A word from our sponsor!

"Give Google your freaking conversion data"

This is the core message from Propellic CEO, Brennen Bliss and it underscores the necessity of leveraging sophisticated AI tools to optimize advertising efforts based on detailed consumer insights.

“Oh my God. Okay. So travel companies are addicted to Google ads. It's like cocaine. And The reason for that is it's bottom of funnel, it's search intent, and it converts. And you know what? 50 percent of the travel companies I talk to, and that's a low conservative estimate, don't have conversion tracking configured properly.”

In an upcoming episode of the Everything AI in Travel podcast Brennen talks about the transformative impact of AI on understanding and targeting customer behaviors more effectively, especially in paid marketing. You don’t want to miss it.

Check Propellic out for yourself here.

If you are sitting pretty on Google search, be afraid

Janette Roush from New York City Tourism shared a post with a link to a Fast Company story this week which spelled out the potential end to Google search dominance and the threat that poses to those overly reliant on organic Google search traffic. I mean that’s a pretty sweet spot to be really, but if you are the main voice of your destination and its tourism marketing efforts, it is probably one you should own.

The TL;DR on the Fast Company story is that Google is drowning in ai created spam and if that continues, searchers will just go elsewhere now there are options like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Bing (!!!! - what a comeback).

In Roush’s own words “Tourism marketers need to be thinking a couple of years down the road - how will you drive site views with less organic traffic? Or more importantly, how will you support your organization’s mission without relying on your site content to tell the story of your destination? In the meantime, diversify your marketing platforms.”

This isn’t just a DMO thing. Every tourism marketer needs to be preparing.

FREE ai productivity course - 30 mins with Allie K. Miller (LIVE)

Allie Miller was most recently the Global Head of Machine Learning for Startups & Venture Capital at Amazon Web Services (AWS) where she launched the global ML-core business from scratch. Prior to that, Allie worked at IBM, spearheading development across computer vision, conversation, data, and regulation In short, Allie is globally a recognised top gun when it comes to ai.

Allie’s clients include Salesforce, Slack, Intel and Mastercard.

In the course you’ll peek at the AI tools and platforms that have saved Allie and her team 2,000 people hours.

It is totally FREE. You have to watch it live. There will be no recording. It is on at 3am in Australia and I’m getting up for it.

Grab your seat here. This course is on in the next few hours. Don’t come back to this later, it’ll be too late.

Making movies with ai

One of the bigger more general ai stories to come out in recent days was the making of the first ever, end to end video clip for a song created completely with ai which I saw via this Jaeden Schafer post on Linked In.

As Schafer very rightly predicts, “This is going to get crazy good!”

In other commentary I sw around the web, the secret here was in creating short vids no longer than 4 seconds each and then knitting them together. This is exactly the same that we’ve found in creating relevant video content to sit behind the audio we create at HandbookFM. The other option is just avatar style talking heads, which gets old pretty quick in a learning environment.

That is unless you go for something a bit more gimmicky, like Linked In founder Reid Hoffman did by creating an ai clone of himself and then interviewing himself.

Working with clients we’ve used similar techniques (minus the video avatar) to create the company or product target personas and then by loading those into a custom GPT that the marketing team can return to at any time and quiz them about upcoming campaigns or marketing messages. This often surfaces things the team hadn’t thought about in advance.

Speaking of clones. This guy just cloned himself and did a job interview completely run by an AI. No news yet if he made it through to the next stage.

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:

Viator turns to ai for its first ever brand campaign

Bloomberg covered the inside story of Viator starting to shift its marketing spend away from just the bottom of funnel performance ads and into “telling stories about (the) company’s identity to connect with customers” via a brand campaign.

But where does ai come into all this? Working with Fig Agency they “used an an artificial intelligence-driven analysis called Story Data. The tool reviewed all the visual, audio and text where the brand and its competitors showed up — from ads to social media posts and even packaging — and classified the topics and types of stories being told.”

Laurel Greatrix, vice president of brand and communications at Viator said “We were very quickly able to see this is where we’re going to join the sea of sameness and these three areas are where we might stand out.”

Using ai to handle reviews

CNBC got into the nitty gritty of reviews this week to ask whether using ai to answer your customer reviews takes away the human touch the reviewer might want to see in return?

Reviews are one of the first and early use cases to get taken up with generative ai. They are in many ways, a perfect use case because it is a language based task, one that is often not done that well by the human and in many cases just not done at all. This is both a poor user experience - because everyone wants to be heard - but you also get rewarded by the review site, be it Trip Advisor, Google or Booking by going that extra mile and giving a reply. The beauty now, is that extra mile is just an extra millimetre!

