Air Canada says it was ai, not us…

In a story that viral this week, Air Canada was slapped down in the small claims tribunal because their ai powered bot hallucinated (lied) to a customer about whether a bereavement fare could be applied retrospectively.

Let’s just go over those core facts again - a major travel company made a passenger take them to Small Claims over an issue around bereavement…………. I mean WTAF? The claim ran to around $820.

I first heard of the case when a member of the companion Slack group to this newsletter, Alex Bainbridge mentioned he had made a post about it which had totally blown up with 100’s of shares and thousands of views on Linked In.

On his post Alex who is building his own AI tour guide business says “Execution is full of edge cases. e.g. guest misses their last ferry that the AI tour guide said they were going to be on time for. Who do you think will be paying the compensation? Air Canada suggests the AI is responsible for its own actions...... interesting legal idea that.”

According to report in ARSTechnica “The presiding tribunal member Christopher Rivers, who decided the case in favor of Moffatt (the person who brought the case), called Air Canada's defense "remarkable." Thats one word for it.

"Air Canada argues it cannot be held liable for information provided by one of its agents, servants, or representatives—including a chatbot," Rivers wrote. "It does not explain why it believes that is the case" or "why the webpage titled 'Bereavement travel' was inherently more trustworthy than its chatbot."

I could tell you how unsurprised I am about this based on my own experiences with Air Canada but don’t wish to end up in court.

ai + Travel @ Arival & ITB

I was set the challenge in the Slack group to find and drag out every session on ai at the upcoming Arival & ITB conferences in Berlin. I have somewhat cheated because there is no doubt a lot more than this but what I am offering here is what I’ve put in the diary for myself.

The good news for You is that if you are not able to attend yourself then you will still be getting the main scoop via extended coverage of the events right into your inbox.

And if you are coming then I’ve open my calendar for the moments between these sessions for us to connect. If you want to talk about the ai strategy for your company, want to know how you can automate the training and onboarding of your team (or your contracted team if using DMC’s!!) around critical policy and procedure information or want to know what ai can do to unblock your bespoke sales team on a load of their manual processes - lets catch up! If you just want to shoot the breeze - thats cool too - we’ve got a meet up of the Slack group you’ll find out more about below.

Here is the guide:

March 3:

1. Theatre Session - Arival at 9 – 10 am (Douglas Quimby)

2. Operators guide to the AI Galaxy at 10:45 am (Christian Watts)

3. Practical guide to AI in your tour business at 1 pm (Alex Bainbridge)

4. AI in the wild at 1:45 pm (Thomas Mcgarry)

5. GenAI with Google at 3:15 pm (Google!)

6. Party @ Festsaal Kreutzberg at 6 – 7:30 pm

March 4:

1. Stripe Innovation - Tour Connect at 10:30 am

2. Stripe Innovation - WeGoTrip at 11:30 am

3. Johaness AMA - GYG at 12 – 1 pm

4. Party post-Arival at the Post-Punk Fotografiska Berlin Museum at 6 – 9 pm

March 5:

1. Future Track - ITB at 10:55 am – 12:15 pm (PhocusWright; Glenn Fogel)

2. Future Track- ITB at 2.10 – 3:15 pm Behshad Behzadi

   Vice President of Engineering, Generative Conversational AI, Google Cloud | Google then Garry Wiseman

   EVP & Chief Product Officer | Sabre

3. Weeva - Hotel Track at 4:40 pm

March 6:

1. AI coming for your tour bus - TTA track at 11:30 am (Alex Bainbridge - again!!!)

2. Travel Perk - Business travel track at 12:30 pm

3. AI Track ITB at 1:30 – 4:30 pm including Karan Bagga

   Engineering Group Manager, Travel & AI | Microsoft; Michael Giangrande

   Travel Industry Lead, Google Cloud Germany | Google and many others.

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:

Airbnb says its all in on ai

Sticking with news springing out of Linked In, Adam Meron dug into the Airbnb earnings call (so the rest of us didn’t have to). According to Meron “They're really going all in on GenAI after their acquisition of GamePlanner.AI. His comments remind me of Paul English's comments when he addresses people downplaying the importance of a good UX. Paul likes to remind them that one of Kayak's strengths was building a rock solid UX and application layer on top of ITA.”

Cheskey has made it clear that Airbnb aren’t going to build a new LLM but rather rethink how we digitally engage with customers or potential customers. “… where we can excel is on the application layer. And I believe that we can build one of the leading and most innovative AI interfaces ever created.” I for one can’t wait to see what they come up with!

Meron thinks we will see new entrants, like Chesky once was, come in and be the disruptors “If I were placing a bet, I'd put it on the youngsters 🍼 👶 . I still remember meeting with Nathan Blecharczyk shortly after they emerged from YC and leaving the meeting not particularly impressed. I learned my lesson. It's the youngsters that are going to figure this out 💯

Expedia says it is in front and pulling away on ai…

On his global goodbye tour, “Peter Kern, vice chairman and chief executive officer of Expedia Group told Nikkei Asia on Tuesday…Expedia will maintain its commitment to artificial intelligence technology to retain an edge on the competition in the global tourism industry.”

“We continue to put it into the products, and everywhere we put it, it can just keep getting smarter and doing better for you. Then it allows us to launch new features much more quickly."

"We've spent the last several years reinventing our technology capabilities, consolidating all our stacks, putting AI into all the products. We think that sets us up really in a great way to go forward in the industry and out-innovate all the competitors,"

Shots fired!! 🔫 

Everyone in working on Travel Planning

In today’s panel at the Travel Trends AI Summit I mentioned everyone both inside and outside the industry seems suddenly interested in solving “Travel Planning”. Here is what I mean.

Bill Gates has talked about. Every new product demo has it. Google released their Github on it. Its just like the movie Oppenheimer right now. The race is on. 💥 

Via Stuart McDonald on Linked In there is also this piece in The Atlantic (if you subscribe).

Conor Grennan on Travel

Loved the Phocuswire piece with Conor Grennan, New York University Stern School of Business dean of students. I think sometimes being one step removed really helps to bring a different lens to what is possible.

The highlight in here for me was the insight that what can be abolished, almost immediately is 30% of all your teams non value work, freeing up space to give those people you spent a lot of time choosing for their brilliance, to be brilliant.

Why would you not want that?

My second favourite was “ If you talk to it like a human, you’re going to get phenomenal results.” THIS is the salient point in generative AI. It can communicate. You can speak to it. It can speak to you.

Get your team in a room and ask them, if someone from our company could be the guardian angel sitting on the shoulder of every customer on their travels, how would we help them? Of course in the past this was fantasy due to logistics & cost. Now it reality. So the only question now is, are you going to realise it or not.

Lonely Planet releases its own ai travel planner.

We broke the news here for you first on Lonely Planet owner Red Ventures releasing a travel planner which is powered by their Lonely Planet assets. More commentary in the full story.

Most clicked last week was the link to the FREE tickets to the Travel Trends AI Summit which has just wrapped up. Happy so many of the subscibers to this newsletter were able to save $249 and get filled to the brim with knowledge.

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