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TourRadar goes all in on creators

This week TourRadar dropped the big announcement of their $1M partner fund.

In s post on his LinkedIn account, Founder Travis Pittman said “we believe the future of travel is shared, not sold".”

Pittman explained further that this is “Our biggest bet yet on people-powered discovery and social commerce. We're still investing in ad platforms, but we believe the most powerful distribution channel in experiential travel is people.”

The fund is a mix of “gifted” trips for creators, advisors and agents and then commissions on subsequent bookings made from the content created tracked by promo codes.

This is the first time we’ve seen this in multiday touring but similar programs are live in the experiences market with Get Your Guide and Klook.

Why is it only the only OTA’s that are scaling this obvious path to new audience?

Many individual brands will do some creator and partner marketing but very few do it in a systematic way. Generally it is quite ad hoc, labor intensive in the selection and management of creators and campaign based. It is also generally ROI light.

No doubt this is a matter of resources in marketing teams with many other things to do and a lack of attribution around the success of the campaigns.

Creator marketing should be always on. It should be simple and systematic. Videreo offers this system out of the box for brands of all shapes and sizes. You don’t need $1M dollars, but you do need some (existing!) budget to pay creators. If you have that and want an always on system that gets your brand both shared and sold – shoot us a message.

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

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

GPT 5.0 Drops

See the video here of the just dropped GPT5 building a travel app for a travel business.

Ideate, add data, get wireframes, code the app – get summaries and reports and guidance on next steps.

Look out for ads in Google AI mode

Exciting news for those who love paying for and viewing ads, Google will still take your money as we move into the realm of the AI answer engine!

That should be a huge relief to everyone…………

Adriaan Dekker on his LinkedIn shared some “leaked” screen shots of Google’s plans to continue to show ads that can add some contextual relevance to the answer to your query as a user – and give you some shot at getting a user onto your website if you are brand.

“AI Mode ads will be selected based on full conversation context not just the user’s initial query. If your brand is running Performance Max or AI Max for Search, you’re eligible to appear in these new placements.”

Apparently your ad will be shown if visiting your site is the “next logical step” for a user (or the 3rd most logical step but the first who is paying up to the Google gods).

This doesn’t smell like best next generation user experience – but lets see if other follow to get their own cash cow or stick firm to a vision of a new world with less ads.

The leak also gave SEO Guidance for showing up in AI answers, core to which is focusing on unique, valuable content for people.

Does your content do all three things?

H/T to Brennen Bliss from Propellic who alerted me to the leak!

Will Hotel website go away?

This was the question posed in an article by Max Starkov in an article on Hospitality Net this week.

Starkov sort the opinions of more than a dozen people who live and breathe hotel business to get their thoughts.

The high level hypothesis is “Agentic AI does not need websites for information or to make a booking. To access hotel ARI (Availability, Rates and Inventory), Personal AI Agents will communicate directly via APIs with the hotel cloud PMS, CRS, Channel Manager, the future hotel's own AI Agent, or via MCR middleware or APIs with the OTAs.”

Fergus Boyd sits strongly in the “No” camp. “About 18 months ago, some people on LinkedIn touted that Conversational Interfaces would kill off websites. Current status? Tumbleweed.” For evidence Boyd cites Gartner who “predicts that over 40% of Agentic AI projects will be cancelled by 2027.”

Nick Slavin from Curacity says “For most hotels, particularly the 70% in the U.S. that are part of large branded chains, the answer is increasingly yes.”

For most of the other respondents the answer was “No… but…” with a definite change in the winds as to which parts of the web experience become more or less important.

They are all worth a read!

Real reviews. Fake people!

Super.com CEO Hussein Fazal this week floated the idea of turning their written reviews into video testimonials with AI.

“Every word comes directly from real Super.com reviews. Every face and scene? Fully AI generated. We are exploring what is possible with AI and marketing.”

The team used Veo3 to create the testimonials which can be then used on product pages or in ads or other places.

Fazal was looking for responses as to whether this was a good idea or not. Whether their disclaimers were strong enough and whether this builds or erodes trust.

The videos are very good. The disclaimers are very tiny. Worth a look though, including the comments.

What do you think? Leave a comment on the LinkedIn post for this newsletter with your thoughts.

For those interested in this type of thing – I’ll be running a hands-on demo session around video at the Arival AI Forum in Washington DC in late September. We’ll show you how to create these types of things if it is something you are interested in exploring.

Google builds the virtual world on the fly

Speaking of video, the folks at Google’s Deepmind lab continue to push the boundaries of what is possible.

Alex Kramer posted the video of their latest work alongside these words: “Using AI for your LinkedIn post is cute, but Googlers are working on making your entire world prompt controlled. Take the 3 minutes to watch, and let your imagination run wild for a bit. The implications for travel will be enormous – both positively, and negatively. Buckle up.”

