A week ago, Ruth from Secret Paradise received a last-minute cancellation for their 8-day Turtle Conservation cruise in the Maldives.

This in itself was not a business disaster. The customer was well and truly outside of any refund window by cancelling late and they would be claiming the cost on their insurance. However, it was also too late for Ruth to offset many of the costs, as she too was locked in at this last minute via her supplier contracts.

The main losers here were going to be the turtles, with one less citizen scientist to gather data on turtle populations whilst out snorkeling remote atolls in some of the most pristine waters on the Earth, but Ruth saw an opportunity to plug that gap and advance her business.

Rather than just shoulder shrug, Ruth immediately reached out to us at Videreo and asked if we would have a suitable content creator who might be available and willing to get to Male this week and take the spare cabin on the yacht.

Ummm, yeah! Within 48 hours we had 23 applications from our travel creator community and 1 day later the lucky creator, a world class videographer from Germany, was booked on.

Now Secret Paradise will get outstanding promotion via exquisite footage of a marquee experience and as Ruth is taking advantage of the current free trial (see end of case study here) the entire cost to her business is exactly zero.

What are you doing when a customer cancels late?

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The Slack group was the first to light up on this topic, as it is with anything that is breaking and potentially consequential.

The first thing we saw was this case study of OpenClaw buying a car for someone. (At the time it was called Clawd, but Anthropic’s Claude - which we highlighted last week -quickly sent in the lawyers on the that one and we’ve landed on OpenClaw 🦞 )

According to the article: “Clawdbot (OpenClaw) is the internet’s latest obsession after Claude Code. It’s an open source project which pairs an LLM with long running processes to do things like read and write email (and monitor for replies), manage your calendar, and drive a browser with great effect. Unlike ChatGPT or Claude Code, Clawdbot does not start with a blank memory every time it starts. It saves files, breadcrumbs, and your chat histories so it can handle tasks which can take a few days without much issue.”

In terms of UI “You can prompt Clawdbot from a web browser just like ChatGPT, or the terminal CLI like Clade Code. The real power comes when you link it to a messaging service. Then messages sent via whatsapp (or imessage, signal or telegram) become prompts for Clawdbot to take action on your behalf.”

You can read the rest of the article to see how much you should pay for a Hyundi Palisade in Massachusetts.

But buying a car is a highly considered purchase that takes a bit of research and costs a fair amount of money. And that sounds very much like another type of purchase we here are all interested in…. travel.

Hopefully we don’t end up with too many bots getting quotes from our competitors and then emailing us to see if we can beat it in a never ending circle until someone says no……. but you get the idea of the power here.

OK, I told you it was a weird week.

From OpenClaw came Moltbook. “Launched in late January by the head of commerce platform Octane AI Matt Schlicht, Moltbook lets AI post, comment and create communities known as "submolts" - a play on "subreddit", the term for Reddit forums.”

What I didn’t explain above is that OpenClaw runs locally on your machine. “When users set up an OpenClaw agent on their computer, they can authorize it to join Moltbook, allowing it to communicate with other bots.”

So now we have autonomous AI agents who can communicate with each other but also “do things” on our local computers and via our email or WhatsApp or Slack or whatever, depending on what we’ve given them access to.

There have been examples of people connecting their crypto wallets (presumably just for this exercise - not with their whole haul inside) and the agent taking the funds to try and grow them. No one asked the agent to do this. That is where this gets a little crazy.

Of course we did see humans doing exactly this via manual prompts at the very beginning of ChatGPT and blowing up on Twitter, so, its not unprecedented as a tactic to get popular on social media.

In another weird part of the Moltverse, an autonomous AI agent decided what we needed most was a new religion, just for the agents. It’s called Molt.Church and its followers are known as Crustafarians. I shit you not.

So what does this all mean?

Bill Lees, head of crypto custody firm BitGo said "We're in the singularity", meaning we’d crossed over the path where AI no longer needs humans and can make all of its (and our) decisions for us.

Whereas David Holtz, assistant professor at Columbia Business School posted on X "Moltbook is less 'emergent AI society' and more '6,000 bots yelling into the void and repeating themselves',"

I’d like to have whatever Bill is smoking but when I get back from that trip, I think David has it about right.

If nothing else it is a huge exercise in public education around what AI can potentially do (for you, as a consumer).

A tiny smattering of investment news coming through.

TripWorks raised $6M “to expand AI-driven pricing and revenue optimization tools, expand into new markets and add to its product, engineering and customer success teams.”

That is not an insignificant raise in the Tours and Activities world. Dynamic pricing via AI is certainly a good move and already happened in flights and hotels - so also a solid history. Not entirely sure how it interfaces with the current reservations technology players in the space (FareHarbor, Peek, Bokun, Rezdy etc) but sounds good.

Like a lot of T&A software, this one was built first by an operator for their own business before seeing the potential to have a business offering it to everyone else.

