We now have a sponsor!

Our sponsors Propellic this week dropped “The Comprehensive Guide to SEO”.

The travel and tourism industry is on a significant upswing with projections pointing towards a revenue of $927.3 billion in 2024, largely driven by a shift towards online sales, expected to account for 76% of total revenue by 2028. Given these statistics, the implementation of effective search engine optimization (SEO) strategies becomes essential for enhancing online visibility and ensuring travel businesses can capitalize on these market trends, ultimately increasing bookings and sales.

Mastering SEO involves optimizing content and structure of websites to rank higher in search results and attract organic traffic, a critical component given that two-thirds of the industry's revenue came from online sales in 2022. For travel agencies, addressing unique SEO challenges such as seasonal trends and evolving traveler preferences can be the key to standing out in a crowded market. Employing successful SEO tactics can also lead to superior website usability and navigation, fostering a better user experience and boosting organic search rankings. Check out the full post here to learn more about these tactics.

What are the tactics for SGE

SGE (Search Generative Experience) is starting to make more noise in people’s feeds (as it should). Phocuswire released the 2nd of 2 part series on the topic which even has some data in it, something that seems missing from most of the other swirl I’ve seen.

It highlights a recent Google study where “an average of 4.3 unique domains were featured in the SGE answers, but only 62% of the links originated from domains among the top 10 organic results for the same query.” and a “study of Perplexity’s results reported an average of 5.28 website link citations in its answers. The overlap of domain links between Perplexity and Google SGE proved to be 60% in travel vs. only 20% in the general e-commerce vertical.” I guess its nice of the advertisers telling us how they will take our money. For some reason the nursery rhyme “never smile at a crocodile” flashed into my head.

Meanwhile Janette Roush from the New York City tourism board cautions on the inevitable outreaches you might receive pitching you the answer to the “new SEO” in a fantastic post on Linked In that has further links to actual research.

In appalling news for us all, there are also two new acronyms we need to get to grips with: GEO - Generative Experience Optimisation & STS - Strategic Text Sequences. FFS.

And the winner is……

Travel Weekly this week sat down with industry captains and veterans to unpack all this ai stuff. Simon Powell boldly predicted “nobody in our industry as it stands will be a winner with AI – it will be a new entrant without any of the baggage”. The rationale Powell used was to look at the past and the dawn of the internet and what happened there. “Just look at the likes of Expedia: they came into travel because they felt they could disrupt the industry and did. It will be the same with AI.” Of course every emerging startup will now be rubbing their hands together thinking it is them and every existing business (which probably existed before Expedia) will just laugh (nervously).

Janet Parton, vice-president of business development at Celestyal “said it (ai) is “assisting us [Celestyal] with personalisation” whilst Virgin Atlantic’s head of agency sales Nicki Goldsmith mentioned Virgin Atlantic is using the tech for pricing efficiencies, which is “really adding value”. It wasn’t reported what Parton, Goldsmith and the other panelists thought about hearing of their own potential demise.

If Only general manager Gordon McCreadie suggested ai “has the potential to be as transformative as the telephone.” No-one on the panel mentioned the telex machine or the fax that we know of.

Powell had the final word saying “that if the travel industry misses out on introducing AI in the right way, “we do so at our peril”.

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:

Where is money being spent on ai now?

I’ve mentioned before that one of my favourite publications out there is Lufthansa’s TMNT which is “the industry deep dive for all who work at the forefront of digital innovation in the context of travel and mobility.”

They’ve done nothing this week to harm that reputation by bringing out research on how top companies are spending their ai budgets.

The findings showed that since 2018, 65% of tech investment from the Top 60 companies analysed has gone towards AI & ML. The specific target areas were broken down to (and I quote):

• Autonomous Driving: Investments are frequently directed towards companies specializing in computer vision and LIDAR systems, which are crucial for developing self-driving vehicles.

• Robotics and Drones: This includes firms focused on autonomous manufacturing processes and delivery systems.

• Predictive Analytics: These investments are targeted at companies enhancing process optimization using AI and ML algorithms.

• Customer Support: Enhanced by natural language processing capabilities, including large language models (LLMs), these investments aim to revolutionize customer interaction platforms.

Bucking the narrative that travel is a laggard and follower industry, TMNT suggests “It looks like our sector is not merely riding a wave of tech trends but is deeply invested in leveraging AI to reshape the landscape of travel and mobility”.

According to recent information released by McKinsey, they believe that for every dollar spent on ai tech, you should budget $5 for change management! I’d love to see some stats on whether these Top 60 have found that to be true and necessary or if these investment amounts cover that off.

Specific areas receiving investment include Analytics and Fraud detection; Maintenance Ops; Industrial and Customer Support (everyone seems to say, “not another Chat Bot” and yet every company is moving towards having or wanting to have one).

ravolution also released its research this week on tech spend. “The data found 62% of travel buyer respondents said they expect their budgets to increase over the next 12 months with over a quarter (28%) of increases expected to be by as much as 20%. AI looks set to take the lion’s share of those budgets with 56% stating they are planning to invest in it over the next year.”

