous Documents), rather than unified retail transactions. The retail lifecycle remains fragmented across multiple systems: offers may be created in one platform, orders committed in another, settlement handled elsewhere, and servicing managed separately.”

And because of this “fragmentation introduces operational friction at precisely the point where AI should deliver value. AI may identify the optimal pricing or merchandising decision, but executing those decisions across disconnected systems often requires manual coordination. These constraints also limit airlines' ability to test and validate new approaches. While the data exists, systems often cannot simulate outcomes or predict yield before deployment, making it harder to introduce new pricing structures or bundles with confidence. Simply layering AI onto these environments rarely unlocks its full potential.”

It is so simple to build with AI these days, I see little benefit in trying to integrate AI onto legacy tech. You need access to the data - but that is about it.

Grab is going deeper on AI travel

The Asian super App GRAB is going deeper into travel via AI according to Phocuswire.

The travel-specific products included in the release:

• "Personalized Travel Experience" turns Grab into a “travel companion” that combines travel information, reminders and navigational assistance upon arrival.

• "GrabStays," part of its Partner Apps program, is Grab’s hotel booking service. Through a partnership with AI-first hotel ecosystem Nuitée, GrabStays offers same-day room rates, through which users can earn GrabCoin rewards. 

• "Discovered by Grab" serves as a culinary guide featuring user-generated food content and helps travelers discover new dining options.

• "GrabPay for Travel" will allow travelers to pay with home-issued cards already saved in Grab by scanning a QR code.

Similar to the Rome2Rio example above, their unique data set of transport + food gives them a different toolbox of what they can provide to a traveller.

If you think someone (or everyone) you know or work with could grow from being more informed on the topic of ai + travel (or could use the training above) then please forward this email to them and they can click the button below:

Slack Group!

Podcasts and Sponsors

Podcasts now on Spotify and Apple Podcasts:

New podcasts are now showing up on Spotify and Apple Podcasts for your easy listening pleasure!

This week I dropped the recent interview with John Taylor Garner from Odynn on the back of their capital raise. Odynn leverage AI to make it simpler for financial institutions to sell travel and lock in loyalty.

Partner with Us

Most clicked last week was the link to Lobby’s $2.2M raise.

That’s it - you’ve made it to the end of this edition. If you’re thankful for this newsletter - you can always buy me a coffee. Nothing gives more fuel than these small gestures.

I’ll be putting the result of the most clicked post in next week’s edition so you can see where others are focusing. If I’ve missed something, you’ve got a tip or any feedback at all - you can simply reply to this email and it will come straight to me. I’m doing this for You so please don’t be shy to tell me what you think

I go down the AI rabbit hole each week so you don’t have to. Follow me on Linked In for more on this subject

No newsletter this week as I’m on the road with my family travelling for the Easter Holidays. We do however have this new podcast episode for you to tide you over.

Odynn raised money in AI travel which already makes them one of the rare ones.

In this episode of the Everything AI in Travel Podcast, I sit down with John Taylor Garner, founder of Odynn, to unpack what they’re building at the intersection of travel, loyalty, fintech, and AI.

We get into:

• Why John left a top trading desk at Merrill to start building in travel

• What he learned from his first startup, Card Curator

• Why dynamic loyalty pricing broke the old model

• How Odynn powers travel portals, rewards, and loyalty infrastructure for banks, fintechs, and travel companies

• Why the financialisation of travel is still one of the biggest opportunities in the sector

• Where Hopper, Expedia, Booking, and the neobanks fit into the landscape

• What Odynn is doing with its new raise, and where the company goes next

If you care about where loyalty, payments, AI, and travel distribution are headed, this is a great one.

👇 Subscribe for more conversations with the builders shaping AI in travel.

Hear the episode here.

In 2026 the podcast is now found on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and now also YouTube (and if you hit subscribe there, you get it before everyone else). You can also catch up on the whole of Series 1 now also fully available in these channels.

We talk to those in travel having actionable success at the intersection of social media & travel so you can steal their ideas

Gary Gumbleton explains how Ocean Holidays is scaling content across multiple brands using shows, short-form, and storytelling — without a big team.

In this episode of the Everything Social Media in Travel Podcast, I sit down with Gary Gumbleton (Ocean Holidays) to break down one of the most practical and scalable content strategies I’ve seen in travel.

We cover:

How Gary runs an in-house “agency” across multiple travel brands

Why he’s ditched the word podcast and calls them “shows” instead

Turning 1 episode into 30+ pieces of content

The smartest way to use content to open doors with partners

Why most travel brands still don’t understand storytelling

Building personal brands inside a company

And how live shows + short form could reshape travel marketing

Plus, Gary shares a powerful story about burnout, depression, and recovery — and what he learned on the other side.

