You can fake a lot of things with AI but you can’t fake this

This article on AI influencers from Dulani Porter at SPARK caught my eye this week.

The article points out that the $24B influencer industry is starting to be infiltrated by AI created influencers with a reference article suggesting that across all industries that penetration could be as high as 29%!

Look, for a talking head to sell a Coke or a kettle maybe that is OK. Social is now becoming a volume game (what is your volume plan?). But this isn’t going to work in travel.

The article talks about Germany’s “Emma Experiment” which we covered here almost a year ago and also the talented and multilingual Radhika Subramaniam in India but goes on to mention the obvious pitfalls where “commenters wondered how a “fake person in a fake place” could inspire anyone to visit a real destination. Emma’s debut highlighted a fundamental problem: compelling travel content relies on emotion and lived experience. AI can mimic style, but it struggles to convey what it feels like to taste a meal, hike a trail, or connect with local people.”

In talking about the upsides of AI influencers, the article leans towards brands being able to “avoid airfare, lodging, and daily fees.” As many Videreo clients like Holiday Pirates already know, you don’t need to pay these things if your budget is limited or you want to really stretch and maximise it.

We can find you awesome real people who have already visited your destination who can re-mix something new for your campaign. No travel costs. No lodging. No daily fee.

Or we can build you an always-on creator program that uses serendipity to intercept those already travelling to your destination.

You can be creative without being fake and you can minimize expenses by working smarter.

The article surmises correctly that only real humans can bring trusted authenticity and cultural sensitivity and with some smart automations we can also deliver users quality information (that then becomes the brand or destinations data trove) 24/7.

Videreo is the place for brands and creators to meet & create a new sales pipeline together.

Contact me to learn how we can make this happen for you.

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

OpenAI says travel bookings are coming to ChatGPT (but they might cure cancer first)

The biggest news I didn’t bring you in my absence last week was Sam Altman confirming that ChatGPT is coming after travel bookings. One day.

Nicholas Sitter did a great job of finding the important travel bits in a much longer piece about all things happening at OpenAI including this most important nugget: “If ChatGPT finds you the best hotel and lets you book it in one click, taking a small, non-influential cut — that’s fine. We’ll do this for travel at some point.”

Sitter lays out five conclusions from this statement:

1. Trust is the new distribution moat.

2. Commissions will collapse and OTAs will have to cut their margins.

3. The New Monetization Model

4. Ads on the Edge

5. AI visibility will define winners

Others in the comments mentioned that OpenAI will likely just be a new meta player that feeds the OTA’s. That is the simplest way to plumb this out and how most people building with API’s end up working. So commissions won’t collapse at all.

BUT in this post I did about a week ago (that LinkedIn decided to show to basically no-one, despite it possibly being the most important piece of information I forwarded on in 2025 🤷 ) Alena Panshina laid out the case that MCP is dead (before you even learned what the acronym stands for!) and instead it makes far more sense for the host AI (eg ChatGPT) to actually build a little purpose-built agent (a piece of code) that would go and execute just this job specifically. Here is how Alena explains it:

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗼𝗹𝗱 𝘄𝗮𝘆 (MCP): Load ALL tool definitions → AI processes everything → Tools execute one by one

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗻𝗲𝘄 𝘄𝗮𝘆 (Code Execution + Skills):

1. AI gets tool interfaces as simple code files

2. AI writes a few lines of code for your specific task

3. Code handles the data flow directly between tools

4. AI only sees the final results that matter

This eliminates the need to plumb with API’s and could drive bookings direct to suppliers with just a small Chat tax on the way through.

This is all great, but Sam also said that whilst booking hotels is important and they’ll get there someday, he is much more interested in solving big problems in science and medicine…. so……….

Google and travel planning v?.0

My alerts this week were flooded by this story about Google’s new push into travel planning. But before I saw any of those I saw this post from inside Google via Eugenie Lam.

So the big new thing in Canvas in AI mode. “Canvas is a tool in AI Mode that gives you a space to organize plans and projects over time. And now, you can use Canvas to build travel plans that are customized for your specific needs. Just tell AI Mode what type of trip you’re planning and the recommendations you’re looking for, then select the option to “Create Canvas.””

The experience (as shown in a video, because it is currently only available to US users who have signed up for Labs) looks like a rich multimedia experience that is then customisable by the now ubiquitous chat interface.

Google also announced that their Flight Deals product is now rolled out to over 200 countries after its initial trial debut in the US, Canada and India. I guess it was a success!

The announcement also covered the booking of tickets + restaurant reservations directly inside of Gemini. This brings agentic booking to the very front door of travel with tour tickets being an obvious next place to go. For this round they’ve partnered with OpenTable, Resy, Tock, Ticketmaster, StubHub, SeatGeek, Vivid Seats, Booksy, Fresha and Vagaro.

They also confirmed their commitment to being a partner to the travel industry. “Building a helpful experience for travelers requires deep collaboration with the industry, and we’re already working with partners including Booking.com, Choice Hotels International, Expedia, IHG Hotels & Resorts, Marriott International and Wyndham Hotels & Resorts to make this possible. We’re committed to partnering with travel companies of every size so you have all the best options at your fingertips.”

Interested to see what ‘small’ travel companies get partnership opportunities….. haven’t seen a lot of that TBH.

Apparently both Booking and Expedia stock fell on the back of these announcements.

Update: How is AI really being used in travel.

Another cracking pieces this week from one of my favourite industry reads - the TNMT newsletter from Lufthansa innovation Hub.

Always well researched, in this article the team have broken down the exceptional examples across the traveller’s journey, picking 3 real life and now deeply embedded working examples of AI.

What is your favourite?