BizTrip also raised $1.5M. There is some serious domain expertise in this one with its CEO Tom Romary being the old founder from YAPTA (Your Amazing Personal Travel Assistant) which was exited to Coupa in 2019 after raising $13M along the way.

Seems like now, many people are trying to build your amazing personal travel assistant, so Tom seems very preeminent in that!

Anecdotally, most startups I speak to have given up on the time suck of chasing Venture funds. Building with AI means you can get very far bootstrapping or seed strapping. The money usually spent on early engineering teams, just isn’t needed now.

To get pre-seed in travel these days you either need traction that in any other industry would be seen at the Seed to Series A level (but investment still comes on pre-seed terms) or you are getting early money from someone who previously backed you and they are happy to go again (which is fair enough)

I see and hear most quality travel startups looking for just one or two people who can fill the roles both of advisors to give the business some strategic boost but who are also confident to have some small skin in the game, and the company seed-strapping from there.

This could also have to do with the lack of consumer facing bets in travel and so maybe the B2B stuff just isn’t venture material anyway?

Phocuswire this week gave these insights as part of its most recent report:

I loved the left field thinking of this piece in Every this week.

In the example in the piece, the team at Goodlabs trained an open sourced AI model on “Diplomacy, a World War I simulation reportedly played by John F. Kennedy and Henry Kissinger. There’s no dice and no luck. As everything shifts around you, all you can rely on are persuasion and strategy.”

By learning the game, the AI learns how to navigate changing situations, not just reciting SOP’s.

“Diplomacy trains context-tracking, shifting priorities, and strategic communication. Customer support, where information is often incomplete and requests shift, needs the same capabilities.

We trained our model on Diplomacy in a reinforcement learning environment where you can clearly score whether the AI did something right. Labs are racing to build these kinds of environments because they do something that feeding the models static data can’t: They give models feedback on their decisions, teaching them to strategize, not just recall facts.”

Fascinating.

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:

A Hat Tip to both Brennen from Propellic and Josh from TravelAI who combined this week to share this fascinating insight into what MIGHT be the outcome of ads going inside of AI platforms like ChatGPT.

You just have to watch it.

If you have an AI B2B business for the travel industry and are looking for people to notice you, you can sign up to the marketplace for peanuts (top right corner, 5 mins, bring your logo) and then your company will show up there but also here too!

This seems like a story that should have disappeared 18 months ago but serves as a warning that hallucinations haven’t disappeared from the platform AI systems and if you are doing inhouse AI work just using the platform API’s - or have found a quick and cheap developer to hook something up for you - then risks still abound.

The story here is that apparently loads of tourists have been showing up to Weldborough in remote Tasmania looking for the hot springs. And the hot springs don’t exist.

The information was found (now deleted) on the Tasmania Tours and Australian Tours and Cruises (parent company) websites.

“Scott Hennessey, owner of Australian Tours and Cruises, which operates Tasmania Tours who admitted: "Our AI has messed up completely." before explaining that marketing materials were created by a third party.

Scott said that posts, which he would usually review, were accidentally made public when he was out of the country. He told ABC: "We don't have enough horsepower to write enough content on our own, and that's why we outsource part of this function."

He added: “We’re trying to compete with the big boys. Part of that is you’ve got to keep your content refreshed and new all of the time. We’re not a scam. We’re a married couple trying to do the right thing by people … We are legit, we are real people, we employ sales staff.”

But apparently not content writers, as LinkedIn wag Stuart MacDonald noted.

This story has been on the BBC, EuroNews, CNN. This is the most publicity Weldborough has ever had and may have even given some of the highest rated backlinks possible to Tasmania Tours via the coverage.

The bit that got me - I can’t even really find blog content on these sites….. and yet apparently many, many people, none of whom were booking tours found the info.

SEO is dead? Don’t think so.

Podcasts now on Spotify and Apple Podcasts:

New Everything AI in Travel podcasts are now showing up on Spotify and Apple Podcasts for your easy listening pleasure! Next week we’ve got one from Oracle - one not to miss!

You may have seen that a new show dropped this week: The Everything Social Media in Travel podcast. I firmly believe these are the two topics from which normal travel businesses can have the great amount of upside leverage over the next decade, which is why I’ve started the new show. If it is isn’t in your field of interest - I highly recommend you send it to whoever is in charge of marketing in your business. It will be filled with successful case studies from real businesses and strategy and tactics you can follow.

The special FREE education with Santiago Rodriguez is also available for those looking to get their feet wet in a practical manner with AI. Short, 15 minute, play along episodes that give you a real result for your business at the end of each episode so maybe try this one on YouTube.

Partner with Us

Most clicked last week was the link to the Videreo case study on Palau (thanks!). I also received a lot of emails as well - so thanks for reaching out. Any sponsor would be happy with that.

That’s it - you’ve made it to the end of this edition. Happy Thanksgiving to those who are celebrating it! If you’re thankful for this newsletter - you can always buy me a coffee.

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