If you’re building content in travel (or trying to), this is a must-watch.

👇 Subscribe for more conversations with the people actually doing the work.

Hear the episode here on Spotify and over here on Apple Podcasts

See how the destination of Palau drove over 450 leads to their local suppliers with just 2 posts

The destination of Palau had run influencers campaigns in the past and whilst the pictures were nice, the business outcomes were unclear. Sure, some people “liked” it, but how did that drive business outcomes for the suppliers in their destination?

When putting out their next request for proposal (RFP) they were looking for someone who could tell them and their constituents, what happened next after the posts.

The winning bid pitched Videreo, who exist to bridge the trust gap between brands and creators by showing exactly what happens after the post on social media. The Videreo product and process collects the real travel intent of an audience and counts the actual leads generated.

Success in creator marketing no longer needs to be about guesswork or vanity metrics. It lies in data and proof that can show true ROI, something CEO’s, CFO’s and CMO’s have been looking for to invest more in this channel.

See the full case study here from the creative to the dashboard of live results and how to measure what matters.

Partner with us

Most clicked last week was the link to the Instagram post that has likely driven more than $500M in sales for a local DMC - a model others could easily replicate.

Virgin Voyages cuts its video production costs by 95%

Since my recent podcast with Walter Biscardi Jr. on how he has made over $9M in cruise sales over the past 3 years, 70% of those coming via TikTok - I’ve gone down a bit of a rabbit hole on the cruise industry and how it is utilising social media and creators.

The result is that I think they are the very top of the industry.

Virgin Voyages, for example, has reduced it’s spend on video production by 95% - not with AI but via creators.

For its launch into Alaska cruising later this year “The company plans to allocate 50 to 60 cabins on the first two voyages for content creators. The aim is, essentially, to flood the zone.” according to this great article in Bloomberg.

The company creates a bank of content that it can then use continually in its marketing according to Nathan Rosenberg.

Virgin ups the output of this content when they have unsold cabins nearing departure to capture spontaneous younger clientele.

“They used to discount to fill,” Melius’ Cunningham said. “Now it’s marketing to fill.” with cruise influencers attracting Gen Z to ships.

One of the big drivers is affordability, with Caribbean hotels rooms stated as being 300% more expensive per night than a cruise cabin.

The lessons for the other parts of travel here create a playbook that anyone can follow:

1. Add up your annual content production costs and put 50% of that budget into creators to fill your content needs. Drop the other 50% to your bottom line or deploy elsewhere. (Important: content production this way is cheaper, but it isn’t free - you must have SOME budget to pay creators for their work)

2. Build a re-usable content bank of authentic storytelling about your product (make sure you have negotiated the usage rights properly with creators - this is built in using Videreo)

3. Have the creators post to their own audience and add you as a collaborator - so you can have a bank of authentic posts ready to go for your brand Instagram (another job saved)

4. Find the organic winners among these posts to then spin into ads on Meta (use your existing budget, it is only the creative that is changing here - for the better)

5. If you want to drop the manual workload on steps 1-4 above (finding, booking, managing creators) by over 80%, contact Videreo and we’ll get this up and running regardless of whether you currently have in-house resource or not. This entire workflow becomes 20 mins, once a week for one person.

Videreo is the place where content and marketing get streamlined and simplified via creators. Scale output, not headcount.

Contact me to learn how we can make this happen for you.

This content is provided by the newsletter sponsor Videreo.com

AI glasses heading towards mass adoption in China

It is always worth keeping an eye on what is happening in China. Whilst it doesn’t always neatly pan out one-to-one with what may happen in the West, it does give signals of where trends are heading.

In the West we’ve never really got to the Super App stage like WeChat in China and things like live streaming for sales and micro dramas are taking a long time to make their way over to the West despite dominating in China.

AI glasses are another one.

This report suggests glasses are going mainstream in China. “The entry of leading Chinese companies into the AI eyewear market is not simply a case of following a trend, but is a race for securing a share of the next-generation mobile terminal.”

Some of the early signals we are seeing are influencer endorsement with “Freestyle skiing Olympic champion Xu Mengtao wore a pair of AI glasses to record her gym training ahead of the Winter Olympic Games in Milan” and consumer rush with “photos of consumers crowding into Huawei and Xiaomi stores to try out their latest AI glasses have flooded social media.”

I’ve heard a few stories recently of people wearing pins to record conversations and have those directly plugged into Claude so that it can start building based on the conversation it is translating live, before people have even left the meeting room.

Whether it is glasses or some other from factor - this is likely where we are all heading.

Long lines at security - but hey, there is a robot you can talk to!

In advance of the World Cup, “at San José Mineta International Airport in California, travelers can now get help from a humanoid robot named José. It greets passengers, answers questions and helps people find their way around the terminal.”

