Top 3 takeaways from Berlin

ai was absolutely everywhere at both ITB and Arival. I can’t recall seeing crowds like the ones I saw for Google’s sessions at ITB with almost as many people standing as sitting and literally spilling out of the room into the corridors. Not only had ai arrived, it was insanely popular to learn about.

Here are my top 3 takeaways:

Get to know SGE fast!

Search Generative Experience by Google has already arrived in the US but for the European crowd at ITB it was still frighteningly unknown. The stage compere asked for a show of hands as to who had heard of it - and barely a hand went up.

SGE is an ai written paragraph that answers your search query in natural language and it sits right at the very top of the Google SERP. This is important because for the user, you no longer need to read the summary of each of the produced hyperlinks in the old search results, then click through to hopefully find the text with the answer. Instead you just get the answer which usually only has one reference. See where this is going? Landing your link on page one of Google might very soon become useless if you aren’t the answer referenced in the SGE because now the user doesn’t have to click anywhere to get what they came for…..

“ai mode” gives the customer choice

The HomeToGo presentation was pretty powerful but what really jumped out at me was the way they were presenting the ai option to their users. By letting the user choose either ai mode or normal mode they were being both very transparent about where the information was coming from and also allowing choice. ai is exciting for some but scary to others and this simple use of language and UX solved this for everyone.

ai is a culture

My favourite presentation at Arival was by Tom McGarry, from Holiday Extras. Holiday Extras started as a company selling airport car parking in Luton. That doesn’t sound very much like where the hotbed of innovation for our industry might be sprouting from - but guess what! It is. Within 1 year of the birth of generative ai, Holiday Extras have two products in production, one of those customer facing. Tom took us on the year long journey of exactly how they did it. Tom has agreed to come along on the podcast in the near future and retell the story so everyone can hear it but as a small spoiler - the second step was leadership buy in.

EU approves new ai laws

The EU have moved first on regulation to try to get ahead of the fast pace of the ai boom & to lay down some of the things it should not be used for in their jurisdiction.

As reported by CNN “It imposes blanket bans on some “unacceptable” uses of the technology while enacting stiff guardrails for other applications deemed “high-risk.”

whilst on the face of it these laws seem both sensible and straight forward, with things like not using the technology to surveillance people without their knowledge (including workers) or bio metric tools that can be used for racial and other profiling, we’ve seen in the past with things like GDPR and also the upcoming greenwashing laws that these things can spiral into an unwieldy mess if you want to do business in Europe or with European citizens.

For example there is a lot of talk around hyper personalisation in travel but how might that be affected here is yet to be tested.

The Robots are coming…

THE ROBOTS ARE COMING….

Pretty wild. We are hitting Jetsons mode right about now.

Travel ai had its own summit!

Outside of what happened in Berlin, ai also had its own virtual summit. It was two days of builders and users talking about their own experiences to date. For those who were following along, they were instantly ahead of 97% of the industry.

Especially for us here Down Under, the timezone wasn’t friendly with sessions running from 1am to 9am over the two days - but fear not because whatever your excuse, you can now watch all the sessions here.

I was on the panel about how to maintain a leadership position in ai alongside John Lyotier of travelai.com; Christian Watts of Magpie and Jeff Kischuk from Tripian and you can watch that right here!

Speaking of maintaining a leadership position, Mark Cuban weighed in this week on the very same topic. He said “There are only two types of companies in this world. Those that are great at AI and everybody else. If you don’t know AI you are going to fail. Period. End of story. And if you are a CEO, you can’t just leave it to the tech guys.” That last bit can not be emphasised enough. This isn’t a “tech thing”, this is a whole of business thing. If you are just expecting your tech people to figure out ai then you are also going to fail, painfully so I suspect.

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:

Everything ai in travel is also a podcast now!

Here in the newsletter we break down the weekly news and events that are occuring in the juncture of ai & travel - but we also now have a podcast which takes a deeper dive by chatting with those people who are at the centre of this new revolution.

Thus far we’ve had on: Fred Chanut from In Marketing We Trust; Shie Gabbai from Roam Around before it was sold to Layla, Christian Watts from Magpie, Jeff Kischuk from Tripian, Kim Bennet from Atlas Guru and Dan Flores from SatifiLabs.

You can jump straight to all the podcast right here.

ai now can write all the code, from just a prompt!

Yet to be seen how good this can actually work but an impressive video demo this week on Devin, which can do all the coding you need, right through to a deployed website - all from a prompt.

Like all these things, this is the worst it is ever going to be. If you are a person like someone I see each day in the mirror, who has a lot of ideas but without the personal knowledge or connections to get all but a tiny % of them actually deployed - this is actually the best thing I’ve seen yet from GenAI.