I sat down with one of the major players this week, Tobias Roelen-Blasberg, Co-Founder at MARA to get a better understanding of the benefits they are bringing their customers and how they were creating a business out of what I saw as a feature. And I was surprised. Writing the review reply is just the tip of the iceberg. The real beauty for the business being reviewed is the ability to listen to your customer, evaluate your strengths and weaknesses and those of your frontline employees. This isn’t just reviews. This is core business & product intelligence.

Other head slapping moments for me in the conversation were replying to reviews where stars were given but no comment left, which most would just brush over or reply the same to each of them from a copy and paste - neither great solutions. Instead, the hotel can say something new and different, pulling out their USP’s and dropping in some keywords. The review response after all is as much for the future booker as it is for the actual reviewer.

Mara currently is focussed on hotels, but I saw a lot of potential here for Tour, Attraction and Activity businesses and Tobi has agreed to very special deal for 5 from that realm who are willing to provide feedback on extra features they would love to see, like automated guide appraisals prior to any one-on-ones or counting guide mentions if that is a review bonus factor.

Please email me if interested in joining the beta group.

How Perplexity build product

More product marketing than pure marketing, but this was a share I had to make this week as Lenny Rachitsky interviewed the team building Perplexity. The headlines were:

1. AI-first: They’ve been asking AI questions about every step of the company-building process, including “How do I launch a product?” Employees are encouraged to ask AI before bothering colleagues.

2. Organized like slime mold: They optimize for minimizing coordination costs by parallelizing as much of each project as possible.

3. Small teams: Their typical team is two to three people. Their AI-generated (highly rated) podcast was built and is run by just one person. (Is that unusal? My less highly rated one is also run by one person… 👋 )

4. Few managers: They hire self-driven ICs and actively avoid hiring people who are strongest at guiding other people’s work.

5. A prediction for the future: Johnny said, “If I had to guess, technical PMs or engineers with product taste will become the most valuable people at a company over time.”

To get down into the how and why - you need to and should read the full thing.

Google Maps is adding AI features to make it more like a local guide

OK, I’ve run out of pure marketing stories but this one caught my eye and thought it was a valuable share. This is not Google Gemini but just plain old Google Maps. So this is not trip planning but more in the moment, serendipitious discovery.

“The result will go something like this, according to Google's blog post: You might ask Maps for "places with a vintage vibe in SF," and it would give you lists of places arranged into categories—record stores, vintage clothing stores, a cool coffee shop, and so on.

You could then further specify that you want lunch, so Maps would dig into its vintage results for a place that suits you. Other examples include activities for a rainy day or things to do with kids.”

Time will tell if these results are actually any good - but the beauty is we can all check at home, without risking a bad experience when on the road by trying it for the first time then.

What are others spending on?

Finishing up with some data so you can decide if you want to splurge a bit on the ai marketing, Business Travel News Europe was one of the many outlets to report on the findings of the Business Travel Show survey. The highlights were:

- Improvements in Booking Travel: 42% see this as the biggest opportunity presented by AI in travel management.

- More Efficient Travel Programs: Chosen by 18% of buyers surveyed as a significant opportunity.

- Cost Savings: Identified by 16% of respondents as a key benefit.

- Improved Duty of Care: Selected by 13% as an important advantage.

On the concerns column we saw:

- Data Privacy Concerns: Identified by one-third of respondents (34%) as a major concern with AI application. Presumably they mean their own data and IP being sucked into and training the LLM’s for anyone else to then just ask for.

- Limited Ability to Handle Complex Situations: Cited by a quarter of the respondents (26%).

- Deskilling of Travel Professionals: Selected by 16% of survey respondents as a concern.

- Depersonalization of Business Relationships: Noted by 15% as their biggest concern.

How to work with Tony

The calendar is now very full.

Please email me to deep dive into the specific opportunities within your business you might wish to explore. By interviewing key internal stakeholders we can identify which of your bottlenecks are most ripe for an ai powered fix and the approach to take to fix those across a month long project. The earliest I am available for this is now July with very limited availability.

For the fully committed business who now understands the transformative power of this technology, the final phase is to move to build your own internal “AI centre of excellence” which is combination of building an ai culture in your business by taking a human centric approach as well as building out or buying in the best solution to each identified issue. Please email me for more details on any or all of these phases.

Want to follow in Propellic’s footsteps and get in front of a highly engaged audience of travel decision makers by sponsoring the newsletter? We are booking 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 through to the podcasts (there is a brand new episode up live now)! Thanks! 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