Also how AI is really being used, a personal story

If Google flooded the zone on PR this week, every week there is a glut of lazy (probably AI written) article from obscure regional publications about how someone (apparently) used AI on their trip and here is what happened. They are normally a straight skip for me and almost never end up in here.

This week however I saw one from The Verge - and I clicked. And I’m glad I did. Because this one was actually written by The Verge’s co-founder Thomas Ricker whilst he is out swanning around in a van travelling Europe it seems indefinitely (luck him).

Ricker tells of a success story using ChatGPT and Gemini interchangeably and compares the results he gets from LLM’s to those he just gets from Google. He asks the LLM’s to find him charming villages within a short drive of where he is and where (crucially) he can park his RV.

I like this because it is real. It mixes his exact personal circumstances and needs and gets a definitive answer, which for Ricker at least - is almost always correct and often surprisingly good. This mirrors my own experience from a Summer trip to the Balkans with my vegetarians who dislike gluten. On trip at least, the horizontal players, the AI platforms themselves, excel. I find it really hard to see others winning in this space. For “planning” on the fly - they are unmatched.

What I also like about this article is Ricker then brought the conversation back to zero-click search, something that deeply impacts his own business. He says “As clicks fail, websites are going to need to show more ads to make up revenue… this sludge is going to make the web experience worse, which is going to drive more people back to AI.”

Boompop raises $41M to solve event planning

If you’ve ever planned an event and have even the smallest understanding of AI, you’d understand why this is $41M well invested into startup Boompop.

At Urban Adventures, we ran an annual conference for all our partners around the world. We did these in super cool places like Hoi An or Lisbon or Isla Mujeres. For our partners, these weren’t just a learning and collaborating experience, this was part of their annual vacation. A tax break with benefits.

For my team however, it meant one FTE out of action for about 6 months. These things are hard to organise!

With a massive sluggish incumbent in CVENT, I predicted back in June of 2024 that this was going to be an area to watch for startup activity. And now here we are.

Boompop is “AI-powered platform, which helps companies design, book, and manage in-person events at scale.” The platform “is built to simplify every step of event creation, including destination exploration, detailed itineraries, guest websites, contract management, RSVPs, and 24-hour guest support. The platform serves both professional planners and employees who are responsible for event duties in addition to their primary roles.” AMEN. Oh, to get even half of the FTE’s time back on to core business.

CEO Healey Cypher is coming on the podcast soon to tell us all more.

They aren’t the only ones winning in this space, with fellow start-up Nowadays taking out both start-up awards at the Business Travel Show America Innovation Faceoff. Nowadays filters down the search with AI but then goes on to use AI to start calling around and gathering info as part of RFP processes. I’ll try and get CEO Anna Sun onto the pod also - because I think this is a really exciting area.

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: Propellic

Huge News from Propellic: They're alpha testing the world's first tool purpose-built to optimize travel company visibility in LLMs. Here's how it works:

LLMs turn chunks of content (from everywhere) into numbers (embeddings, to be precise) during training.

It then stores the patterns.

You write a prompt, and the LLM then turns your prompt into numbers (more embeddings).

Then it runs those numbers through a neural network to predict how they relate.

Then, you get an answer that's more numbers (tokens), strung together, converted to text.

The News: We've been building a tool that turns your website content and your prompt into numbers with the same technology that the big LLMs use.

We're actively running alpha tests to use the tool to optimize websites for LLMs - and it's a tool that maybe .5-1% of SEO/GEO firms out there have even thought about building - much less have it today.

We'll be rolling this out to our SEO/GEO clients in the weeks to come.

Another tool in our toolbox that's helping 50+ travel brands win when growth is not optional.

Reach out to Brennen if interested to learn more.

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).

It’s priced for bootstrapped startups but also accepting larger companies too.

Shadow AI is putting businesses at risk…

Shadow AI, if you aren’t aware is when your employees get sick of waiting for your guidance on how to use AI within your business and just get stuck in so they can do things more productively (for You).

In this article, this is framed as a massive issue that can be solved not through communicating the company strategy, rolling out the infrastructure or educating the workforce but rather by introducing a policy to tell people to stop doing it!

In the articles own words: “Unregulated AI use is becoming so widespread by the travel trade that agencies are being forced to implement official company policies to avoid data leaks, compliance breaches and reputational damage, say industry experts.”

OK - the article is a little more helpful than that. One expert says “that embracing AI proactively allowed agencies to set clear frameworks for responsible and secure use.” and another chimes ““We are encouraging companies to not sanction people that are using tools that they do not support.” Phew.

Honestly, if you haven’t done the work at this point to start to build AI into your company, that’s on you. This newsletter is nearly 2 years old and this is the exact reason I started it. So you didn’t get caught trying to hold back the ocean.

The ocean is here. Human’s are always going to find the way to be most efficient and by forcing them to be inefficient (ie continue to do mind numbing tasks to cobble together tech stacks that don’t talk to one another) then you’ll probably soon find you have less employees and none who want to join.

I’d love to say its not too late but the best I can offer is don’t wait one more second. If you don’t know where to start, please reach out.

Slack Group!

Podcasts and Sponsors

Podcasts now on Spotify and Apple Podcasts:

New podcasts are now showing up on Spotify and Apple Podcasts for your easy listening pleasure!

This week we got the first FREE tool in our educational series: The Travel Expert released. The Travel Expert will help you build you strategy on attracting high value customers and enhancing your travel career. It is loaded with highly researched prompts that give high quality outputs. You don’t need to think about prompting structure - just use natural language to tell it about your business and what you wany to accomplish and it will build the strategy for you.

Partner with Us

Most clicked last week was the link to our recent Videreo campaign with Intrepid. Thanks for taking a look. Yell out if we can help you with your own creator program.

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