A Super Bowl sized audience, but every day..

Beautiful Destinations this week dropped their highly anticipated report into the state of social commerce in travel and the implications are massive. Massive with a $T.

“The most transformative shift in online travel is yet to come. Over the next ten years, social media's role is set to expand beyond dominating travel inspiration. It will begin to drive travel bookings, thereby impacting the industry's top-line revenue in ways previously unimagined.” the report predicts.

The report outlines a 3-step phase of travel evolution and suggests we are in phase 2 right now:

Phase I: Following the post-dotcom burst, the internet wave of the 2000s marked the beginning of travel's digital transition.

Phase II: This phase details the quiet yet profound shift towards the growing influence of social media and online travel communities.

Phase III: Over the next decade, we anticipate a significant transition towards the social commerce era, fundamentally changing how travel bookings and engagements occur

The Beautiful Destinations report says that short-form video, personalization and embedded booking capabilities are the three core pieces to unlock this next wave.

Because of innovations in AI, this happens now, not in some future state. Videreo is the place for brands and creators to meet & create this new sales pipeline together.

This is achieved by enabling creator storefronts to be built instantaneously by making their short-form videos searchable on a map and applying the bookable travel products, most likely to convert for this audience. (Hint: Your products)

With each creator averaging 30K in followers & posting daily, it isn’t difficult to understand the compounding scale of the opportunity here. It is a Super Bowl sized audience, every day. (Go Eagles!!)

The report goes on to warn, “Many travel providers, still acclimating to the initial era of social media, often overlook this transition, thereby missing out on substantial, untapped commercial opportunities ahead”

If your business is a consumer facing travel product, don’t let it be one of those to miss these changing winds. Check out more here to join brands already being sold this way like Contiki, G Adventures & Globus.

This content is provided by the (interim) newsletter sponsor Videreo.com

“Google search is fundamentally dead within the next seven years”

According to a story in Phocuswright this week, this is the prediction of internet guru Gary Vaynerchuck, chairman of VaynerX and CEO of VaynerMedia. ““But let there be no confusion - this is like when I saw web crawler in 1994, it was clear that it would be an issue for the yellow pages eventually, the yellow pages started to really feel the effects of this in 2001/2/3, so almost 10 years later,” Vaynerchuck said in the video. “Things move faster now and there is more adoption of new tools, apps and technology overall.”

The story goes on to explain “The internet — and websites, user experience, etc. — largely has been built for use by humans. But agent-to-website or agent-to-agent interaction, like what Operator can initiate, could require major changes for websites in the future.”

By Operator, they are talking about OpenAI’s new product which was the headline story from last weeks in the world of AI until the contenders from China launched and took the scoop. (As Alex Bainbridge pointed out in the Slack group, these “new” terms for things are pretty confusing in travel where we already have “agents” & “operators”…..)

The article also looks at the impact on marketing with Marina Petrova from Intentful saying “Many companies and organizations globally have heavily relied on just the performance marketing because of the immediate ‘validation’ nature of it. But this is not a healthy long-term strategy. … Because of these new couple of audience segments [such as AI agents or AI assistants], the whole marketing strategy requires a holistic refresh, not just a website.”

If the King is dead, long live the Bing?

Brennan Bliss from Propellic shared an interesting and useful piece of information from his own teams’ messing around on Operator.

“Operator consistently takes action on Bing's first organic result.

Not 2nd, not 3rd. First.

Why this matters: - Google just dropped below 90% market share (first time in 10 years) - Bing powers ChatGPT's web results - Operator is basically an AI shopping assistant.

So this will lead to purchases.

Translation: If you're ignoring Bing optimization, you're missing what's coming.

Think about it: - Customer asks ChatGPT to "book a helicopter tour in Hawaii" - Operator goes to Bing - Pulls first result - Books the tour with user-input payment details.

That first position in Bing just got way more valuable.”

Do you want fr(a)ies with that?

Reports this week that Barcelona Airport has launched first fully AI powered restaurant in the travel sphere.

“The 137-square-meter robotic restaurant blends artificial intelligence, robotics, and touchless service to create a fast, contactless, and high-quality dining experience. Customers:

• Receive a QR code and order number.

  • Place orders via touchscreens.

• Watch as a robotic arm prepares and delivers meals.”

There are however still humans-in-the-loop.

“While the restaurant is highly automated, human staff remain available to assist customers, handle special requests, and ensure a smooth dining experience.”

