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I recorded the most incredible podcast this week with a hotelier in a far off and remote location who has ALREADY had delivered $10’s of millions of dollars to his hotel from AI. Here is a sneak preview clip. The full episode drops first for those subscribed to the show on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

A once in every 20-year opportunity to make a move.

Mario Gavira, vice president of growth and brand at Kiwi.com recently came out gave his thoughts on the new tie up between Instagram and Google that allows Google to index Instagram posts from professional accounts and deliver those as search results to consumer queries.

According to Gavira in his semi regular contribution to PhocusWire “it's a strategic realignment that transforms Instagram from a "walled garden" social platform into what we can call a "searchable content powerhouse."

Google gets access to the huge database of shortform video. Instagram gets new users who click to watch the videos from Google. Both sides get what they need here, but it is the opportunity for those in highly visual industries like travel which is particularly interesting.

At Videreo we’ve spent this week looking at who is already showing up for a set of travel keywords (shout out to Eating Europe who we saw a lot!) as well as working with our creator ambassadors to see if we can change those results by targeting very specific content to certain keywords. The results have been very promising!

So promising in fact, we are refocusing all our efforts specifically here for the next few sprint runs. We see an immediate & huge opportunity to build shared spaces between brands and creators to create quality, unique content at scale which can impact these results.

This content can not only give the normal lift of brand visibility to the creator audience – but the added opportunity to show up first in Google search results for core keywords and then to become the default video component of an AI answer generated by an LLM.

This has potentially huge ramifications for who shows up first and most over the next decade. It is a potential total rewrite of the existing systems for organic results, one that only shows up once every couple of decades. Or as Gavira puts it “The future belongs to brands that can create content that is emotionally engaging for thumb-stopping but also informationally valuable and easily readable for search and AI engines.”

We have a couple more places for brands who would like to partner with us and be first to come on this exciting new journey together (note: you’ll need some budget to work with creators, it can be the budget and campaign you already have planned, but we are looking for partners ready to do something now. Because now is the moment.). Shoot me a message this week if interested.

Otherwise be sure to follow Videreo on LinkedIn to see & hear how the results are going if you are more of a wait and see type brand.

Videreo is the place for brands and creators to meet & create a new sales pipeline together.

This content is provided by the newsletter sponsor Videreo.com

The Lean AI Playbook

Henry Shi the exited founder from Super.com this week announced that they’ve hit “$200M+ in annualized revenue with just over 200 employees and is the first scale-up to join the Lean AI leaderboard.”

If you don’t know Super.com, they make most of their revenue selling hotel nights and are at the forefront of the “financialization of travel” movement alongside Revolut and others.

To celebrate, Shi also released their playbook on building a Lean AI business. Well worth a look because as Shi explains “everything changed when we adopted AI systematically across our operations, as our latest product alone went from $0 to $100M ARR in just 2 years.”

Shi now spends his time educating those who follow him on how to make the right moves for these times. A must follow from a true practitioner.

AI destination video done right

A few episodes back I dropped from video from Linz Tourism that was totally AI generated.

I’ve found another good one here. This is just someone not from the tourism board specifically but using the idea of destination marketing as the subject for their video creation.

This one turns Colombia into a Lego world version of itself to do the destination storytelling. There are infinite versions of how a destination could do this without falling for the trap of trying to portray reality, artificially.

Not sure how Lego feels about it all………

Hiring with an AI native mindset

Rafat Ali from Skift often talks about keeping an eye on job adverts to see where companies are headed.

This one from my friends at WeRoad caught my attention.

Fabio references a post from Elena Verna of Loveable which has been the inspiration for WeRoad’s direction here. (You can find that post here but it’s gated by a paywall).

Phocuswire took a broader view of the travel industry’s ability to attract top AI talent.

In my experience, most travel businesses I’ve spent any decent amount of time with over the past couple of years already have some people internally who are obsessed with AI and its potential. They are hacking their work life (and all parts of their life) and working through a lot of the trial and error needed to understand how to work with AI.

If those were my business, I’d be dragging those people out of whatever role they were initially hired for and unleashing them on different parts of the business to help see what is possible.

