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Booking says don’t call us! We’ll call You. 

Glenn Fogel was out doing the rounds this week after the Booking Holdings earnings call.

In this video from CNBC we hear Fogel saying that the future of travel with AI is that it will be the brand reaching out and suggesting that now might be a good time for a trip which starts the booking process - as opposed to the customer starting their search with intent.

Of course this is the marketers dream, especially if the traveller is open to it. It is the reason we still get so many brand emails in our Hotmail or Yahoo or whatever old email we sign up to that stuff with.

Harder to run away from your phone. Of course, you can always delete the App which is sending these exquisitely timed outreaches, assuming it works that way.

This however is still a very brand centric view of the world.

I think in the agentic world of our future, what Fogel says is somewhat true. Our personal AI, the most wonderful EA in our pocket might be the one to suggest a holiday is a good idea. But the EA AI works for us, not Booking or Expedia or Airbnb.

If we give it the affirmative to start sorting out some options, it how these brands interface with our agent that will be most critical. And that is for them to figure out.

Our indefatigable shopper will be shopping around and so the direct seller “should” be able to offer the best price. Of course that doesn’t always happen now. No-one really seems to understand why that is…

Cho Cho Choose Rail Travel with AI

A patent dropped this week in the US for an AI that detects things that could be on the tracks up ahead.

According to the article “The patented technology integrates sophisticated electro-optical imaging and artificial intelligence to safeguard against hazards both on the tracks and in surrounding areas.”

Rail is already pretty safe but it can always get safer, particularly in the developing world.

If you are interested in rail travel, check out my recent chat with Cat Jones who run the Flight Free Travel Agency Byway who knows this part of the travel world intimately!

AI is fueling a travel technology boom

Travel & Tour World this week wrote a piece on how AI is creating a boom in travel technology.

According to the article the market for “Global Travel Technology” is expected to each $21 billion by 2032, up from $9.4 billion in 2022, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 8.6%

Alongside AI, “increased adoption of voice search and control (&) the rise in contactless payment options” were two other driving factors.

Interesting to see Voice search called out so predominantly. I think for many the jury is still out on voice becoming dominant. I know this can also have cultural connotations. My Chinese friends for example only ever send me voice messages. They almost never type. Hard to see everyone suddenly murmuring to themselves on the Tube in London?

In terms of regional differences, the article suggests Asia is the place to watch for greatest transformation. “North America dominated the market in 2022, accounting for one-third of global revenue, while the Asia-Pacific region is projected to witness the fastest growth at a CAGR of 12.1% due to the increasing use of e-commerce platforms in travel bookings.”

AI content gets the chop

An interesting bit of news pointed out by Stuart McDonald on LinkedIn this week about Media Vine cutting off some of their clients who had over indexed on AI created content.

If you are not aware of Media Vine, they are an organisation that brings together specific publishers, mainly bloggers (remember them!) and advertisers together for a more targeted approach than what you might get on a Google ‘spray and pray.’

The nuts and bolts of what went on here was Media Vine employed “third party quality content” tools and then “internal investigations” confirmed this was true.

If you’ve ever looked into systems that can detect AI content what you will inevitably find is that pretty much every site offering you the opportunity to check a piece of content is then offering you the solution to create “TOTALLY UNDETECTABLE CONTECT”.

So good luck sorting that out. It also isn’t clear why click bait and listicles are good, but AI content is bad, but I’ll let someone else figure that out.

AI Stats!

A bunch of interesting stats in this TTG article this week on the balancing act that is AI:

• AI-powered search engines have been known to increase hotel bookings by up to 33 per cent

• 71 per cent of consumers expecting personalised travel experiences

• 64 per cent of Gen Z and millennials find vacation planning time-consuming (impatient to get back to their video scrolling?)

• AI could boost tourism businesses’ revenue by 10 per cent and reduce costs by 15 per cent

• 30 per cent of consumers will take their business to a different brand, abandon their purchase, or tell their friends and family about their poor experience, after an unsatisfactory experience with a chatbot.

Unfortunately, none of these are attributed to the source so take them with a grain of salt. Presumably they didn’t just make them up?