Expect to be flooded with a landslide of ideas turning up as MVP’s from all the crazy “ideas people” out there. First up I think will be a “street artist marketplace” where you can just scan any piece of street art you see and like the style of, and order a commissioned piece directly from the artist. Been wanting to build that one for about 10 years! Does anyone like that idea………. let me know with a reply or comment on Linked In.

TUI develops formal ai strategy document

TUI certainly doesn’t look like one of those who will be left behind. The company was one of the first to deploy a customer facing generative ai bot and now has developed a strategy document to outline its future direction.

The document put together by The Executive Leadership and the Employee Representation Committee at TUI outlines the role of humans in the ai process. Notable quotes were “At TUI, we are convinced that AI does not replace jobs, but rather certain tasks. That is why we are focusing on training our employees for higher-value tasks.” & “human beings retain ultimate authority over decision-making.”

Sybille Reiss, Chief People Officer at TUI Group summed up the groups attitude to ai best saying “We are embracing an important topic for the future and shaping it – openly and without fear.” Others in the industry can certainly learn from that.

Sabre gets deeply personal for agents

We covered Gary Wiseman’s piece on stage at ITB last week but this piece in TTG really sums up where some of their development is leading. Sabre has built “an AI tool that is able to pen emails to customers, identify and then request any missing information, and translate it into an itinerary in almost any language”

“From a productivity standpoint, there’s a huge amount of time and money to save for an agent,” he said. “There’s actually a very large amount of opportunities.”

Once more for the people down the back. Tasks not jobs.

Kayak goes multi modal in PriceCheck

If you are still getting your head around what multimodal is and what it can do in generativeAI then this is a good example from Kayak.

The new tool allows you to screenshot directly from your phone any flight price you see on another site and upload it to Kayak’s Price Check feature, where it will then go and check to see if what you found was actually the best price. Here the ai is reading the image in the screenshot and turning that into search information to go and do your bidding for you.

The article also talks about the new Ask Kayak feature where they are “permitting travelers to specify their preferences for lodging, transportation, or air travel.” Great to see a big data company like Kayak leaning into the most powerful thing about GenAI - the ability to just ask for the data you need right now, for this search or transaction.

“airlines account for 46% of all fraudulent online transactions” But not for much longer…

Sometimes you read things and you just have to do a double take. That was definitely the case here with this quote from airport-technology.com. To quantify that further the article also quotes “The International Air Transport Association reports that airlines lose 1.2% of revenue from their annual website and mobile sales to fraud, costing them more than $1bn annually.”

That seems like a pretty painful problem to solve! The article suggests that the main way to solve this has been through manual review (Yuck!) but the crims are on to that so most of the fraudulent activity occurs within the last 24 hours before take-off - thereby not leaving the time for manual review.

ai is coming to the rescue here through pattern recognition of fraudulent activity and putting the blockers on early.

OpenAI partners with Dublin

Over more than a year, we’ve seen a plethora of startups jump into travel planning with GenAI. Some of the best known ones include Layla (who acquired one of the other better known players, Roam Around) and Copilot2Trip.

We have also seem pretty much all of the infrastructure level players like Google, Meta and OpenAI, as well as Rabbit1 use travel as their vehicle to demonstrate the capabilities of their product.

Now we are seeing something a little different with OpenAI partnering with a destination, in Dublin. “This collaboration is about creating tools that harness this power to benefit visitors to Dublin – in this case, by providing tailor-made itineraries created using generative AI.”

It is not clear whether this is more just part of the marketing offensive and normalising of ai into the community at large or whether players like OpenAI and Google in particular see more of a role for themselves, deeply embedded operationally and transactionally into travel. Right now, it would have to make investors nervous to plow more into the startups.

Anna Makanju, OpenAI's vice president of global affairs said “Our advanced AI technologies, including GPT-4, have the potential to revolutionize how people explore and experience destinations. We look forward to working together to create innovative solutions that will benefit visitors and cities alike.”

If you weren’t touched by the Hand of (ai) God like Dublin, that doesn’t mean you can’t get moving as a Destination in your ai journey. I know of two options you could take:

Arival can do a research project for your destination to help your team and constituents understand the opportunity with ai - contact Bruce at Arival for more details

Or if you prefer the collaborative approach more Group NAO has just kicked off its AI Opener for Destinations which currently has 36 European destinations signed up and is about to open up for US destinations also - get in touch with Signe from Group NAO

(Disclaimer: I am engaged as an expert on both these projects - feel free to also contact me about either and happy to do a direct intro)

Most clicked last time was the link to the story on Meta teaming up with prominent Universities in the US for research on ai agents using travel planning as the test use case if you missed it, models like GPT-4 “achieved a success rate of only 0.6%” when building multi-day itineraries with pre-defined constraints such as stating in budget or pet-friendly accommodations. This makes us feel pretty good about out Customised Trip product to be honest. It seemed much harder than it should have been to get it right (like 6 months of hard) but this research shows it is actually a very complex problem to solve!

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