We now have a sponsor!

Very pleased and proud to be able to introduce the first sponsor for the newsletter in Propellic! Here is how they helped customer Visit Amarillo.

Visit Amarillo, supported solely by the city's Hotel Occupancy Tax and part of the Amarillo Convention & Visitor Bureau (CVB), aims to draw tourists and events to Amarillo without directly selling hotel stays or experiences. Despite its visibility, the site struggled with organic search rankings compared to its Texan counterparts due to issues like image optimization, page layout problems, repetitive content, multiple redirects, and not leveraging trending search terms.

To elevate Amarillo's appeal as a top tourist destination, the primary goal was to enhance the site's search engine visibility and user traffic. This was achieved by refining the user experience and aligning the website more closely with visitor interests. Initial assessments pinpointed significant problems such as unnecessary website sections, large image files slowing down the site, numerous redirect chains, broken links, 404 errors, and non-secure URLs.

By analyzing keywords used by successful Amarillo and Texas travel sites, we identified missed opportunities and popular search topics. Propellic revamped the website with optimized content around trending topics like outdoor activities and B&B accommodations in Amarillo, ensuring unique page titles and URLs, and advising on the consolidation or removal of duplicative pages.

This strategic overhaul swiftly bore fruit, doubling organic traffic and significantly boosting rankings within three months. The optimization of existing content, coupled with a carefully curated editorial calendar based on keyword research, attracted more visitors, particularly international travelers interested in unique experiences like stargazing at Palo Duro Canyon.

Check them out for yourself here.

The big opportunity everyone is missing?

Gilad Berenstein who is an investor and advisor to the Board of Directors at Virtuoso wrote this piece this week on where hotels should be looking to apply ai.

In the article Gilad says “it dawned on me that a vast majority of these innovators are ignoring a giant glaring opportunity” when discussing the innumerable conversations he has daily with people from all different viewpoints of the travel industry.

The answer “So while most founders are focused on consumer offerings, storytelling, recommendations, and funnel optimization (all areas I am passionate about and invest in), almost none are focused on the enormous opportunity that is Back-of-House Ozempic. The opportunity to shrink down expenses, increase productivity, and help supercharge a hotels operational and hospitality teams.”

Back of house is boring. It isn’t sexy. You aren’t likely to become a big startup celebrity. You might just however make yourself and those who back you a pile of cash.

I’ve long been a fan of the pairing of grizzled veterans with young startup founders. Whether they come in as co-founders or angels or advisors - find people who know where the pain is and what the value of fixing it is - and you will improve your chances of winning, infinitely.

In a prolific week for Berenstein, he also penned a piece pointing out the main lessons from the big guys that have already jumped into ai with both feet. Those lessons were:

Lesson 1: Lack of Trust

Lesson 2: The age-old Build v. Buy Decision is moving towards build.

Lesson 3: Measuring ROI is Hard!

Lesson 4: Culture is often the blocker

Lesson 5: Employee Hesitation

Lesson 6: Success is found in the overlap of the Venn Diagram.

There is SIGNIFICANT context found on each of these points - go read the article!

“The single greatest value creation opportunity humankind has ever seen!”

Hello! That’s a pretty big statement!

It comes from this weeks series of sessions run by VC firm Sequoia as part of the keynote. The deeper explanation is that ai is actually a “services revolution”. And by revolution, they mean alongside “the industrial revolution”. With this mindset they are pegging the TAM opportunity in the 10’s of Trillions (yes, with a T).

The hypothesis is that essentially all services can be replaced by ai. I’m not so sure about massages though.

Of course the industrial revolution brought people off the farms and into the factories. They paved the way for the 8 hour work day and the unleashing of leisure time, which led to things like the advent of professional sports. It is less clear right now, where those who currently provide services go, but it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see the 4 hour work week as a part of our near future. Can’t wait to see what we invent with all our new spare time!!

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:

What does your content smell like?

This post by ex Skift researcher Luke Barjarski caught my eye. Luke, I’m sure, is not alone in detecting the growing mound of lazy ai created contented starting to litter our feeds in all corners of the internet.

Burjarski argues that “Once detected, there is the feeling of being duped, that what I am seeing or reading is unoriginal fluff meant to steal my time and money.” I’d say I have to agree.

He also believes there is an “ugly volume-driven race for eyeballs, the assumption that more is better - which is not the case.”

In conclusion, there is a place and a process where ai can help you with your content creation but getting ChatGPT to write your entire post off a lazy prompt isn’t it. You are neither winning friends, nor influencing people.

OTA’s under threat?

A few weeks back we informed you of latest moves by Google on barging their way deeper into travel by connecting up a lot of their properties like Gmail and Maps to help with itinerary planning as part of their larger move in GenAI powered search results. This is part of their broader SGE strategy where Googlers will soon receive a written paragraph answer to any search query - with what Google determines the actual best answer to be as well as your usual bunch of links to go explore more deeply yourself.

