I go down the AI rabbit hole so you don’t have to!

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What do you know about channel dependence? Unfortunately, the school of life taught me personally a LOT about it. Whilst it wasn’t something we really went looking for when I was running Urban Adventures, it found us anyway. Around 2018, Urban Adventures was doing about $6M in annual sales with Trip Advisor. It was an unhealthy 25% of our total business. And whilst we grew at CAGR of around 17% every year, we could never shake far away from that 25% number. Which whilst everything continued along as normal, was fine.

Except one day Trip Advisor decided to change everything it had previously been doing and switched the algorithm to show new businesses instead of the best businesses. They went all in on growing supply and this was the carrot for new suppliers. No heads up was given to their decade long partners. Our sales dropped by about $2M in 2019 when we’d factored in the regular 17% growth. The result was mayhem. Redundancies. And ultimately a lot more.

Hear from Propellic CEO Brennan Bliss on how you can mitigate this happening to you. The irony, the example he uses is Google doing same to Trip Advisor.

Need someone looking out for your online health? Check Propellic out for yourself here.

ByWay lands £5.04 million to build out “JourneyAI”? 

Some interesting funding news this week as UK sustainable tour operator, Byway, announced the raising of their Series A saying the raise was specifically “to add more hires, including engineers to dial up investment in its proprietary artificial intelligence-based trip planner tech.”

ByWay has been around for a little while now and already found some product-market fit with its “no fly” model of tourism which taps into both sentiment around environmental concerns but also the romance of trains and other forms of transport.

The article suggests “a majority of the package holidays Byway sells (about 60%) are booked online, which means customers are using its proprietary trip-designing software, called JourneyAI.” Knitting together disparate train companies to create full itineraries across the European continent is no mean feat.

ByWay founder Cat Jones said “JourneyAI helps manage this disruption risk by designing for resilience, with the software factoring in fallback options so it can offer alternatives should the original plan get derailed. We are still manually sorting disruption at the moment. But actually that’s something that, very soon — especially with this funding — we will be able to automate the vast majority of our disruption detection and automatic disruption replanning”.

Here we have a great example to follow. ByWay found a market of people with a specific need and did the things that don’t scale to deliver them what they needed. With market established, they are now optimising with AI. Whilst almost certainly not invisible in their pitch deck, the AI here is just running under the surface making things work, not sitting under a flashing neon “AI” sign

‘King’ of product managers lays out how AI might replace product managers

Lenny Rachitsky who found his fame as one of the early core product managers at Airbnb, this week wrote on his blog that AI actually does a better job than human product managers in a number of key areas.

Collaborating with prompt engineer Mike Taylor, he aimed to benchmark AI's progress in replacing product managers by testing AI and human responses to specific PM tasks. Using blind Twitter/X polls, they evaluated tasks like developing product strategies, defining KPIs, and estimating ROI. Expert prompting significantly enhanced AI responses, revealing that many underestimate AI's capabilities. Surprisingly, AI outperformed human responses in two out of three tasks, demonstrating its potential when guided with clear, structured prompts.

The methodology involved providing role-specific instructions and real-world examples to the AI, ensuring realistic and effective outputs.

Future tests will explore additional tasks, models, and prompts, addressing challenges like data contamination and refining voting mechanisms. Their study seeks to determine how close AI is to automating PM roles and to identify which areas can be delegated first, offering valuable insights into the evolving capabilities of AI in professional settings.

Is Mindtrip looking at loyalty?

Mindtrip, the best funded of the swathe of AI travel planners on the market this week dropped a little nugget that it might begin focusing in on loyalty points and rewards.

In an interview with Upgradedpoints.com, Mindtrip CEO Andy Moss said they “are rolling out “early next year” for users who redeem rewards. As a points and miles earner, he added that he recognizes the importance of capturing the points and miles audience.

He said there would be a place to add your preferred loyalty programs, elite status tiers, and credit card loyalty points you may have.”

Smoothing out any objections a user could have is clearly a smart play in a notoriously difficult GTM like travel planning.

In the US, DoT ruling on refunds is spurning AI innovation

In an article this week in Fastmode.com, the “Why Now” question around new tech adoption (and a key question in building a new startup) was given an emphatic answer. New Government regulation that many businesses need to figure out fast in order to avoid breach and possibly the negative publicity that would almost certainly come from dragging the chain on this one.

The backstory is “On April 24, 2024, the Biden-Harris Administration and the U.S. Department of Transportation announced a groundbreaking rule mandating automatic refunds for airline tickets and ancillary service fees in cases of canceled or significantly altered flights, extensive delays in checked bags, and unprovided services. Previously, airlines had the discretion to set their refund standards for flight changes, leading to varying carrier policies. Standardized refund criteria ensure consistent treatment for passengers across all airlines, simplifying the process for passengers to understand and assert their reimbursement rights.”

The article suggests “streamlined workflow reduces manual effort and minimizes errors, leading to cost savings for the airline while ensuring compliance with new refund policies and enhancing operational efficiency.

Furthermore, by incorporating conversational AI into ticket processing systems, airlines can enable seamless customer communication, provide real-time refund status updates and promptly address inquiries.”

The question in my mind is everyone building this custom for themselves or is there a SaaS play here given the rules at least are now standardized even if each integration might be slightly different?

Sticking with the regulatory driven theme, this article in Travel & Tour World looked at concerns around data and privacy alongside our now old friend (!) - GDPR. The article states “To mitigate these risks, travel companies must implement robust security measures. This includes encryption of data both in transit and at rest (and) regular security audits”.

