Why Amazon will most likely buy TikTok

This week Amazon quietly closed its TikTok style “Inspire” feature. They had tried also once before with another similar venture called spark which ran from 2017-19. Inspire also lasted 2 years having debuted in 2022.

According to Jessica Thorpe in her Creatormonics newsletter “Millions of dollars were thrown at creators to get the flywheel going and build a user base of content makers so that they could test and learn how customers would engage in the app and how that social proof content would drive shopping behaviors.”

The problem this time around according to Thorpe was “the over emphasis around 'celebrities' and high-end influencers really confused the everyday customer of Amazon and really left the experience feeling a bit confused.”

Meanwhile, TikTok and Amazon have been working together for some time on building Amazon integration into the TikTok shop native experience in the TikTok app. Announced in August last year “The collaboration between these two digital giants represents more than just another business deal—it could potentially reshape the future of online shopping.” according to Carbon6.

You see Amazon is already the 3rd largest advertiser on TikTok and so it probably makes sense to be paying that money to itself and I suspect it has seen traction in the native TikTok store where it saw very little in trying to spark that social excitement inside its shopping app.

You’ve got to go meet the people where they are.

What would this mean for travel? It would mean a huge sidelining because Amazon has never mastered selling travel and it would for sure concentrate on being able to sell all the things it does have (ie it is the Everything store) first, and then maybe look at other categories.

Don’t expect Amazon to come and help you get social commerce going for your travel brand. You have to go meet your customers where they already are, which is hanging out with the creators they already trust on the platforms they want to be on.

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

Check out more here to join brands already being sold his way like Contiki, G Adventures & Globus.

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

Is AI ready to replace tour operators?

So this is a pretty loaded question and if you want to go really deep on it, I encourage you to follow Alex Bainbridge on X or LinkedIn (or just join the Slack group associated with this newsletter where we are kept well informed!).

This week however we got another opinion from William Bicknell the founder of Felioh.

This comes on the back of the Open AI release of their operator platform. Bicknell breaks down some important definitions for us:

“The difference between AI agents and workflows:

Workflows are a series of predefined steps, which may include a call to an AI model like OpenAI or Claude (from Anthropic).

Agents are where the next step is not predefined but the AI models will generate it.”

Bicknell gives an examples of automating payment reconciliations as a workflow. An extremely boring and annoying job for anyone, anywhere. But of course, also critical.

In terms of agents the analysis come out thus:

Most useful for tasks that are:

• Valuable and complex

• Have low cost of error/monitoring

• Can benefit from iteration

That’s a pretty wide basket.

The other insight is that currently, consumer facing agents are way overhyped and small time-saving automations are way underhyped. And I think that is about right. But lets look again in June and then December.

Airbnb & AI

Being a public company now, we are guaranteed to hear from Airbnb once a quarter guaranteed. Even if they have nothing to say or announce. Which was pretty much the case this month, except they also need to answer analyst questions - and of course, most of those questions are about AI.

This quarter was no different, so what did we learn.

Firstly, Airbnb have rebuilt the App from the ground up. “This summer’s release is going to be significantly larger than past ones and I expect the ones after that will be larger.” said Chesky.

This isn’t because the App was necessarily broken for its (previous) core purpose of matching customers with accommodations but more setting the framework for the future. “We are not going to launch separate apps or separate brands. We're going to have one app, one brand, the Airbnb app. We want the Airbnb app, kind of similar to Amazon, to be one place you go for all of your traveling and living needs.”

Chesky thinks the current version of AI basically benefits every company more or less equally (with a small advantage to small startups) but it is what you can do at the application layer where you can accrue a big advantage.

Airbnb seem happy to be second mover here. Clean their data and infrastructure and wait until the tech matures into something more exceptional via agentic workflows.

TechCrunch reported, “other companies were working on integrations around trip planning, but that he thinks it’s too soon for AI trip planning.” on Chesky’s comments.

I saw a comment somewhere this week on the topic where someone likened the phase we are in, to the advent of television where the first move most made was to just put their radio shows onto the TV. That’s not the Airbnb style.

Another pundit Jeff Fromm did a great analysis where he thought Airbnb could utilise partnerships (& API’s) to build out all the experiences we typically need when holidaying:

“Imagine if Airbnb could help you:

• Get a little better deal with Uber or Lyft

• Partner with an rental car brand with a strong local network like Enterprise so you can access a car for a subset of your trip as appropriate

• Help you get concert or sporting tickets in the local market

• Give you access to some local restaurants that are often hard to get a reservation at.

