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Will travel agents survive the AI era?

I found myself this week on the other side of the questions as part of a new partnership with Karryon where Matt Leedham and I will take a monthly look at how AI in impacting different parts of the travel industry, in a new segment of The Check In podcast.

First up was the question of how travel agents will navigate the platform shift.

My starting point is that booking travel is more than just technical efficiency. Selling travel has a psychological component almost always greatly underestimated.

“A trip is never just a transaction. It’s emotional, aspirational, and deeply personal. AI can enhance the process, but it can’t replicate that connection you have with your client sitting across the desk – or that ability to reassure them when things go wrong.”

I’ve been working with a pilot group of travel agents on how we can help them not only be more efficient when working across an aging and disconnected tech stack that is the reality for many advisors – but also how they can up their game in areas where they have traditionally not been strong, had a perceived lack of ability or a lack of confidence.

Social media has come to the fore in these conversations. Most travel advisors would not consider themselves “creators”. Whilst their core content creating abilities might lack some polish, their keen eye for what matters actually can give them a huge advantage in this area.

By using the new Videreo 2.0 travel guide creator, we can help them put content in the world that has the polish built in but is filled with their knowledge, their tips and their insights – all with a call-to-action back to them. We’ve got our first group now confidently sending weekly social media updates to those who follow them – 50% of whom are existing customers.

Following our Reach+ operating system we can help advisors gather more than views and likes, we can tell them who specifically might be interested in a particular destination or style and a new pathway to getting the phone ringing more often.

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

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

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

AI finally admits it doesn’t know.

In a huge break through, evidence is starting to emerge of AI admitting it doesn’t have all the knowledge to give a good answer in certain circumstances.

This may seem trifling, but it is actually immense.

Hallucination is born out of how the LLM AI has been wired up. Predict the best answer to make your human happy. Sometimes as we’ve all experienced, that prediction is just made up nonsense.

AI now becoming aware enough to say – actually, I’m not sure is a massive and welcome step.

Travel is under invested

Kai Kramer from Roche Investments this week laid out how travel tech is massively underinvested compared to its significance in the global economy.

“$10.9T industry. Only 2% VC penetration. Is Travel-Tech venture capital’s biggest blind spot?”

Kramer tells us that in other industries the penetration of VC is a lot higher.

“Despite being larger than most venture-backed verticals combined, Travel has attracted just a fraction of the funding FinTech, Mobility, or Logistics enjoy. If it simply catches up to their 5–7% penetration, the upside is enormous: $500B+ in potential VC deployment.”

Having been through a couple of generalist accelerators, I can tell you there is a lot of wariness around travel. VC’s are not unaware of the potential of travel but they are somehow more deeply scarred by their portfolio failures in travel than in pretty much any other sector.

In my recent chat with Amir Mohajer on the podcast, he said that you just have to work a lot harder in travel than elsewhere to get capital flowing. Idea + team doesn’t cut it in travel. Only traction matters. That means founders need to bootstrap for longer and take bigger personal risks to build in our industry. No doubt it also stops talent from coming into our industry.

Kramer however sees a correction coming. “It’s about staking a claim in the next underpriced venture asset class—before the market wakes up.”

Agentic booking comes at a cost

Timely article coming in from Phocuswire reminding everyone that the move to agentic booking isn’t a land filled with rainbows and unicorns.

Focusing on the “Look to Book” metric the article gives us a history lesson that has taken the “number of shopping and pricing requests compared to the actual number of tickets sold” from around 10:1 in the 1990’s through to around 20,000:1 now according to a piece they did previously with Sebastien Gibergues, formerly VP of digital search with Amadeus.

The future however will turn that number into a trifle.

“AI operators trained on how to use popular travel sites will continuously scan metasearch platforms for deals, potentially executing 100+ daily searches per user—or will it be 1,000+? This could push the look-to-book ratio beyond 200,000:1, as early as this year,” Gibergues wrote.”

All that searching isn’t free for the companies who are receiving it.

““The real shock is coming—not in hallucinated itineraries, but in runaway pass-through costs,” said Mat Orrego, CEO of Cornerstone Information Systems, “Every chatbot interaction, dynamic fare quote or agentic approval runs on cloud infrastructure, and that meter is running.”

The article says United Airlines is already putting in place penalties for those who are looking but not booking enough and talks about Cloudfare and how it is putting in a toll booth for its customers so LLM’s need to pay to get access.

