You only need 10 devs to build Kayak today using ai + what Kayak thinks about OpenAI plugins

Education: GenAI Academy sets up tourism specific training on ai

After reviewing the information our readers have provided in the recent poll, I'm thrilled to announce a training opportunity that's tailored specifically for the travel sector. The Advanced ChatGPT Class, led by tech industry veteran and travel innovator Sam Keller, is designed to empower travel professionals to leverage the advanced features of ChatGPT to elevate their business operations.

Here are the essentials:

When: October 24, 2023, at 12pm Pacific (6am AEDT; 8am GMT)

Format: 1-hour Zoom session

Instructor: Sam Keller, CEO of Working Without Borders

In this fun and interactive workshop, participants will dive into an array of transformative capabilities including enhanced research techniques, tailored content creation, rapid learning, and creative ideation. Moreover, the class will explore the advanced features of ChatGPT such as real-time data exploration, plug-in functionalities, voice-only interactions, and image analysis.

This is an exciting opportunity to explore the potential of ChatGPT in the travel sector under the guidance of a seasoned innovator. Whether you're seeking to turbocharge your research processes, accelerate your written content production, or broaden your creative horizons, this class has something to offer.

For this initial cohort we’ve convinced Sam to drop his normal $99 price tag down to just $40USD per person (plus $4.52 transaction fee) , so reserve your spot now as places are strictly limited. There are just 25 spots available at this price.

To register simply go to: https://www.genaiacademy.ai/events and be sure to choose the Zoom based option.

If you were looking for some other type of training or training for your whole team - please just reply to this newsletter and let us know what you are thinking!

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:

Kayak is waiting to pounce on your great ideas!

Loads of stuff coming out of Kayak this week with both co-founders Steve Hafner and Paul English weighing in on all things ai.

Steve found himself on (friend of this newsletter - let me know when this gets old 🤣 ) Jason Calacanis’ podcast, This Week in Startups. The conversation started around general generative ai use cases including travel planners, then moved into a long discussion about Open Table (apparently Jason is mega tipper - please tell everyone as he mentioned it several times) and then ended up with a discussion about hotels.

Highlights for me included:

• Steve giving a shout out to an Everything ai in Travel Slack group member’s start up - Roam Around (in which Calacanis is an investor - which I didn’t know and probably should have)

• How hotels work. This explanation could have saved me a very painful 2 year chase back at Urban Adventures. If you think you want to work with hotels - you NEED to know this info.

• Just how brazenly those with scale are willing to copy good emerging ideas from the startup world and add scale to them and win (no talk of acquisition - just steal)

• That Steve is not bullish on voice as a UI input

• Steve giving his opinion on OpenAI’s plug-ins. If you are in the middle of building one - you might want to take a listen or just see this picture below:

Meanwhile Steve’s co-founder at Kayak, Paul English (now with his new venture at Lola) put out this post on Linked In where he suggested starting Kayak today with what ai tools can do, they would only need 10 devs and 3 years vs 140 engineers over 10 years!!

The point of the post was the downward pressure on pricing and presumably better deal for consumers but let’s not hold our breath on that one.

Dinosuars & Unicorns

Actually nothing specific about travel in this post on the Punks & Pinstripes newsletter but it was one of the best things I’ve read in months, so I just had to share here.

The hyopthesis is that we can innovate for either “abundance” or “indugence” and in general we are addicted to indulgence. Author of the piece Gregory Larkin goes on to explain “When indulgence innovation is thriving, we spend more time glued to remote devices gaming, gambling, scrolling, and buying crap that we don’t need……. When abundance innovation is thriving you feel it in the areas of your life that you seriously depend on. Healthcare is faster and better. Highways, schools and bridges are built faster, with less money, less corruption, and fewer people. Insurance claims are processed faster.”

Larkin goes on to explain the measure to look for is “total factor productivity. It basically measures how much more an economy produces with the same amount of money spent, hours worked, and energy consumed.” He then dives in to whether ai makes the situation better or worse.

What he is seeing is C-Suite executives leaving their cushy Big Co. jobs knowing intimately what the pain points are, then using the advance of ai technology to find rapid solutions. The article finishes with this nugget:

“Here’s the simple math of why I feel optimistic:

- There are 348 AI Unicorns in the United States.

- 145 of those startups are in industries which are stagnating, and systemically significant.

- 62 of these startups are led by CEOs who once worked in one of the incumbents in the same industry where they now operate.”

Keep an eye open for grizzled travel veterans moving out of the corner office and into the garage. (See also below ways you can work with this grizzled travel veteran).

Hat tip to Tom Goodwin who put me onto the post in his own newsletter.

Will the travel agent survive? (Part II)

I think we are going to see a lot of articles on the death of traditional travel agents (rumours of whose demise have been greatly exaggerated for, well since the birth of the internet). I won’t continue to post too many of them here unless they start to bring some actual statistics of decline or otherwise.

For this final week then we have Cenk Sidar, founder and CEO of Enquire AI quoted in Business Traveller as saying “What (has) saved the upper echelon of agents was offering a high-end, highly personalised experience to elite travellers. With the help of AI, that service can now be fully captured by technology, including intimate knowledge of the traveller’s history and preferences, offered instantaneously.”

Of course that is still theoretical. No-one is coming close to that as yet.

What really made me want to go one more week on this however was this incredible battle cry and call to arms by Richard Turen in Travel Weekly titled “Are we going down without a fight yet again?”