• Find you a modest discount at the museum, Zoo or other interesting place near you.

• Make it advantageous to explore the local area and collect points (like a scavenger hunt) when you shop, dine and find local cultural experiences

• Partner with a travel credit card company to give consumer extra points and exceptional incremental value when they purchase with Airbnb”

Ultimately I think these types of “experiences” are both simpler and more profound in their impact of the overall holiday outcome than trying to build out an experience network of people run experiences.

However we’ve seen Airbnb hire in some experts from the mainstream experiences industry recently, Stephen Oddo being the most publicised, but those paying attention might have seen at least one other significant advisory hire! Did you catch it??

All AI roads lead to Home(page)

The dynamic SEO duo of Brennan Bliss and Kevin Indig have done it again with some critical new information about AI search.

Bliss, reporting on Indig’s latest research came out these headlines:

“But here's the interesting part for travel brands: 22% of AI chatbot traffic goes to homepages (vs 10% from Google). And these homepage visitors are showing stronger engagement signals.

What this means for travel companies:
1. Your homepage just got more important
2. Those "best places to visit" blog posts might not matter as much
3. AI visitors are coming with more context and higher intent”

How’s your Homepage looking?

Note: Both Brennan and Kevin are past podcast guest on the Everything AI in Travel podcast

In other AI optimisation news, Search Engine Land dropped new info to show AI overviews are growing, especially as search queries by the public lengthen. Queries of over 8 words now have a 25% chance of getting an AI overview in return.

What Tourism CEO’s want to know about AI

Former Skift Editor Greg Oates this week dropped a summary of the many conversations he had been having at the CEO level, in particular with heads of large Destination Marketing Organisations (DMO).

Oates who recently finished a stint at mega agency MMGY to take up the post of Director of AI Advocacy at GuideGeek broke down those conversations to 5 core questions that are (or should be) on the minds of travel CEO’s everywhere:

1. How can I create AI policy that serves our organization but doesn't suppress experimentation among staff? (Interestingly, policy did not come up that much with the CEOs I spoke with.)

2. How do we need to develop our websites, content and data to rank higher in AI search? How is AI SEO different, and the same, as old SEO?

3. What are existing AI chat platforms accomplishing, how are visitors using them, and how are they influencing travel decision making and purchase behavior?

4. If AI is not just for marketing, what does the ecosystem of AI tools for all departments look like across the organization. And what do they do in terms of increasing productivity, creativity and quality?

5. How do I get staff to buy in? We know AI is an imperative for our organization's competitive advantage and relevance. And we know AI is an imperative for employees for their professional growth and marketability. But how do we get people to really believe?

Greg joined me on the podcast this week and we talked through all the points here.

Costco teams up with Travelport to leverage AI into travel offering

Costco has 139 million members and this week announced that “"Costco Travel is focused on delivering more value to its members by giving them more choice and better offers when planning their trips, and Travelport provides the seamless, modern travel retailing experience that their customers have come to expect.”

“It will introduce artificial intelligence through Travelport+ with the goal of making trip searches faster and more convenient — ultimately benefiting members.

Costco Travel provides travel services throughout the U.S., Canada and the U.K.”

Amazon hasn’t been able to sell travel, but can Costco?

It wasn’t mentioned in the release and maybe it hasn’t been though about by the brands themselves (or maybe already exists), but being a member-based organisation that has already done the hard work of getting members to pay for the membership, they should be able to access below market rates like other travel clubs do. This could be a significant factor in taking market share.

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:

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AI deployed to track damage to cultural sites in real-time

A cool article in Wanderlust this week about AI being used to track damage to cultural sites in real time.

The AI scans satellite photos of sites to see how things are changing and then can send alerts when things don’t look right.

In recent times we’ve seen things like the destruction of Palmyra in Syria but too late to do anything about it. Hopefully tools like this can help.

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:

• How Yanjola are working with Google’s new Agent API

• Excellent piece about whether hoteliers are ready for AI agents with comments from many well known voices in the industry

• Dr Poppy Crum analyses AI in managed travel

• How some UK firms are embracing AI

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 caught up with Ed Morris from Equator AI and had a great chat about AI + big data and sustainability.

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Most clicked last week was the link to Perplexity’s move on hotels but it was only fractionally (and disturbingly) ahead of the Muppets ad for Booking……….

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