If travelling through BCN you can see it for yourself in Terminal 1 near Gate B24. Would love to see readers of this newsletter post a pic of themselves there and tag us in on LinkedIn!!

The Missing link…

Back to search for moment where this week Stuart McDonald whilst playing with new Google search capabilities in their lab, found that when he asked for what information the AI might be able to give around what his South East Asia travel site might know about motorbike safety (McDonald has spent decades riding all over SEA on motorbikes - the answer therefore is A LOT), he was returned a summery where none of the supporting links ended up back at his travelfish.org website………

All the major LLM platforms are now mostly caught up with frontrunner Perplexity who pioneered the idea of attribution links alongside AI summaries meaning Perplexity itself may just become like the AltaVista or NetScape of LLM world.

McDonald is no fan of AI generally and is a critic of the way models were built from scraping the work of others without permission, only to then disintermediate those original creators from their own business models (which is more than fair enough!!).

This week the US Office for Copyright weighed in on whether AI output itself could have any copyright protections in the wake of accusations that DeepSeek used outputs from the US LLM companies to essentially hack their way to a cheaper product.

It probably wasn’t great news for alleged plagiarists now crying over plagiarism of their own system when the office gave the following advice:

• AI-generated content needs human creativity for copyright.

• Prompts alone don’t qualify for copyright protection.

• Current U.S. copyright laws cover AI works.

I’m sure Stuart isn’t shedding any tears for them.

There are still many outstanding lawsuits over how the models were originally trained but the markets & investors at least don’t seem to this as a significant future threat to these companies’ and their prospective returns with OpenAI reportedly in talks to raise another $40B at a valuation of $340B.

AI (and Jürgen Klopp) push Trivago back to revenue growth

According to , AI has played a role in Trivago getting back to revenue growth after a couple of years of slump.

“Trivago filmed its latest television ad, starring German football executive Jürgen Klopp, in English. Then the company used AI to translate the ad into several other languages, and the ad has been released over the past few weeks in nearly 20 markets.

In addition to translating the voices, the AI changes the actors’ mouth movements to match each respective language. And it adjusts the tones of their voices to imitate native speakers.”

The attributed cause of the slump is also interesting given the theme of most other stories in this week’s edition, “Trivago's CEO said changes to Google ads are primarily what caused repeated revenue declines over the past couple of years.”

And exactly as Marina Petrova predicted above, Trivago switched to brand to reboot the engine.

Of course, not everyone (or to be more precise), hardly anyone call afford a 20 market TVC campaign with Jürgen Klopp.

If only there were little TV’s that maybe people carried around with them, with massive audiences that could be reached economically and measured with some ROI data………. hmmm.

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:

Marketplace Spotlight: Yonder

"Yonder is one of the most powerful tools for saving time, increasing the efficiency of your business, customer intelligence, and turning that into new customers." -Trent Yeo, Ziptrek Ecotours

Their AI ChatBot is built for tourism operators and uses cutting-edge artificial intelligence to act as your best customer support agent - running 24/7/365 to answer customer FAQs.

They also integrate with key reservation systems, allowing customers to book directly from the bot and increasing your direct bookings.

The Yonder platform also includes our Intelligent Review and Recommendation Quiz Builder features, guaranteeing you'll see business growth from day 1.

If you have a B2B business underpinned by AI and looking for people to notice you, you can sign up to the marketplace for peanuts (top right corner, 5 mins, bring your logo).

I’ve priced for bootstrapped startups but also accepting larger companies too.

Priceline’s Penny passes 3M users.

A little snippet of information from a much larger interview with Priceline CEO, Brett Keller this week was the news that “Customer interactions with Priceline’s gen AI travel assistant, Penny, which debuted last summer, now number more than 3 million.”

What is less clear is if that is a big number? SEMRush says Priceline’s monthly traffic in December was 2.36M. Extrapolating that out it seems less than 10% might use the bot in planning.

Slack Group!

Shorts

Every week a lot of stuff is left on the cutting room floor. I though maybe I’ll just lest those here for anyone interested in digging more:

• US Navy started a rush on bans of work & personal use of Deepseek globally

• Kevin Roose uses ‘Operator’ to answer his LinkedIn messages

• Alaska Airlines invests deeper into AI for efficiency

• SouthEastern Rail uses AI to line up platforms for accessibility

• AI makes it to Kasmir

Podcasts and Sponsors

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Most clicked last week was the link to OpenAI’s Operator demo. Actually, it’s the most clicked article there has ever been here.

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 focusing. 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