Link error!

One of the most engaged posts from last week went through to my Notion rather than the actual article itself. The post was on the Chain of Thought prompting technique and you can access the article here. Sorry about that! 😅

New Podcast drops

Whilst the newsletter will be taking a wee break over the holidays, that doesn’t mean you’ll be left without your dose of ai in travel. Next week the new Everything ai in Travel podcast will drop with episode 1.

For the first edition I’m chatting with someone who does something I’ve seen few other in the ai space do as yet, and that is make his customers lots & lots of money. For some that rides into the 10’s of millions of dollars.

As a subscriber, you’ll receive it right here in your inbox next week all set for those quieter moments sitting in your home comfy chair or jogging off the holiday excess.

Thanks to our friends over at travelai.com for sponsoring this new content

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:

Flight Centre sets up “ai centre of excellence”

In a move I think we’ll see often repeated in 2024, Flight Centre Limited have set up their own internal ai centre of excellence. The centre is to be headed up by Adrian Lopez.

Lopez “was a co-founder of SAM, an AI-powered virtual assistant app that FCTG acquired in 2019” according to the report in Phocuswire.

“In today’s ever-changing digital world, we recognize the tremendous potential with AI and ways it can transform our work,” said John Morhous, global chief experience officer of FCTG’s corporate brands upon the announcement.

It was interesting that the initiative is centred around the corporate division rather than the leisure one. There are of course lots of use cases in corporate, be it simplifying rules for the end user, allowing self service booking via bots and automation of expense allocation, all of which we are seeing from other TMC outfits.

Leisure offers different opportunities such as having ai work with the client on their initial itinerary exploration, bringing together the customer thoughts, research, ideas and preferences to build out plans as a preliminary step to pre-validate a customer, especially given not all these inquiry convert. This would also move the starting point a few steps along creating greater efficiency plus also give the customer immediacy for their inquiry. Creating and updating proposal versions as things change or new ideas get added can also be handled by ai. It isn’t clear whether Flight Centre sees these as areas requiring more excellence.

MOBI comes out of stealth, after 10 years!

This one caught me a little off guard. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a startup staying in stealth for 10 years. Anyhoo - ta-da! Here they are.

MOBI “has been in travel for the past 10 years, implementing projects for brands like TUI, American Express and the Singapore Tourism Board” & according to the Travel Weekly article received $21.6M in Series A funding in 2021.

According to CEO Anna Jaffe “Mobi's travel agent-facing experience has seen the most traction, Jaffee said. The platform helps agents track and understand client preferences while providing detailed contextual information on destinations.” But it doesn’t come cheap. According to the linked pricing page in the article this service comes with a price tag of $20K a month + 50% Commission.

Crikey.

Maybe that is OK for their A-grade client list and presumably it must be driving totally new revenue which is why it can ask for half of it.

When asked why MOBI chose travel as the industry to target, Jaffe responded "It's a world where we, as a B2B technology company, could build a relatively small number of relationships and basically touch almost everyone who travels." OK! Simple as that.

A bit of advice from Terry Jones

Kayak founding chairman Terrell (Terry) Jones brought a bit of wisdom to the ai conversation this week with his post on Linked In.

Terry tells the anecdote: “A consultant told me recently that she’d been presenting AI ideas to her clients and she showed high, medium and low risk options. They asked if she had, “Low, low risk options!.”

On the other hand, the chairman of Bosch said, “By 2025 our aim is for all Bosch products to contain or have been developed with the help of AI.”

Jones says it is now table stakes that all your competitors are using ai to improve their productivity & profitability but “have you thought about which new competitor might simply put you out of business with a new idea?”

Jones suggests having an innovation department that takes risks because “ a low, low risk might just be the riskiest strategy of them all.”

As we have seen, Flight Centre is already on board, but who else?

As one wag in the comments chirped maybe it would’ve been better to present high, medium & low reward options and see which one they wanted most!

Peak ai at the end of 2023 - mind blown

Sticking with Linked In a moment and not travel specific, however it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to start thinking about the possibilities when you see what other industries are doing already with ai.

With my HandbookFM founder hat on, text to video is already something we’d be playing with but we hadn’t as yet come up with anything quite as slick as this. It did however spark some ideas around how we might be able to execute on our vision faster. I’d love to know what it sparks for you?

