TravelPerk raises $104M

The money keeps coming for the Travel & Expense management system arena with Softbank leading a follow-on investment into their portfolio company TravelPerk.

Let’s break this down a bit. Anyone who follows my content here will hear me talking about how solving travel planning for speed is a misguided approach. I stick to that hypothesis on the leisure side but I wholeheartedly agree with it as something to solve for when it comes to booking business travel. No manager, owner or shareholder wants their staff spending the same amount of time booking their business trip, as they are spending whilst on it. That is a huge waste of productivity time!

AI that can deliver just a couple of choices, this or that, from which the employee can still have a little bit of input into, but is covered in the travel policy and utilises any pre-contracted rates, is what business owners are looking for.

That isn’t the end of it however. Businsses want to be able to claim the cost of this travel as a genuine business expense. Relying on the employee to get the right receipt back to the finance team and record the informatin in an efficient way……… now we are moving into real pain territory. This is how expense management system businesses get their foothold. Again I don’t want my expensive employee spending a day hunting down missing receipts any more than that employee wants to be hunting them down. Everyone is chewing on glass here.

None of these issues translate back to leisure. Don’t see this as a marker if you are on the leisure side. It’s different pain, different problems and different payers.

I saw one report this week saying that “Bleisure” was a trend for 2024 which shows, we are running out of trends but also that more complication is probably on its way that needs solving for.

Get your ai strategy done, now!

I was very fortunate and grateful to be asked by the Singapore Tourism Board if I could provide some information to their member constituents about how specifically they can begin their ai journey.

I joined Andrea Hak for the very first in a new series of podcasts on ai where I talk in very specific and actionable terms about how any business can go through a process to get an ai strategy together.

I talk through the process I go through with my paying consultancy clients so you can just follow it. If you need a fascilitator, drop me a note but if you don’t then just follow the steps and get a roadmap in place.

I talk about how to engage your employees in the process and the things inside your business you should be looking at.

Big thanks to the STB for making it available to everyone.

Still not enough? I’ve built an ai Strategy Builder GPT you can use to guide you through process. It is FREE but you need a paid OpenAI account to access and use it. Running out of excuses!

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:

ai is planning mystery trips in Norway

Skoda has recently released an in-car ai that will take you out on a mystery drive.

These “random excursions… explore the byways, backroads, scenic beauty and nightlife across the Nordic nation. It takes less than 10 seconds, accessed through the automaker's website, app and various vehicle browsers”

Reminicent of the UK startup Journee which isn’t ai powered (yet), this ‘marketing idea’ could provide some insight on how we might move forward more generally. For example, is providing a full itinerary upfront really the best use of generative ai in 2024? Don’t we want more fluency and freedom in what our next move might be when out tripping around?

We’ve seen lots of examples of building the old way quicker but I’d argue there is probably a new way that will take over.

You don’t need ai to get funded but….

This artice on the funding landscape in 2024 had one quote which grabbed my attention and reflects what I am also hearing out there on the funding hustings.

Mia Morisset, a principal at Inovia stated their “advice to startups in its portfolio is to “have a defensive AI strategy. You need to know what’s going on, you need to know what’s table stakes.”

I am hearing some frustration from non-ai startups getting stumped at funding meetings for not having enough to say on why ai is not a threat to what they are doing. Probably don’t wait to be asked if you are in that situation.

Chatbots to get intelligent

The New York Times this week weighed in on How Will A.I. Change My Vacation This Year?

Quoting Oren Etzioni, professor emeritus of computer science at the University of Washington, the Times said “In 2024, we will see a new breed of intelligent travel agents built on top of chatbots”.

I totally agree. I expect to see a lot leading questions coming out of our bot buddies as they build up data profiles of the user on the fly in order to deliver back to them something that is customised for them. The job of the travel agent has always been around asking questions, gathering information (now called data..) and matching customer wishes to what they have available to sell.

I look forward to soon launching what we’ve been working on with the team at Customised Trip for the multiday adventure touring industry as a way of opening up the lucrative FIT market. To date this has been held back by the mismatch in the amount of work required to get a trip built and quoted versus what the market wanted to pay for such a trip. Not to mention that a good % are just fishing for information they will use to book elsewhere. With ai doing the heavy lifting on the initial interactions, we will see a big acceleration in this area.

Yell out if you are an operator or DMC in that area and want to have a look at the demo.

Steller raises $5M for “Trips”

ai + social media startup Steller has raised $5M. To date, Steller has concentrated on building its content which mainly consists of short form video (you know, Tik Tok style). Now “Steller combines that content in Trips with destination details, curated trips from experts, interactive maps, an AI-enhanced trip planner, and booking functionality.”

I had a play with it this week whilst doing some research for a client and its actually not bad! There was however one feature missing that for me kills it. You can’t co-plan a trip with someone else. What I liked about it was that it seemed like a good place to bookmark all those dicoveries that you collect whilst in the planning phase. As I rarely travel alone however, it can’t just be my bookmarks in there from which to pull our trip together.

I’m not really interested in the video bit, so clearly I’m not the demographic and maybe the video kids don’t care what anyone else wants to do. 

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Most clicked last week was the catch up article on Phocuswire by Mario Gavira

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