AI is not a competitive advantage for startups (apparently)

You can’t win with ai alone!

Despite 40% of the latest cohort of startups to be accepted into the fabled YCombinator startup accelrator being ai or Machine Learning focused, Serge Vasin who is partner in his own venture studio thinks ai is not the silver bullet to success.

He goes on list some of the categories that are ‘doomed’ as being “things like email applications, web design, language lessons, search, chatbots, code writing and more.” It is not clear if travel planning was just not top of mind or if it fits in the “and more” category or if Vasin thinks it could be a winner given it clearly sits in the overtly obvious applications, alondside these others.

Vasin thinks big tech has the following advantages:

### 1. Bigger players have an unfair distribution advantage.

### 2. AI can be replicated.

### 3. Most AI startups don’t have a real competitive advantage.

### 4. AI requires human domain expertise.

### 5. The AI market has become oversaturated.

Vasin believes “startups should invest in their own models and create products that others cannot replicate by simply leveraging an API or copying some open-source code” and success “requires human expertise, especially in the specific domain the algorithms are trained on. Unfortunately, startups may not want to use resources to hire domain experts to train their algorithms in the fields they want to disrupt. But this should be a priority.” 👋 This is not a spnosored post 😅 

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:

Better hotel summaries from Trip Advisor

Phocuswire reported this week on the latest updates from Trip Advisor which included ai mining the reviews of individual properties to bring back greater context for what the customer might be looking for in a hotel.

The article is quoted as saying “The summaries are what is powered by AI and will include “popular themes and details” pulled from reviews written by travelers who have visited those locations in the past.”

Expect this to be a common feature of those businesses that have a massive depth of customer reviews on their own platform.

FWIW I expect that the marrying of review data with customer preference profiling to be one of the big advancements in online commerce, especially relevant in travel. This is where having proprietory data sets and big existing audiences helps the incumbents over the startups and engender deeper loyalty into the brands where people already book frequently such as the OTA’s

Techradar took the whole system for a ride since the last update and you can find out how they went in the Trip Planner section below.

Sustainability & AI are the big trends, but not necessarily together

Rudi Medved posted easily the most in depth and insightful rundown of the recent Tourism Innovation Summit on his own Substack this week (not sure why the mainstream travel media seem to have ignored this event?)

Rudi informed us there were two strong threads at the conference - suastainability (Yay!) & ai (Yay!).

It should be mentioned that Rudi is no luddite and probably sits pretty firmly at the early adopter end when it comes to tech but his takeaway of the ai news was that it was pretty underwhelming suggesting of the presentations “most were quite standard and it didn’t feel that you were part of an innovation summit at all. Especially the talks about AI, where I expected more in the pragmatic sense”.

The sentance most spoken was ““AI is just a tool” and similar to the story above, it is the layer of personalisation that seems to be currently missing.

Meanwhile in a different part of Spain the cruise industry were gathered and talking about……………… sustainability and ai! 

Interestingly at The International Cruise and Tourist Congress (CITCA) the ai focus was far more pragmatic! Here the chat was about how “AI is seamlessly integrating into cruises to optimize routes, manage energy, monitor emissions, and reduce waste”.

Makes me feel like I’ve jumped into a paralell universe to see the cruise industry is looking at the connection between ai and sustainability as the FIRST step. If that is what is actually happening then Bravo!

FWIW Rudi also found the efforts in sustainability at TIS to be pretty lacklustre saying “it was more conceptual or viewed from a policy perspective.” Probably acceptable if the conference was being held in 2003 instead of 2023 and maybe answers my own question as to why no-one was covering this event……..

Advanced GPT for Travel Professionals is a success!

The first of our special series of education courses, in partnership with the GenAI Academy, was held this week. See below this fantastic review from New York Times reporter and acclaimed author Lisa McCubbin Hill.

If you missed out first time around and are interested in catching the next one - you can express your interest here with two clicks!

How is Hyatt is using ai already!

This great article in Costar interviews two professionals from both Hyatt and Outrigger Resorts in Hawaii. It covers lots of different things including the use of outsourced contact centres and how that plays into the advancements of ai.

Jessica White, Hyatt's senior vice president of global property and guest services says "AI-powered chat and voice channels can achieve higher customer engagement, improve response times, increase the level of personalization with each interaction and, most notably, help call centers learn more from customer interactions by analyzing customer feedback."

White notes that “Hyatt went from almost no conversations before the pandemic to nearly 30% of all interactions today being via chat”.