The video inside the post is pretty incredible. As the transcript says “You're not walking through a prebuilt simulation. Everything you see here is being generated live as you explore.”

The real major innovation IMO though was the pervasive memory of an action that was taken in some part of the world, is remembered if returned to. “World memory even carries over into your actions. For example, when I'm painting on this wall, my actions persist. I can look away and generate other parts of the world, but when I look back, the actions I took are still there.”

If looking for a travel use – hotel walk throughs come to mind as a simple but effective use case. Photos only take us so far – but imagine if the prospective customer could go up any stairs, look through the different room configurations, lay of the bed and check the view from there and choose the exact right room for them?

Or meet their tour leader deep in the Khan-al Khalili markets of Cairo to get an overview of what the Egypt Experience tour might be like, have the leader demonstrate some impressive insider knowledge and the customer be able to ask all the questions and then if convinced – book the trip.

Or what city exploration game businesses like Questo might do with this type of tech to add a whole new level of amazement in clue dropping and blend the real and virtual worlds.

What use case springs to your mind here?

Meta Ad prices predicted to rise

On the Pivot podcast last week, Professor Scott Galloway dropped the stat that investments in AI last quarter were greater than the TOTAL OF ALL CONSUMER SPENDING IN THE US.

Like, Wow.

If you still think AI is a bunch of hype and hot air – you clearly are not following the money.

Meta have advised in the Q2 earning call that they are growing CAPEX by $30B. One predicted outcome of this extra investment came this week from Neal Goyal who went back through past major CAPEX spends by Meta.

“How are profits/earnings expected grow so aggressively… while costs are skyrocketing? Answer: Because ad revenue is subsidizing the build. That means advertisers are footing the bill… and higher CAC is the transmission mechanism. Here’s the historical pattern over the past 5.5 years: In each of the last 4 instances Meta forecasted a major infrastructure spike… Ad pricing and CAC surged within 6 months. Every. Single. Time. And Q2 just lit the fuse for the next wave.”

Ad prices were up 9% in the Q2 data – but that is just the beginning. Check your performance budgets and check them twice – because your traditional performance marketing might not go quite as far as it used to……

As Goyal finished his post: “The AI revolution is here… but it’s not free. It’s being financed through your media budget. While Meta will continue to have lion share of a brand's ad budget, this is also your friendly reminder to diversify those acquisition channels. ”

(Have I mentioned that Videreo is a way to diversify into creator led marketing?)

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Marketplace Spotlight: MyTrip.ai

MyTrip.AI provides generative AI tools and services ranging from free, easy to use writing tools, to advanced high quality, high volume AI content creation services, to AI Assistants who assume different roles and assume different tasks in your travel company.

Their flagship service is a custom made AI Sales and Service Assistant that greets your users on your website or Whatsapp, helps them plan their trip using your website contents and sales process and works together with your sales and service team.

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.

Shots fired!

Simon Calder from the Independent took up the story sparked by Glenn Fogel’s comments on the BBC “that artificial intelligence could replace traditional agents.”

Fogel said by way of explanation ““This is the most transformative type of technology in the world has ever seen. AI enables our customers to go to our site, Booking.com. They go to the text box and they can just type in natural language, just like you would be talking to a human travel agent – ‘I'd like to have a hotel that's a three star, I’d like it to be on the beach with a view of the water and I’d like to have a gym’. It’s so much easier, that natural search, it’s just the simplest thing.”

Fogel of course is all in on self-service.

The counter points came thick and fast. “Julia Lo Bue-Said, chief executive of the Advantage Travel Partnership, said: “At its heart, travel is and always will be about human connection. It’s about understanding individual needs, crafting experiences that resonate emotionally, and offering a level of care that technology alone cannot replicate.”

And “Ashley Quint, director of the Hertfordshire agency Travel Time World, said: “I would suggest that the best travel agents would call the majority of the clients friends, and know what they would like more than they know themselves.”

I do a lot of work with different Travel Advisor groups. They aren’t shrinking. They are growing. And in my experience at least, they have a desire to leverage technology to better serve their customers. They aren’t sitting on their hands here.

More than anything, I think people want the assurance they are making the right decisions in their holiday choices. They want to hear that it is going to be fantastic from someone they trust as they hand over thousands of their hard earned. And they don’t want a logistical headache once they hit the road. They want to send a text message saying – “can you sort this out” when things don’t go as planned – and for those things to be sorted out.

Picking a route or a hotel is one thing, but only one thing.

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:

Podcasts and Sponsors

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

This week was one out of the box with Tata Crocombe – The AI Hotelier. Hear what happens when you just go all in on AI. This is one everyone needs to listen to.

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Most clicked last week was the link to the AI produced LEGO themed video about travel to Colombia!

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