It does make me think whether its time for this newsletter to launch a jobs board specifically for AI and travel? Let me know if that is something you might find valuable.

Things to know when building custom GPT’s

Custom GPT’s are the silent soldiers making so many businesses and functions easier than they were 18 months ago. A bit like private Facebook groups, they are a superpower that no-one ever talks much about.

Those who know, know, however.

A custom GPT is a little specific bot you can build just by typing what you want it to do. It generally does one thing and doesn’t interact with anything else. People have been building them to do jobs that are part of their normal workflow, but which they hate doing. Or in some cases which give them an edge. Or give them information that getting another way would be long and cumbersome.

I have a bunch of them for my own workflows and for refining marketing messaging and rollouts. I even built one to help others build out their AI strategy that has been used by over 1000 businesses to just help ask the initial right questions.

I saw this little guide by Chelsea Castle this week to help people from making some mistakes whilst setting them up which resonated and thought might be useful for you all.

Stripe is powering agentic shopping: no need to checkout on merchant site

This is not super new but it is something you should be across. Shopping is coming directly inside LLM platforms and Stripe is working with them to make it so the user can just checkout right there in the LLM interface.

That means there are suddenly a lot more “Everything Stores” than there were.

Heading things up at Stripe when it comes to agentic integrations is longtime friend of travel Maia Josebachvili (ex Living Social, way back in the day).

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:

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Marketplace Spotlight: Propellic

Don’t sleep on the advice give by Brennan Bliss from Propellic.

If you weren’t aware, on LinkedIn you can go to the profile of someone you follow and click the little bell ️ next to their name and ask LinkedIn to show You every time they post. I’ve clicked that bell for Brennan.

This week he was telling those of us who are watching about a new Google service currently available to those who are signed up to Google Labs call Web Guide.

“Here's what it does: – Reorganizes the search engine results page with AI – Delivers search results in a completely new user interface – Does the thinking for you: it uses Google's Query Fan Out methodology to get ahead of your next search – Personalizes search results based on your account, location, and device (thank you Andrea Volpini for calling this out!) Bye-bye blue links!”

One way or another – everything we knew about search for the past 2 decades is going to change, probably much sooner than you think. Are you ready for that?

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.

Passprt Trips bags $500K

News out of India was the pre seed funding of Passprt Trips.

“Passprt Trips aims to integrate every step of the travel journey into one interface. From sourcing inspiration to mapping routes and managing bookings, the platform promises a single-window solution that reflects how modern travellers plan their holidays—often influenced by social media, search tools, and recommendations.”

The bit I found most interesting was this: “The company is building a vertical large language model (LLM) stack trained on community-contributed data.”

We don’t hear much about a travel specific model.

Also not sure if this is just RAG built on top of a horizontal model (which I suspect it is). $500K wouldn’t get you far on training a brand new model I wouldn’t have thought.

Slack Group!

Shorts

Every week a lot of stuff is left on the cutting room floor. I thought maybe I’ll just lest those here for anyone interested in digging more:

John Lyotier’s Exact Match theory
Headout’s AI vision of augmentation (video)
GenAI’s impact on Marketing (video – webinar)
How bots plus automated flight pricing are pushing prices up

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 recorded an absolute doozy. It will be out on Tuesday in the streaming platforms for subscribers there – and released later to everyone here.

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Most clicked last week was the link to traveling.com – which was a surprise. Maybe a nice one for them!

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 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

Glossary

Artificial Intelligence (AI) Artificial intelligence leverages computers and machines to mimic the problem-solving and decision-making capabilities of the human mind. (source IBM)

Generative AI (GAI) is a type of AI powered by machine learning (ML) models that are trained on vast amounts of data and are used to produce new content, such as photos, text, code, images, and 3D renderings. (Source Amazon)

Large Language Model (LLM) is a specialized type of artificial intelligence (AI) that has been trained on vast amounts of text to understand existing content and generate original content.

ChatGPT – Open AI’s LLM; sometimes referred to by its series number GPT3; GPT3.5 or GPT4. These are used by Microsoft & Bing.

Gemini – Google’s suite of LLM.

If wanting to go even deeper into the AI lexicon – check out this handy guide created by Peter Syme for the tours & activity sector