I can picture a hotel guest being able to play on the monitor in their room an introduction to their day ahead whilst they get ready. The plan would already been planned with ai assistance (with their input & preferences included) and now bring in some of the visuals they can expect to see in the day ahead along with their ai concierge walking them through the plan. For now, this is going to require access to existing video but from our experience, the ai should be pretty good at choosing the right bits to show to match the commentary. It is a much simpler use case than the news example in the post above.

I’ve not yet actually verified if this video was actually all created with ai on the fly and there is also a healthy amount of scepticism around right now, especially after Google were found to have faked the video of their new ai capabilities. (WTF).

Renaissance introduces RENAI

Hotel chain Renaissance unveiled this week their new ai concierge for guests. The article is at pains to empahasise that this is a collaboration between human and ai as their endeavor is all about “local”.

Those humans, called Renaissance Navigators “have provided their expertise to train RENAI By Renaissance with their top picks, and these specific recommendations will always be designated by a compass emoji.” The tech then weaves “ChatGPT and reputable open-source outlets, which have contributed recommendations to a curated and constantly refreshed “black book” directory that is vetted by human Navigators.”

Guests “can simply scan a QR code to connect with RENAI By Renaissance via text message or WhatsApp and start a conversation. Guests will then receive a response to their requests with recommendations that have been vetted by Renaissance Navigators”

Whilst I definitely see the merit in working via an interface the customer is already comfortable with (WhatsApp for example), where I see this falling down is two fold:

-getting people to use it. If it were part of the tech that opened their door to their room via their phone for example, you’d know everyone has it.

-the ai not knowing where the customer is at a particular moment and therefore probably recommending something that isn’t actually practical in terms of location or accessibility. Of course the bot could start every conversation by asking where the customers is and then matching recommendations that have been tagged with that neighbourhood for example - but travellers also don’t always know where they are in strange cities. These problems are not intractable and potentially they are working with a vendor like Tripian who specialise in sorting out these types of details.

That said, I do think that the opportunity for any travel company that at some point of their travel life, ‘owns’ the customer (the airline they book with, the hotel they book with), the downstream passive revenue potential via ai is one of the biggest opportunities I’ve seen across 2023. Those companies can now, add immense value, build loyalty and make money. I’m just surprised more aren’t jumping on it.

Klook land $210M in funding and at least some of it is going on ai

In a story that seemed to fly completely under the radar this week, Klook managed a $210M series F, funding round. Given my background is Tours & Activities, I expected to see my feed flooded with this news - but I saw it exactly once.

“The company said its recent partnership with Google Cloud will see generative AI used across the platform for automated translations, content generation and a customer service chatbot.”

Whilst these areas are really the bare minimum you’d expect any decent sized travel company to be taking a look at, translations at least might yield a short term sugar hit for the newly profitable outfit. That said, even the smallest of their operators can just use the free version of GPT to do the same. And whilst translations will be good for some extra SEO exposure and obtaining a spot in Google’s ‘Things To Do’ carousel - if you don’t have a language product that matches - it isn’t really that big a win.

Travel planning didn’t really take 2023 by storm, as it looked like it might at one stage earlier in the year. The new interfaces are fun and I have no doubt we will see more of that in the future, including a move away from the “search box” as we’ve known it for the past 15 or so years.

Ultimately the planners that were released concentrated on getting an answer as fast as it could to the user. They didn’t really think about how to work collaboratively with the travel consumer to craft something with them, by taking the handful of things the traveller already knew and was excited about in their destination of choice and then build from there. Anyone who has been a human travel agent knows this is how it goes. The customer always has that recommendation from their neighbours or Aunt who “was there last year and said we just must <insert incredible thing here>. “

Instead the decks were filled with the usual old “travel planning takes ages, we solve that”. Yes travel planning does take ages. It starts from the moment you decide you might want to go somewhere and pretty much goes through until you step onto the last flight home. You can’t change that. And most people are OK with that. And actually a lot of opportunity lies within that.

As I said ad nauseum this year - stop building faster horses, no-one asked for them.

I don’t think we’ll see this section back in 2024.

Most clicked last week was the bbroken link to my Notion. I’ve fixed that above!! Sorrrrrrry!

That’s it - you’ve made it to the end of this edition. 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