If you need to catch up on agentic bookings, I recommend tapping into this recent webinar by one of our active slack group members, Mike Coletta. If you’ve got follow up questions, you can ask Mike and others in the group those questions directly in the general Q&A section of the slack group. That is what it is there for.

Meituan says its record results are because of AI

China’s giant Meituan is booming and the reason for it is its investments in AI are paying off.

“China’s Meituan has posted remarkable growth in its hotel and travel division, setting new records in the second quarter of 2025.” according to the article reporting on the results in Travel and Tour World.

CEO Wang Xing “explained that this record performance is a result of the company’s relentless push to enhance its AI-powered tools for merchants. These innovations are being rolled out progressively across the platform, aimed at streamlining operations and improving the digital presence of hotels. For example, AI-driven business assistants are being integrated into merchant interfaces, helping hoteliers optimise store page designs, simplify management tasks, and leverage digital assets like user reviews and images to strengthen their brand.”

Meituan are filling a knowledge and technical gap on behalf of their hotel suppliers (and in turn, locking them deeper into the platform).

“A central element of Meituan’s approach in the hotel industry is the introduction of Meituan Jibai, an artificial intelligence solution tailored specifically for hotel operators.This powerful tool offers data-driven insights, including intelligent pricing recommendations and dynamic inventory management, which help hotels optimise revenue and enhance operational efficiency.”

How are big guns like TUI and Carnival are attacking AI?

A couple of clues this week into how some of the bigger companies like TUI and Carnival are thinking about and executing with AI.

In this company profile of TUI on the Snowflake site we found:

AI prototypes built in just one hour: TUI rapidly built a prototype for an AI data discovery platform that democratizes data access and increases the delivery capacity of data teams.
Potentially months of time saved: With AI-powered data search and discovery, TUI teams are empowered to streamline processes and get answers to vital questions faster—potentially saving months of people hours..
Higher quality data and leaner operations: During its AI indexing work, TUI’s Technology Analytics team improved data quality, reducing processing times and providing faster, more comprehensive insights to the business.

TUI are turning their vast amounts of disjointed data into you can easily query with natural language. “We’re building a web across our data to connect everyone — from interns to our C-level,” says Anastasiia Stefanska Senior Data Analyst, TUI. “It all adds up to a platform that can answer questions about data that our previous systems never could. That means our people can be even smarter in how they work with data and serve our customers.”

Meanwhile at Carnival Fortune reports “Carnival Cruise Line has piloted over 100 different generative artificial intelligence projects. And while only six are in full production today, the cruise line operator’s chief information officer is pleased with the company’s measured progress.”

What has made it across the high bar? “A tool helping servers make more appropriate recommendations for the perfect red wine to sip with steak.”

“What Carnival hopes to see from the latter is an increase to the company’s net promoter score, a closely watched customer satisfaction metric that cruise lines, restaurants, retailers, and other consumer-focused companies track.”

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Marketplace Spotlight: Propellic

Propellic this week (Tuesday 9 Sept) is hosting a chat into “the first-ever behavioral study on how AI is truly reshaping the travel booking journey. This is your chance to get the actionable playbook that will define the next era of travel marketing.”

They’ve got a great line up on the talk:

▪️ Kevin Indig (Growth Advisor) ▪️ Eric Van Buskirk (Clickstream Solutions) ▪️ Mike Coletta Colletta (Phocuswright) ▪️ Douglas Quinby (Arival) ▪️ Paul Teddy (Propellic)

They tell us the findings are “Game-changing”.

Register here to listen in.

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.

Now everyone can build their own chat

Voice concierges are extremely hot right now.

But it might be a precarious business to try and build a company in as OpenAI has recently dropped a new feature that let’s anyone get in on the act (ie to build internally).

Jan Popovic was the first I saw talking about this. The new feature is SIP support.

The article Jan linked to told us “OpenAI has added remote model context protocol (MCP) Server and session initiation protocol (SIP) support to its speech-to-text large language model gpt-realtime via its dedicated API to help enterprises build more autonomous voice-based agents.”

The article explains for us (me) not across this technology: The added support for SIP, which is a standard for initiating and managing real-time voice calls over IP networks, will allow enterprises to integrate AI voice agents directly with PBX systems and phone networks.”

Slack Group!

Podcasts and Sponsors

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The biggest news on the podcast front is that you can now get them on YouTube if that is your jam and I've got a new editorial slot happening with Matt from Karryon. Go there to find out what I really think!

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Most clicked last week was the link to the New York Times article that reviewed a number of consumer facing AI tools in travel.

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