I won’t quote any of it here because its a quick and fun read except for the final line on how Richard and his team will be letting their customers know how the itinerary they are sending got created with “Beginning tomorrow, every itinerary we send out will carry the phrase, “Prepared entirely by humans who have been there -- instead of bots that haven’t.””

Show me the money!!

This was a great article which covered a panel from the recent Web in Travel conference held in Singapore.

Are investors bullish on ai in travel? You bet they are!!

6 investors from the likes of Thayer Ventures, Orbit Startups, JetBlue Ventures, Travelstart and others formed a panel to discuss the landscape.

Stephan Ekbergh suggested “some of the most incredible stuff that’s going to happen in the next ten years is happening as we speak” & that we are at the biggest point of innovation since 2008, right after the financial crisis.

From Stephen Snyder from JetBlue Ventures we heard “I don’t think the future of generative AI is about content generation – it’s about taking data and using it in a better way” & Chris Hemmeter from Thayer Ventures suggested they are moving out of the safer ground of B2B because “There is great disruption in the way consumers will discover and book travel, creating an opportunity for OTAs to be radically disruptive.”

If you are building something, you should probably read the whole article.

Your ai Mews

RICHARD VALTR from Mews penned a thoughtful piece this week for Phocuswire. Mews is a hospitality management cloud that empowers the modern hotelier to improve performance, maximize revenue, and provide remarkable guest experiences and they have raised $185M - so not a Johnny come lately to the ai experience.

Valtr initially explains how the current phase is being mainly viewed through the lens of cost cutting, citing the example of the chat-bot replacing customer service staff. The big upside of this phase however is that it puts the technology itself into a favourable arc.

He see the eventual biggest upside in what he terms “distributed management” where silos get broken down and productivity gains in one area are not just the result of kicking the can into someone else’s area and making that part of the process more complex - especially as move into micro personalisation.

My biggest takeaway from the piece however was the thought that the experience shouldn’t be that different between a 2 star and 5 star hotel! Presumably the only real difference is in the number of human pamperers who are visible in delivering the hospitality.

Let’s get practical with ai

I’ve had a few readers drop me a note asking for a bit more practical advice on how to utilise ai in their business. I love people reaching out and asking for what they want BTW. This newsletter is for You.

I came across this piece around sales & marketing specifically which I think might fill some of that gap. Whilst the article doesn’t tell you specifically which specific tool and how to use specifically use ai (we do have a course upcoming on that however!), it does give a lot of stats around how others are using GenAI tools and at what rate.

I won’t list all 43 of their “insane stats” but some quick highlights include:

• 54% of businesses have reported increased cost savings and efficiencies because of AI implementation.

• AI algorithms can increase leads by as much as 50%.

• Using AI for sales can reduce call times as well as overall costs by 60%.

• 73% of businesses are now using generative AI to produce various types of content.

Lots more inside!

Emirates move to 50% of bookings coming direct

“Five years ago, maybe we were dreaming to get 5 per cent or 10 per cent of our online bookings done directly by customers. Now, we’re seeing more than 50 per cent of our customers do their business directly with us. Not too far in the future, we will see maybe close to 80 per cent of our customers wanting to do that."

This is so startling a turn around as quoted from Adel Al Redha, Emirates' chief operating officer. Whilst the article talks specifically here to “Improving technology” & “automated technology” it isn’t 100% clear how much of this can actually be considered ai specific. I’ll reach out and see if I can get some more specifics on this.

What was more definitive in the article was this snippet “At Emirates, we have taken a step change in training our cabin crew from traditional trainers to using generative AI that is delivering a very complicated training programme.”

This made my heart sing! You’ll see why in the section about our venture studio below and HandbookFM. If you are looking for a step change in the way you train people - please reach out! (We’ve got 3 beta spots available).

Brex thinks ai is a winner for corporate travel

Brex who was one of the beneficiaries of the Silicon Valley Bank collapse with many customers shifting their deposits across, is now taking a bet that ai is the killer tech to “simplify corporate employee expense reporting and transactions”.

The company believes “the mix of booking trips, reserving hotels, scheduling ride shares, and filing expenses are a fit for large language models and other elements of generative AI, which uses machine learning to produce original content, answer questions or obey textual commands.”

Its a super competitive space with incumbents like Navan but one mini trend is those who were already tinkering around with ai prior to the GenAI platform explosion of LLM’s could actually be disadvantaged by the huge shift, in particular, in what the consumer expectations are around UI. The article was in American Banker but you have to sign up for an account to read the whole thing.

Just a quick note in this section this week because I did spy that a Japanese travel planner made into the Forbes list reporting on Google’s Asia-Pacific Women Founders Fund Picks First Batch Of AI Startups.

The entrant was “Ikura (Japan): The two-year-old startup provides tailored, off-the-beaten-path travel recommendations using AI. “Instead of everyone going to Shibuya or everyone going to that one shrine in Kyoto, [cofounder Eiko Nakazawa] felt that not only is that not environmentally friendly, but most of the time people are unaware of the other things that are available,” says Kim. “Not only will this help small businesses, but it will also help the environment because not everyone will be going to these few [tourist] spots.”

I love pretty much everything about the desciption. It took a bit of searching but I found a link to their beta sign up for anyone who is in or going to Japan. Please report back on how it goes!

Most clicked last week was the link the Slack group! This came off the explosion of conversation in there no doubt. So great to see this awesome community forming. Here is some of the crew catching up at Arival:

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