Meanwhile Anita Travis, vice president of contact center operations at Hawaii-based Outrigger Resorts is taking a more cautious approach. "It's important to understand that if you're going to implement AI, [you know] what your 'why' is," she said.

Outrigger are looking at the 35-40 most commonly asked questions and looking to deliver answers faster to waiting customers on these points to save them waiting on hold for a human agent.

The article also touches on two other areas - call centre staff training and multilingual services - but doesn’t connect these back to ai. This is strange because of the strong capabilities of ai in these areas - but also probably because these are perhaps not as obvious as a chat bot. We think this will change in the next phase of ai awareness.

Are car manufacturers muscling in on tourism?

In a subject that is often debated in the companion Slack group to this newsletters, more evidence this week that the car industry is coming for tourism. This time it is the DS brand (DS Automobiles is a French luxury-premium vehicle marque of Automobiles Citroën) who “is integrating ChatGPT, the generative artificial intelligence model, into its line-up of vehicles and their infotainment systems” according to this report from AM Online.

Autoura founder Alex Bainbridge has long been screaming (mainly into the void) about how the auto industry is positioning itself to move into travel as part of their new lifestyle brand lens and the idea of vehicles as platforms. Alex focusses mainly on the coming of autonomous vehicles but has informed the Slack community about the company Cerence. Alex shared this video which demonstrates exactly how it works both in-car but also on scooter. According to Alex, Cerence currently holds 50% of the in-car infotainment market and the Cerence product manager in the video does actually compare their solution to a Hop On - Hop Off bus.

They are however a long way from the customer and it is really up to the car manufacturer to market this to the end user. As they are charging a monthly subscription fee as part of their platform play, I guess it is in their interest to do so.

Cerence does seem to rely on “their partner road.travel” in creating the routes so these don’t appear to be ai creations and maybe that is where the opening is for those building with ai?

As for Autoura, I expect them to be the dominate tour player in NEOM.

Try an ai powered tour yourself if in London for WTM!

Speaking of Autoura, they are the ai power behind Imagine Experiences’ “Bond for a Day” tour in London. If you are having trouble connecting the dots between what is possible on the experience front when it comes to utilising ai - then there is a fantastic opportunity for WTM attendees to actually just go see for themselves

.We decided that if we're going to change some of the rules, we might as well change the game,” said Ana Araque co-founder and CEO for Imagine Experiences.

On ai tours, Alex Bainbridge explains “The key aspect that makes them different to audio tours is the interaction. You can talk to the AI and the AI will talk back. You can't do that with an audio tour.”

Ana from Imagine Experiences has kindly offered a discount for subscribers of this newsletter so please use the code WTM23 at checkout to get your special subscriber discount of 20%. You can see the tour here. Bookings available from today.

No doubt you can also talk to Alex, the human, IRL at WTM also.

Everything ai in Travel is launching a podcast!

Who me? Yes, that is right we are moving to into your ears (and maybe onto your screens, so long as you enjoy watching people talk into their computers).

More to come on this but suffice to say we have been behind closed doors chatting with one of the real ‘movers and shakers’ of the travel ai scene who are keen to invest in the robustness of the ‘ai in travel’ community and make sure that travel takes its rightful place on the global ai stage. On that we are totally aligned, given that was the purpose for starting this newsletter in the first place.

Whereas this newsletter focuses on the news of the week, the podcast will go deeper with individuals using or building ai tools and products to delve deeper into why this actually is a new step change revolution and why it matters.

As part of the web platform we will also be writing and have other contributors write, native articles on the subject of ai and how it relates to travel.

I’ll be doing call outs for guests and contibutors in the Slack group.

In this week’s trip planning news, we are thankful for Techradar saving the day by going on a tour of the Trip Advisor ai powered platform since the the last update.

The TL;DR is captured best in this sentence: “I mentioned to the AI that I didn’t like fluorescent lights. Admittedly a very strange request for a hotel, but TripAdvisor's AI was able to find reviews that focused on lighting” which is actually not bad at all!

If we take what Trip Advisor has in terms of its massive amount of reviews and pull that into something a little more real, like “I’m vegetarian and gluten intolerant” then we are suddenly arriving at something that does add a lot of value when wandering around Tokyo or Lima or Bangkok. I can tell you now, nothing like that currently exists (or works if it does exist).

Most clicked last week was the headline piece on Zendesk.

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.

Apologies to Jason Calacanis for not getting him in this weeks news.