Can AI help with tourism recovery after events like Hurricane Beryl?

The Jamaican Observer this week posed the question of how AI could help with recovery of their ravaged island which depends so much on tourism from an economic point of view.

The article looked at many facets of the Jamaican economy impacted included fishing and farming, finance as well as tourism. “By embracing AI, we can accelerate Jamaica’s economic recovery across all sectors, potentially reaching and surpassing our pre-hurricane growth levels. We should harness AI technology to create new opportunities and ensure a resilient future for all Jamaicans, powered by our collective intelligence – both human and artificial — in the face of adversity.”

The travel piece was a bit light on TBH and talked more about general AI (potential) advantageous like personalisation which is fine but unlikely to rally tourism specifically when it was needed.

I previously interviewed a helicopter operator out of Hawaii as part of the report I co-authored for Arival. They were based in Maui where there was a terrible wildfire incident that devastated much of the island. I recall the operator saying what was most imperative for them was to get the word out as to which areas were affected, but almost more crucially, which areas were totally unaffected, especially as Hawaii is a collection of islands and the fires were on just one.

In this case they used their chatbot to answer these questions firm and fast. It was at a time when their staff were off trying to save their houses and neighbourhoods or were unable to commute to the office and man the phones. Not being able to get the word out could have meant economic disaster on top of natural disaster and really compounded the problems for these locals. This is perhaps something a DMO from a disaster struck area could look at as a case study.

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:

DMO’s move into the spotlight with AI

I used my regular column in Travel Daily Media to explain with more detail than is probably desirable for this newsletter as to why exactly the EY report I covered in last week’s newsletter struck such a chord with me. And why I think when looking back, it could be a seminal moment in the AI journey in travel.

Both the report and the breakout group working on the impact for the longtail of travel at the WIT Think Tank event, wove together a narrative that just made sense to me. I really want to believe it.

The summary version is:

• As search and discovery evolves with AI there is a new chance to connect the traveller directly with the grass roots supplier. (This is something I’ve worked my entire career trying to help achieve - which is why it is incredibly exciting).

• For this to occur the personalisation of the searchers intent needs to be matched by an AI agent with the ability to create the exact right experience on the ground. OTA’s don’t know what a supplier is capable of creating, rather they only know what they have listed. And they don’t list everything. In fact, they list very little.

• Some work needs to be done for LLM’s to understand, on the supply side, what is possible. Suppliers themselves need some help in getting their data organised here. Where do they operate? What are they specialised in? Who is their ideal customer profile?

• The DMO seems the obvious place to facilitate this organisation as it actually helps achieve their core mission of delighting their region’s visitors whilst evenly supporting suppliers. Australia via the Australian Tourism Data Warehouse have already shown the exact model to build but they built it over 20 years ago and at the cost few others would now contemplate and it lacks the new core communication vehicles like vertical videos.

• AI can help build these data warehouses for any destination fast and for pennies in the dollar of what Australia has paid and continues to pay.

This is a problem worth working to solve. I might just jump in and have a crack myself. A few who potentially have been burned in DMO interactions or supplier interactions in the past think it is crazy as you can see in the comments here. 

I personally see a desire from DMO’s to use AI to create a greater good in the work I’m involved in with GroupNAO, so for now - I’m a believer. If you work at a DMO and are interested in understanding more - I’d love to have a chat with you, so I can understand more from your side too.

Customer care is the AI low hanging fruit in travel

Travel is predominantly a service industry, so no matter where you sit in our broad church, customer care is something that we all have in common.

And customer care is where the quiet revolution is already well underway. Don’t expect to see and hear a lot about it from companies on LinkedIn or corporate blogs because right not those who already invested are out building some distance into their competitive advantage. Where you can expect to hear about it is retrospectively, in earnings calls and annual reports. Costs are going down whilst service levels are going up. Companies are finally connecting the circle on their ‘Voice of the Customer’ from product right through the entire business ecosystem and back to product design. Reviews, call transcripts and other data points around sentiment that have really just informed our gut feel are now becoming solid and trackable data points.

The podcast this week from McKinsey on the subject was outstanding and a great place to start your exploration if you haven’t already.

Slack Group!

How to work with Tony

The calendar is now very full I’m afraid.

Lots of work going on to launch the marketplace for buyers and suppliers to find each other with ai solutions. If you have an ai solution in market (product, SaaS tool, service) - please get in touch to get information about being listed. We are grandfathering forever the lowest listing price for those who are in for the launch.

Please email me to deep dive into the specific opportunities within your business you might wish to explore. By interviewing key internal stakeholders we can identify which of your bottlenecks are most ripe for an ai powered fix and the approach to take to fix those across a month long project. The earliest I am available for this is now September with very limited availability.

For the fully committed business who now understands the transformative power of this technology, the final phase is to move to build your own internal “AI centre of excellence” which is combination of building an ai culture in your business by taking a human centric approach as well as building out or buying in the best solution to each identified issue. Please email me for more details on any or all of these phases.

Want to follow in Propellic’s footsteps and get in front of a highly engaged audience of travel decision makers by sponsoring the newsletter? We are booking Q4 sponsorships now. Also email me on that one for rates and details.

Most clicked last week was the link to the EY report and the WIT Think Tank (unsurprisingly). That’s it - you’ve made it to the end of this edition. I’ll be putting the result of the most clicked post in next week’s edition so you can see where others are focussing. 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