In a travel related query, that paragraph will transform into a travel “itinerary” with flight recommendations and day to day itinerary with map all ready to go.

Christian Watts has done some analysis of this in Phocuswire on what it all means, especially for Google itself and the potential impact on OTA’s like Expedia and Booking.com 

Watts explains “Gemini makes Travel and Maps more useful because it acts as a deep search, which wasn’t possible with just algorithms. And Google Travel makes Gemini better because users are often looking to purchase flights, hotels and activities. Each makes the other part stronger.” This gets Google closer to the transaction because users don’t need to click away to get what they need. Watts argues that blogs and the like are probably dead in the water as most users won’t be going that deep for information.

No-one knows yet how Google pull all this off whilst retaining their extremely lucrative “sponsored” style business model but with this evolution in how travel queries are returned it maybe becomes more obvious because there are a lot of components to a trip and some of those can for sure still be sponsored.

As seen in this review on Mashable of someone planning a trip with just ChatGPT, Google has moved back into the ascendency for this use case.

Build or Buy?

We saw above in the piece reporting on Gilad Berenstein’s analysis of what he is seeing in the market from his position as someone from whom others seek advice, that there is strong move back to build, rather than buy when it comes to ai. This Bernstein argues is because a lot of what is both useful and available is coming in the form of API’s which just require sme configuration for each circumstance rather than deep build from scratch.

I saw this week that expert led education provider Maven seems to be leaning into this trend by launching an entire suite of courses around building. If you think this might be the way you will go, then this might be the place your teams can get the learnings they need.

Is your bias showing?

 An interesting Op Ed this week from the (recently acquired) CWT’s Matthew Newton about being aware of the bias that is inherent in LLM’s. The article is somewhat lengthy but GPT has summarised it for us as:

The Risk of Algorithmic Bias: The presence of bias in AI algorithms can result in discriminatory practices, affecting employee well-being, satisfaction, and perceptions of fairness within a company. This includes biased recommendations for hotels, flights, and travel budgets, disproportionately impacting employees from diverse backgrounds.

Recognizing and Addressing Bias: To combat algorithmic bias, it is crucial to acknowledge its existence, understand its causes, and take proactive measures to dismantle bias within AI systems. This involves careful examination and adjustment of the algorithms used in tools like the Intelligent Display feature, which aims to enhance travel experience and policy compliance.

Mitigation Strategies and Ethical Guidelines: Implementing ethical guidelines, conducting audits, collaborating across diverse stakeholder groups, and providing professional training are essential steps towards achieving equitable AI outcomes. Utilizing bias analyzers and ensuring balanced training data are practical measures to prevent and address bias.

Collective Effort for Bias Mitigation: Tackling algorithmic bias is a collaborative endeavor that requires ongoing effort and dialogue within the industry to ensure AI-powered travel systems are fair and inclusive. Emphasizing diversity, equity, and inclusion in AI development and deployment is critical for fostering unbiased decision-making and enhancing the travel experience for all employees

An ai that refunds your travel if it rains!

Someone is betting that their ai weather predictor is working well enough that they will pay out if the weather on your holiday is not how they predicted it would be.

Can’t help but wonder what other types of new business models of this ilk we might see emerge in the near future. The likes of Hopper have previously mentioned that a lot of their high margin products are “fintech” offerings like these, which are essentially insurance plays.

How to work with Tony

As things have started to get busy in a few different areas I’m going to now change the way I work with people:

What was consultancy services to help you with your own ai strategy & other growth challenges (check my Linked In bio for reviews of those I’ve helped out already) will now become corporate workshops. I have space for just two in May. Please email me if interested in a 2 hour session with your leaders and ai forward team members. Each workshop has a cost of $3000 AUD (+ G.S.T. if in Australia).

For those further advanced, I’m also available to work as a business partner with your team on building an ai centre of excellence within your business. This is a more lengthy process of getting ai enhancements to run alongside your business strategy, evaluate the low hanging fruit opportunities + the deeper opportunities, source and interviews vendors as well as your existing suppliers and helping to build a culture within your business where fixable problems are easily surfaced. Please email me to set up a call.

Want to follow in Propellic’s footstrps and get in front of a highly engaged audience of travel decision makers by sponsoring the newsletter? We are book Q3 & Q4 sponsorships now. Also email me on that one for rates and details.

Always happy to chat to anyone looking to engage either of the two travel related startups:

• HandbookFM.com for those looking to up their training and onboarding game such as DMC’s who want to show prospective customers how they will train their local teams on the customer brand values and safety criteria

• Customised Trip which is an ai that mimics the human travel agent to build out a bespoke itinerary for a client before the human sales team gets involved. It comes also with a fulfillment option so the whole process from conversation to travel experience is taken care of. Great if you have an engaged audience and looking for something to really add some big value and big revenue.

Most clicked last week was the link to my Linked In (Hi!) followed by the link to the upcoming Webinar on Trip Planning Fails with the (much featured his week) Gilad Berenstein.

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