Expedia is here to “Build the world’s most loved AI powered travel apps”

Expedia is here to “Build the world’s most loved AI peered travel apps”

In this story about Expedia doing lay offs last week was a little hidden nugget that caught our eye. In a copy of an internal email that Yahoo got their hands on, Tript Singh Lamba, an Expedia Group senior vice president is quoted as saying “As we have begun looking to 2024, it is important that we are ready to ‘Build the world’s most loved AI powered travel apps.’ These changes to our org will help us take the next steps to move quickly and stay tightly aligned while simplifying where we can,”.

The “Build the world’s most loved AI powered apps” screams of an internal mantra or company level objective that we assume would be well known across the entire company. Seems Expedia are all in on AI. Game on!

“Only 18% of US adults have used ChatGPT”

This article isn’t travel specific but it is extremely relevant. When you’ve got your head in something everyday, it is easy to forget that as an early adopter - you are by definition ‘early’.

Still 18% seems pretty low but maybe the more important figure is the “41% of people ages 18-29 using it” stat. If you are testing or seeking validation, maybe test here!

As “Only 19% of employed US adults working across all different industries who have heard of ChatGPT felt the technology would have a major impact on their jobs”, it seems the general populace are not too worried about the impacts of AI.

Michelin meets the digital era: Personalized recommendations powered by AI

Really enjoyed this piece as a practical guide of how a brand is utilizing AI to better cater for their customers in terms of perosnalisation.

The Michelin guide have teamed up with AI personalisation specialists Qloo “which uses AI to predict taste for any target audience and map relationships within and between cultural domains.” The theory here is that people who like certain people and things in one area of culture are more likely to like similar things in another area. By knowing a little bit about you, the system can make predictions on these other things. As Qloo CEO Alex Elias explains “You could type in Sonny Rollins, the jazz musician and see recommendations. There’s over 11,000 people in our database who’ve explicitly declared they like Sonny Rollins and gave their opinions on many, many other topics. So, if you like Sonny Rollins there’s a very high likelihood you will like these other things, too.”

If interested in trying yourself then “Most enterprise integrations start in the 6-figures annually”.

In travel specifically we’ve seen the startup Tango doing something similar with its own internal surveying.

Travel advisors should counter AI with ‘experiential intelligence’

This long and empassioned piece coming in defence of human travel advisors brought up the idea of “experiential intelligence”. The idea that AI has never been, can never go and so………. what can it really know when compared to the human advisor. I think that’s a fair point but it didn’t really cover what happens when the human travel advisor also hasn’t been there?

You can read the whole article or I’ve created a summarised audio version here if you prefer to just get a quick overview by listening along.

HINT: You can also just get the quick audio overview of this entire newsletter if you prefer? It comes out the same time as the written one and you can sign up here.

Sabre & Google engineers come together to work on 3 distinct travel use cases for AI

This article provides a fascinating insight into the problem areas in the travel journey that the might of Google and Sabre together thought were the biggest and best to tackle first.

Those 3 areas were:

1. improving self-service in customer care and support

2. delivering trip proposals via email

3. simplifying automated refunds

The focus here was on “solving real-life business problems” & using “the power of generative AI in driving transformative solutions.”

How does this compare to the problems you are working on?

The main topics in the Slack group this week were:

• A framework for evaluating whether you actually even need AI in your product or not

• ChatGPT “wrappers” - their merits or otherwise

  These insights you can only get in the Slack group.

Enjoying the content so far and know someone else who might benefit from it? Forward it on to them and they can click this button below to join.

“AI should be treated as a complementary feature for people to use of rather than their eventual replacement”

In this article this week in Forbes, eDreans ODIGEO CEO Dana Dunne lays out the case for people when it comes to AI.

Dana suggests that future hiring practices might need to change to ensure the new workforce coming through has the skills and knowledge to work with the AI tools. It’s a great take. Dunne says a key pillar at eDreams ODIGEO integration is that AI is a co-pilot “where AI outputs are validated by our expert human team”.

Leading AI travel expert App – Mappls KOGO raises just over $1M (USD)

More movement on the funding front with $1M bagged by Mappls for the KOGO product. The article from APN News was full of supurlatives including this quote from Praveer Kochhar, Co-founder and CTO of Mappls KOGO, “We have achieved a milestone that the travel tech industry has been aspiring for – the confluence of Geo-Intelligence, real-time data, Generative AI and a global travel ecosystem, that delivers personalized bookable recommendations.” The app is rated 3.8 in the apple App store.

What we did love was a focus on the hyper local experiences although not too sure about the example given of “even where to feed pigeons”. Please don’t feed pigeons.

Investment came from MyMapIndia who had previously invested in the business.

Are you in India? Have you given it a go? Let us know.

This week we have very special guest presenters taking us through the demo of an AI powered trip planner. I’m pleased to introduce Jason Calcanis and Sunny Madra who will be taking us through the offering from www.copilot2trip.com 

It’s awesome to have my new friends Jason and Sunny* (*we don’t actually know each other) take time out of their busy schedules do a deep dive here* (*it’s really just on their “This Week in Startups” podcast - but lots of great questions asked! Essential viewing for others getting into this I think).

Got some questions of your own? No worries because Copilot2Trip Founder Islam Midov is one of the many quality people in Everything AI in Travel slack group. You can join free and ask him anything you want! It’s that sort of place!

Tip! The best way to embed knowledge is to talk about what you’ve learned with someone else. Share this email with a curious friend with whom you can brainstorm the ideas.

This job posting at Origin caught our eye to give an insight into how some companies are already leveraging AI. It say that at Origin “Our travel experts combine the power of machine learning, artificial intelligence, and human expertise to craft the perfect itinerary, down to the smallest detail.”

This job specifically is about “‘protecting’ TC time resource from unqualified leads with low potential”. TC’s in this case are Travel Coordinators, the humans pulling the itineraries together. They aren’t hiring someone to protect my time!!

It’s actually a little surprising to us that Origin haven’t embraced AI for this task? Many customer conversations we’ve had as part of our Venture Lab and via the consultancy here have exposed this a core pain point many are looking to get solved and it is something we are actively building.

We are utilising AI to work with the customer in getting the bulk of the itinerary nailed down and then assess the likelihood of the customer actually booking, before passing them through. Those unlikely to book still get value with a beautifully presented and branded itinerary they can go book themselves (we all know people do this!!) but without being a time suck on the human staff. If that your FIT department is snowed down fielding inquiry unlikely to book or spending hours piecing together itineraries in word docs for same, whilst burning new inquiry - feel free to reply to this email for more details. We’d love to get 2 or 3 more enterprise size customers into our upcoming trials.

Have you got an AI role you need filled? Reply to this email with a link to the job ad and we’ll try and fit the best one’s in here. We’ve clearly go the most passionate group of AI + Travel people all gathered here in one place so should be a great spot for finding great talent.

Most clicked last week was…. turns out the Beehiiv analytics only show up to higher tier subscribers than myself. We need to get to 2500 subscribers here in this newsletter for that to happen. You can help! See the first post here in this newsletter about paying-it-forward. Most clicked will return when we hit the number!

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