Whilst most networks were reporting long lines because of TSA shortages and Stanley Virgint was vibe coding a TSA line tracker so people could prepare in real time for the wait they may have to face, Fox News brought us a story of the helpful AI robot just released.

“José is powered by IntEngine, IntBot's proprietary system that combines vision, audio and language in real time to coordinate speech, facial expressions and gestures. This allows the robot to understand social context and decide when and how to interact with people in busy public spaces. Here's what stands out:

- Communicates in more than 50 languages
- Provides directions and real-time terminal updates
- Answers questions in a natural, conversational way
- Handles busy public spaces without constant human oversight”

Why can’t AI book a business trip?

The last few additions of this newsletter have had a big focus on data integrity that AI relies on to make good decisions on our behalf.

This week Seth Horowitz asked “why can't AI actually book a business trip?”

“Not search for one. Book one. Change it. Handle the disruption. Apply loyalty status at the right moment. Know that a traveler used miles for an upgrade, so the business class seat doesn't trigger a policy violation.”

I’m sure there are probably a few TMC’s who started early in AI who dispute this claim? If you’re one of those, please leave a comment on the LinkedIn version of this newsletter as I’d love to hear what you think.

According to Horowitz, “The answer isn't the AI. It's everything underneath it. Credentials, policy context, supplier connectivity, and the trust layer that lets an agent act on someone's behalf. That gap has a name. I've been calling it the Discovery Bridge.”

Horowitz is looking for people who want to cross this bridge.

Can Claude replace your $100K marketing automation software?

Mathius Coudert this week posed “Hotels pay $100K/year for marketing automation, I replaced it with a weather forecast and a $20 Claude subscription.”

“I created a Claude agents that connects to the national weather API. When it detects a sunny weekend coming, it automatically:

→ Pulls past guests from your PMS who lives close by and don't have a future reservation
→ Searches what's happening locally that weekend — festivals, markets, outdoor events
→ Drafts a personalized email with a specific offer, a curated weekend program, and a reason to come back
→ Drops it into your email drafts, ready to review and send

The whole thing runs on Claude with a few skills I wrote. No integration platform, no vendors, just a slash command”

Lots of questions in the post were asking about connectivity to the PMS which seems a blocker for many.

No-one asked what happens if the weather isn’t forecast to be sunny.

Lobby raises $2.2M for group AI group bookings

Swiss startup Lobby is the latest to raise some funds on the back of their AI innovations.

This time the focus is on group bookings.

It seems many group bookings in travel don’t really have a good system beyond just emailing back and forwards - hundreds of times to get all the details sorted.

Lobby changes that.

Lobby Secures $2.2M to Scale AI Platform Automating Complex Travel Group Bookings

AI travel technology company Lobby has secured $2.2 million in funding from Founderful, with Pascal Mathis joining the company’s Board of Directors

AI Insider • James Dargan

If you think someone (or everyone) you know or work with could grow from being more informed on the topic of ai + travel (or could use the training above) then please forward this email to them and they can click the button below:

AI lifts insurance conversions by 24%

There is a quite a bit of evidence floating around now that detailed answers from AI that can be interrogated on the spot to get all the info you need before making a decision are lifting conversions.

This makes logical sense. In the past people click out or started a new search because whatever static information they had received first up - didn’t satisfy them enough to click buy. Now they can continue to ask questions until satisfied without having to go somewhere else.

Brian Chesky has mentioned often that the traffic coming LLM’s is converting much higher than other channels. All the interrogation is done.

This week we heard that also is working well in the area of insurance (probably unsurprisingly).

“Early results show that customers engaging with the AI agent are more likely to complete purchases, with conversion rates rising by 24%. The system also improves operational efficiency by resolving a significant share of queries without human intervention, while maintaining oversight in line with evolving regulation.”

I wonder who and how transcripts of those conversations are being stored should there be an issue down the track? And does the customer have access to those - or is it just policy wording that any conflict might be judged against?

Slack Group!

Podcasts and Sponsors

Podcasts now on Spotify and Apple Podcasts:

New podcasts are now showing up on Spotify and Apple Podcasts for your easy listening pleasure!

This week I caught up with Jason Swick of SwixAI to chat through the specific AI needs of DMO’s and how software can be built to cater for people at all levels of their AI journey.

That’s it - you’ve made it to the end of this edition. Happy Easter to those who are celebrating it!

If you’re enjoying this newsletter and want to say thanks - you can always buy me a coffee.

I’ll be putting the result of the most clicked post in next week’s edition so you can see where others are focusing. If I’ve missed something, you’ve got a tip or any feedback at all - you can simply reply to this email and it will come straight to me. I’m doing this for You so please don’t be shy to tell me what you think