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:

HR gets on board with AI

In this AI Mindset article, the author leads with the headline the “HR must lead the AI change”.

I guess I’m not too sure about that but later in the article they do hit on some nuggets which do ring very true. One of my favourite quotes was “This isn't about learning new software. It's about fundamentally changing how people work, think, and show up every day.” True dat.

The roadmap also started in exactly the right place (kind of):

1. Start at the Top

You can't expect your troops to charge into battle if the generals are still using carrier pigeons. Training on generative AI has to start with senior leadership. Why? Because they're the ones who set the pace, who decide what "good" looks like in this brave new world.

This week I was on Simon Kriss’s ‘AI in 5 show’ and he asked me what the single piece of advice I would give someone whose company was about to start on their AI journey. This was the exact advice I gave.

The leader of the company needs to be the cheerleader of AI in the company. When that happens, everything else gets worked out pretty quickly. Where it gets outsourced down the line - there is a very different outcome.

We can argue whether it is HR’s job to marshal the CEO or Founder into this position. I suspect that has some flaws.

I do find the opportunities in HR especially intriguing. I’ve invited Barb Hyman who is the founder of Sepia.ai which uses AI to totally rethink the hiring process especially for high volume &/or high turnover roles and who works with some big players in travel, to come on the podcast shortly.

What they have built is one of my favourite AI executions to date where you have an expert with deep domain expertise that has lived the endless bottlenecks in screening, shortlisting and evaluating. Barb and her team have just zoomed right out to look at what the best outcome looks like and worked back in from there. It is examples like this where you can see that AI has revolutionary powers.

OpenAI hits 1 million paid users

Bloomberg reported this week that OpenAI have hit the magic million mark for their paid enterprise and teams products.

Actually, I thought it would be more than that.

I heard an anecdote recently about a company in travel where the Fonder & CEO of a travel company that could instantly see the potential of AI immediately got every employee a paid account.

If you aren’t aware, only these types of subscriptions stop the model from training on the data that is input into them (as does the API). The paid personal versions do not do this!

I love this move by this founder because it both immediately signals that AI is here, that it is beneficial and that everyone should be using it. In fact I hear that in his managers meetings he would pull up the token usage list for each account and ask why “so & so” wasn’t using it very much!

It also however protects the company IP from leakage.

As a result pretty much everyone in this company found their own personal hacks to improve their internal workflows and efficiency. They shared those around. The culture was, its cool to hack your workflow.

That is a winning company.

If we say average company size adopting enterprise grade AI is 100 that means only around 10,000 companies across all sectors and countries are taking this approach. That number seems small to me.

I’d love to isolate that group of companies and see where they are in their trajectory as a business, compared to all those who dragged their feet. I hope someone is doing that research.

Slack Group!

How to work with Tony

There are a few places upcoming where you can find me if you like.

I’m presenting on the intersection of sustainability & AI at WeTravel’s upcoming Travel Innovation Summit alongside Gilad Berenstein and Tornike Tsiramua, CEO at Biliki AI. The session is on Thursday, September 12th from 11am-12pm ET (that really soon BTW if you opened this immediately).

Tickets to the entire Summit are FREE. You can sign up here.

I’m also moderating an AI panel at the Travel Agents Days Australia being held in Melbourne on 2nd October 2024. You can find out more details on that one here.

The marketplace is now launched - please just jump on the site to grab your listing if you have an AI tool or service that you want the industry to know about. We are extending the grandfathering forever the lowest listing price for just one more week before moving to normal pricing. Jump in now if cost is a core issue.

Between existing consulting work and joining Videreo as co-founder, there isn’t really a lot of time for new consulting work I’m afraid. Still please reach out if you have something non urgent and is a decent piece of work and let’s discuss what might be possible.

At Videreo, we still have a couple places left in proof-of-concept group. Specifically looking for a DMO who wants to leverage video and personalization for your business results and partners - please get in touch. In return we are offering a full-service approach, the opportunity to shape the product to suit your business and heavy discounting as our way of saying thanks in advance!

We’ll be closing our POC group in September.

Most clicked last week was the link to the story on Mobi.ai 

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