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I was fortunate to sit down with Propellic founder, Brennen Bliss, this week for an upcoming podcast episode (due around mid May) and he dropped a number of insightful nuggets.

Brennen suggests a strategic approach to content creation using AI, emphasizing the need to produce material that is both engaging and authoritative. He mentions the potential of AI tools to assist in content creation but warns against relying solely on these technologies without adding a unique perspective or expert insight, which remains crucial for maintaining quality and relevance.

“Feel free to use AI. There's no reason you can't use AI, but make sure you give it the unique information about Your property, about your experience, about your airline, whatever industry you are in travel with your cruise, your, your media company, you need to, you need to have something. Above and beyond what's available out there.”

Look out for the full pod when it drops and you can check Propellic out for yourself here.

Tripped Up - why trip planning startups always struggle 😟 

I mentioned at the beginning of last week’s newsletter that the Tripped Up webinar had just occurred. You can watch the whole thing which you’ll find at the bottom of this round up on the webinar host Phocuswire.

Some snippets from this round up are “The bottom line,” Coletta said, “is it's just very hard to get repeat usage that translates into any kind of significant revenue.” Coletta being the webinar host Mike Coletta. “Most people actually enjoy trip planning,” Coletta said. “They enjoy researching the destination and things to do and things to see. It can be fun. It builds excitement, anticipation.”

Guest on the show Gilad Berenstein also did his own recap. The TL:DR there was “Trip discovery and planning may be too far from the transaction - The Cost of Customer Acquisition may be too high for planning revenues to sustain - The concept of Traveler Lifetime Value in consumer Travel may be a false hope - It's hard to build a business on a cut of a cut of a cut.” Oh yeah! Been there and lived that one. The full post is well worth a look.

Trip Planner Mindtrip launches 😀 

Reminding me of those immortal words from Rage Against the Machine: “F@ck You, I want do what you tell me…” Mindtrip, the startup with the largest seed funding so far in the generative ai versions of Trip Planning launched soon after the webinar referenced above..

At least part of the answers around customer acquisition came via the launch for this startup. “In addition to its consumer-facing product, Mindtrip plans to provide its tools to travel industry partners, including tourism boards, travel agencies, airlines and hotel chains. Many in the industry see AI assistants as an important emerging distribution channel.”

It just so happened that I interviewed CEO Andy Moss for the podcast this week also, where he confirmed that this is a B2B2C play, a road he and many of his team have been down before with their previous businesses.

Listening to Moss on the pod, I have to say, I find it hard to bet against the team that has been assembled.

The Mindtrip edition should be out next week. If you receive this newsletter then you’ll also get a solus message when it comes out. It is compulsory listening.

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:

Monthly reminder to follow Tom Goodwin

Goodwin is my favourite contrarian on Linked In. I find his posts almost impossible to scroll past because I love to hear the counter argument.

This week Goodwin schooled us in the history of technology

“With every new profound* technology there are two stages. Stage One - When technologies are new, we play with them, we experiment with them, we apply them. We take existing systems, paradigms, workflows, machinery, and business models and we augment them with technology. Stage Two - When technologies are understood, we think about what they mean. We build new systems, new paradigms, new workflows, new machinery, and new business models and we rethink them around that technology. Stage One is where there is the most chaos, the most investment, the most uncertainty, the most complexity, the most doubt. And the business case for change seems most unseeable. Stage Two is where there is the greatest profitability, the greatest efficiency gains, the greatest step-change in output quality.”

In my own consulting, most are already at least trying to conceptualise stage 2 for their business. That doesn’t mean they skipped Stage One but we’ve certainly rushed through it a lot faster than other technological paradigm shifts and that has been part of the understanding process.

Yes “another chatbot” is not the high point of this technological breakthrough, but it’s a decent start on learning what the tech can and can’t currently do and using that as a frame to understand what you and your business might be able to do by re-thinking everything around your market opportunities and scale possibilities and recalibrating on what the pathway to achieve these things could be.

ai problems in the Yukon

Canadian ai consultant Peter Pilarski has been out touring some of the more remote parts of the country to get a feel for how ai is perceived and to flesh out the solvable problems for real operators on the ground. He reports 3 main findings:

-Deep Engagement from Senior Leaders

-Addressing Seasonal Staff Training Challenges

-Enhancing Customer Service

It is awesome to see the curiosity is finding its way down through the levels as operators of all types seek efficiency gains and solutions to entrenched problems (more so since COVID) like staff shortages. No one’s job is being taken if there is no one there to do the job!

On this point, Pilarski explains “A recurring theme was the substantial effort involved in training seasonal staff and embedding corporate culture efficiently. Leaders are curious about how AI can streamline these processes and ensure consistent adherence to company policies, transforming a significant pain point into an area of strength.”

This is exactly the burning problem I discovered on the other side of the world in Australia and the reason we built the HandbookFM solution to it. If this is a problem you are facing too, then please feel free to get in touch.

Airbnb drops, not a lot

I was hoping for something pretty big and profound from Airbnb and thought we might get it in the pre Summer update which has just dropped.

What we got was delivery of Brian Chesky’s first lot of forecast things, the Stage One things if you like. Things like “Hosts can use AI-powered suggestions to reply to questions, such as sending the guests the property’s checkout guide.” & ““We are increasingly using AI to streamline our customer support to make sure that customers are routed to the right agents or to have tickets automatically resolved with AI-generated responses,”.

For the “ultimate concierge” we clearly need to wait a little longer.

