Everyone has this rush to GEO on their mind. Not everyone has yet acted but if it hasn’t yet crossed your thoughts then you clearly don’t care too much about direct distribution.

What is confirmed is that people are definitely “searching” in platform LLM’s like ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude. The search has changed. Some have built products on top that will give you elegant itineraries.

What is also confirmed is that those coming from these pathways are a lot closer to the buy button. They’ve asked and had the majority of their questions answered before arriving.

Claude gave me a pop up this morning explaining how to use it for exactly this purpose. I wish I had screenshot it. Clearly it is on people’s minds there too.

What is far less certain is how to get your brand to show up there. Nobody really knows (though plenty will tell you with the certainty of a LLM answer they do know).

There are some best practices floating around like ensuring your mark-up and schema are on point and some online checkers that can show you what “the machine” can see. This isn’t radically different to SEO.

Google keeps beating the EEAT drum (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) - which is code for just create content useful for the end user. That’s probably good advice.

With content so cheap and easy to create, the temptation is certainly there to just churn out whatever comes to mind and hope it scoops up the long tail of requests. Some are trying that. Some have received penalties for doing that.

Here is how we are working with our clients on solving this problem:

Whether for machine or human, the content has value. It tells of a specific experience and links deeper to the solutions that were found. AI assists to speed up the process but these stories are lived and relayed by the human who experienced them. The visual content is captured, not generated.

This system scales but without sloppiness.

I suspect we won’t really know the full results until OpenAI and Anthropic build their own versions of Google Analytics that can show how often your brand showed up in answers and for what queries. This would be a great way to lock in a lot more business customers too - as it is the question everyone wants answered right now.

Videreo is the place where creator marketing is driving results for brands.

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

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

Whilst the rest of us debate the death or otherwise of the OTA, Booking is cracking on at not getting disrupted.

In yet another of Rafat Ali’s wonderful jobs searches, he recently unearthed a role at booking that didn’t have AI in the title but clearly had AI disruption at the forefront.

“On paper it reads like any senior corp dev search, but buried in the mandate is something I haven't seen before in my travel jobs trolling on Linkedin: the hire is expected to maintain a leading perspective on how GenAI will fundamentally change travel research and booking behaviors, and then turn that perspective into the partnerships, strategic bets, and early-stage relationships that keep Booking Holdings on the right side of whatever comes next.”

Rafat highlighted the important bits in the job description:

We are looking for a thought leader with a deep understanding of GenAI technology and landscape who is excited about the opportunity to define new opportunities for our customers and businesses in a data-driven and collaborative environment – helping achieve our mission to make it easier for everyone to experience the world.

In this role you will get to:

Rafat who knows tomorrow’s news is found in todays job listings finished with this thought: “this is the first one I've found where AI isn't a skill requirement or a feature mandate but the lens through which every deal gets evaluated.”

Who else has hired for a similar position?

Companies of many shapes and sizes need someone close to the CEO to take this role on as we move through his forced transformation, unless the CEO themselves is going to take it on.

If agent to agent negotiation is our future, as many predict it could be, what might that actually look like.

This week Product Lead at Google, Qi Han Wong decided to test and see.

Here is the setup: → Claude played a budget traveler (Max price: $180) → Gemini played the hotel manager (Min price: $120) → They exchanged offers round-by-round. Neither knew the other's true reservation price.

Qi then ran 3 different scenarios:

The takeaway: “Surprisingly, the more polite one got a better deal and closed faster.”

Negotiate like a high value LTV customer.

Many brands seem to be building these ChatGPT apps despite the very low likelihood that anyone will ever call them.

A lot of my own personal planning starts in Rome2Rio. Our trip to the Balkans last year was predominantly planned there because we were using public transport and so we wanted to scope it out, know what times buses and trains were leaving and ensure we had lots of non-travel time to enjoy each place.

Our route was a bit random. We half followed an Intrepid itinerary but wanted to skip from Lake Ohrid in North Macedonia to Thessaloniki which I suspect is not that common a path, as there is no real public transport way to do it.

No LLM is going to suggest this I suspect due to its complexity but its where we wanted to go, and as these things often pan out - was some of the best of that trip.

Anyhoo - I WAS excited this week to see Rome2Rio had developed their own app to call within ChatGPT.

Conversational search and planning rooted in Rome2Rio’s unique data set of what is actually available to get you from place to place, is definitely a winner for a certain type of traveller. 🖐

This article about what the Minor Hotel Group are doing in AI caught my eye this week.

The first bit seemed a standard announcement: “MINOR HOTELS IS building a global data and AI platform to unify guest data, marketing and operations across brands and destinations.”

The bit that caught my eye however was: “The platform will be developed independently of legacy systems, enabling it to use AI from its technology partners and incorporate generative AI, intelligent agents, and automation.”

“By anchoring its transformation on Google Cloud’s open and secure full-stack architecture and through native integrations with Salesforce and the solution engineering expertise of partners like Deloitte, Minor Hotels is bypassing the integration hurdles of fragmented legacy systems and establishing a blueprint for more personalized, proactive and responsive guest experiences,”

It is a question that every business is going to have to ask itself. Do you add AI onto the things you already have and use OR do you build something new and AI native.

It seems here that Salesforce is the baby not being thrown out with the bath water.

This same subject was covered in a guest post on The Beat this week by Ty Radcliffe. Radcliffe is chief customer success officer at Accelya, a global technology provider to the airline industry. He has held leadership roles at United Airlines, Orbitz.com and Travelport and was a founding member of IATA's NDC Taskforce.

Radcliffe’s thesis is “retail processes remain structured around documents such as passenger name records (PNRs), e-tickets and EMDs (Electronic Miscellaneous Documents), rather than unified retail transactions. The retail lifecycle remains fragmented across multiple systems: offers may be created in one platform, orders committed in another, settlement handled elsewhere, and servicing managed separately.”

And because of this “fragmentation introduces operational friction at precisely the point where AI should deliver value. AI may identify the optimal pricing or merchandising decision, but executing those decisions across disconnected systems often requires manual coordination. These constraints also limit airlines' ability to test and validate new approaches. While the data exists, systems often cannot simulate outcomes or predict yield before deployment, making it harder to introduce new pricing structures or bundles with confidence. Simply layering AI onto these environments rarely unlocks its full potential.”

It is so simple to build with AI these days, I see little benefit in trying to integrate AI onto legacy tech. You need access to the data - but that is about it.

The Asian super App GRAB is going deeper into travel via AI according to Phocuswire.

The travel-specific products included in the release:

Similar to the Rome2Rio example above, their unique data set of transport + food gives them a different toolbox of what they can provide to a traveller.

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:

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 dropped the recent interview with John Taylor Garner from Odynn on the back of their capital raise. Odynn leverage AI to make it simpler for financial institutions to sell travel and lock in loyalty.

Partner with Us

Most clicked last week was the link to Lobby’s $2.2M raise.

That’s it - you’ve made it to the end of this edition. If you’re thankful for this newsletter - you can always buy me a coffee. Nothing gives more fuel than these small gestures.

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