Unless you are a SAUDIA customer because this week they did launch their own “Travel Companion, powered by advanced artificial intelligence, as part of a two-year plan to revolutionise the travel industry by embracing digital innovations.”

“The platform is intended to be a comprehensive, one-stop solution that allows users to book concierge services such as hotels, transportation, restaurants, activities, and attractions, eliminating the need to switch between multiple platforms. Additionally, it establishes seamless connections with transportation platforms and various train companies, ensuring a smooth and uninterrupted journey.”

Most interesting for me was the tie in to a eSIM. Even if having a travel planner is just a “nice to have”, tying it to connectivity seems like a clever move and for eSIM companies, I’d think partnering with a quality travel planning solution could give you a market edge, thereby also helping the travel planner with their acquisition problem in a all-win scenario.

UK’s Advertising Standards Agency uses AI to sniff out greenwashing

Maybe not the ai for sustainability announcement we most wanted to see in the world, but I’m always up for a little bit more accountability. The main takeaways from the announcement were:

1. ASA Rulings on Airline Advertising: In 2023, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) issued rulings as part of their Climate Change and Environment project, finding that certain sustainability claims in airline advertisements likely mislead consumers. The rulings emphasized that airlines should avoid suggesting their flights are sustainable or climate-friendly, as air travel remains carbon-intensive.

2. Monitoring and Compliance: Post-ruling, the ASA's Compliance team, along with their AI-based Active Ad Monitoring system, reviewed approximately 140,000 ads from air travel companies across various platforms to ensure compliance with the new guidelines. This system helped flag and review ads making similar misleading claims, with only a few exceptions found.

3. Effective Adherence and Future Focus: The monitoring efforts revealed that most air travel companies quickly adjusted or did not include misleading sustainability claims in their advertisements. With the success of this initiative, the ASA plans to reallocate resources to other areas of consumer detriment, while continuing to monitor the airline sector to ensure compliance with advertising standards related to environmental claims.

At least someone, somewhere in the world has worked out that flying does not equal sustainability and is willing to at least stop others from saying otherwise.

I’ll also just leave the list of those who were investigated here also…..

Reference rulings and claims

• Air France-KLM: "travel better and sustainably"

• Deutsche Lufthansa: "Fly more sustainably"

• Etihad Airways: "environmental advocacy"

• Etihad Airways: "“a louder, bolder approach to sustainable aviation” and “a conscious choice for the planet”

• Deutsche Lufthansa: "Protecting its future"

In his OpEd this week, Intrepid’s James Thornton said the next generation of spenders are not as likely to look the other way.

“Generation Alpha. Often dubbed “mini millennials,” they are poised to redefine the essence of travel, because they have such a strong commitment to our planet while also reinventing how we use technology.

This generation of tech-savvy travel transformers will not let the travel industry get away with greenwashing. They are holding businesses accountable, demanding tangible results, and will redefine the travel landscape for good.”

Who is using what?

TUI this week dropped that underpinning their ai efforts is the Amazon Bedrock platform, the same as what the team over at Lonely Planet are using as we’ve previously reported.

TUI featured in some of our earliest newsletters as they were one of the first to get ai in front of their customers last Summer. The ability to act with speed is all caught up in their choice of platform as explained by TUI’s CIO, Pieter Jordaan, ““You need backend infrastructure … you need compliance and your security,” Jordaan says, “You can’t just use ChatGPT off the ball - your data must be secured.”

To cross this hurdle, TUI leveraged the existing infrastructure of its chosen cloud provider AWS and Jordann emphasizes Amazon Bedrock as the key to TUI’s rapid generative AI adoption.

“What Amazon Bedrock brought to the table was the ability for us to quickly use the models and not have to worry about it,” Jordan says. “So as long as our security sector in AWS is fine we know the pipeline will be fine,”

YouGov get the stats on ai

Hat tip to Slack Group member Alex Bainbridge for bringing our attention to the recent YouGov webinar where they released their latest findings on “travel preferences, experiences, and AI.”

Some highlights were that it was young American’s leading the charge in terms of usage but possibly to flesh out Mike Coletta’s points from the first story above, generating a bespoke itinerary scored lowest of 5 ai use cases with translation and local communication scoring highest followed by personalised recommendations, then analysing a lot of reviews (so an SGE style response is what is wanted here) and real time chat bot assistance ALL coming in higher.

The ai stuff starts at 15:30 through to about minute 22.

Everything ai in Travel to become a B2B directory

Most of the calls I have, ultimately end up with someone seeking a solution to a problem where a great SaaS solution, or at least a great technical agency, is already available. Currently I just tell the caller the answer which is fine because I actually love learning about people’s businesses. But it is far from efficient, and makes me wonder about all those who don’t reach out (and that having all those calls is not longer term sustainable for me either).

The solution I think is to build the Everything AI web presence into a directory where people can find the tools and partners they need (thanks to the Mindtrip team for suggesting this idea). If you have a B2B (or B2B2C) offering and you would like to be listed - please shoot me a message (Linked In probably best for now) to help me assess if this is something people want (PLEASE. Thankyou)

How (else) to work with Tony

As things have started to get busy in a few different areas I’m going to now change the way I work with people:

Please email me if interested in a 2 hour session with your leaders and ai forward team members to get your business started on its ai journey. Each workshop has a cost of $3000 AUD (+ G.S.T. if in Australia) and dives into the background of ai, what is good and not so good at and then some facilitated brainstorming on opportunities specific to you. From the workshop we then have the option to deep dive into the specific opportunities within your business. 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. 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 book Q3 & Q$ 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 talking about the coming of SGE. 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