Nimet Sayeed, event manager of TravelTech Show, said: "As AI continues to evolve, arguably it might be regarded as a ‘one stop shop’, that can answer many of the questions that operators are being faced with."

Trip Planners rule!

Overnight, (prior to the publication of this note, but too close to publication time to report here0 was the much anticipated webinar - Trip Fail where former Trip Planning startup (UTrip) founder, Gilad Berestein was chatting about why this could be all a big waste of time.

I thought I’d take the opportunity therefore to feature a trip planning tool that has been around for more than a decade (2012), has a working subscription model abd has just this week dropped its first foray into ai.

If you want to see the full journey which included a successful exit for the original founders, then check out their Wikipedia entry.

Roadtrippers succeeded because they targeted a specific market with a specific problem. Their ICP is people doing long haul trips around the US in RV’s. Whilst I’m sure that churn is a massive part of their business, many of the ICP travel for many months (sometimes years) on these journeys meaning they can build strong MRR numbers.

I had many chats with James the founder back in my Urban Adventures days as we looked to tap this market for when they hit the big cities and wanted to explore. The content (data)they produced was both unique & great. You could personalise to your road trip interests (distilleries, road side BBQ joints, quirky attractions and so on) and then hit the B & C roads to discover it all.

If (or more likely when) I finally hit up the States for a good long period, this is exactly how I’ll be travelling, armed with my Roadtripper subscription and my Harvest Host membership. I can’t imagine how you could have a better trip.

Whilst on ai travel planning, the Rabbit R1 device which launched to much fanfare a little while back has now finally shipped to the first customers. Touted as running what the makers call a Large Action Model, the device which you carry around with you and push a button like using a walkie talkie to interact with, has been trained on how to push the (right?) buttons on websites and apps to save you from having to do that and thereby operate those simply from your voice command. Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu went out of his way to mention “that more functionality is coming for the R1, including travel planning.” This could be because they already did the demo of travel planning on launch day (not very convincingly IMO). It is expected before the Summer.

WTTC release 2 ai reports

The WTTC confirmed their belief this week that ai is set to shape the future of travel & tourism.

They released two reports to their membership: "Responsible Artificial Intelligence (AI): Overview of AI Risks, Safety & Governance" and "Artificial Intelligence (AI): Global Strategies, Policies & Regulations,"

As reported by Travel Agent Central "Responsible Artificial Intelligence (AI)" delves into the potential risks associated with AI deployment and offers strategies for establishing frameworks that promote transparency, accountability and fairness. From addressing bias and discrimination to ensuring human oversight of AI systems, this report empowers organizations to harness the power of AI responsibly. In its fourth and final installment of "Artificial Intelligence (AI): Global Strategies, Policies & Regulations," WTTC provides a detailed overview of the AI ecosystem across key countries and international organizations. It shows how policymakers are navigating the AI landscape and shaping regulations and strategies to foster AI innovation while ensuring its ethical and responsible use."

MIT puts travel in the spotlight

The MIT technology review this week gave us three core takeaways from the EmTech Digital conference in London.

One was that agents are coming. Article author Melissa Heikkilä immediately translated this to travel as a core use case. “They are AI models and algorithms that can autonomously make decisions by themselves in a dynamic world. Imagine an AI travel agent that can not only retrieve information and suggest things to do, but also take action to book things for you, from flights to tours and accommodations. Every AI lab worth its salt, from OpenAI to Meta to startups, is racing to build agents that can reason better, memorize more steps, and interact with other apps and websites.”

The other two takeaways were: Humans are not perfect either. “One of the best ways we have of ensuring that AI systems don’t go awry is getting humans to audit and evaluate them. But humans are complicated and biased, and we don’t always get things right.” I think this is something often left unsaid when people publicly evaluate ai responses for being 20% wrong. Is the human response always 100% right? I don’t think so.

The final takeaway was something close to my heart: AI avatars are getting really, really good. “Instead of skimming through pages and pages of onboarding material, for example, new employees could watch a video where a hyper realistic AI avatar explains what they need to know about their job. This has the potential to change the way we communicate, allowing content creators to outsource their work to custom avatars and making it easier for organizations to share information with their staff.” Precisely the problem we are solving at HandbookFM.

Wizz Air gets us shopping more with ai

In our relentless pursuit to leverage the smartest humans and machines to redefine life as one endless stream of 15 second infomercials, Wizz Air have jumped in with both feet to invest in “a first-of-its-kind online shopping platform, one designed to elevate the passenger experience by offering a personalized experience.”

According to the article in SimpleFlying “The airline has partnered with online shopping startup InterLnkd, which leverages artificial intelligence (AI) to create a personalized shopping experience through its fully integrated online store. Across the platform, customers are free to explore a variety of fashion, beauty, and retail brands and make purchases that will be delivered directly to their homes.”

How 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 & Q4 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 back to the previous edition? Second most clicked were Christian Watts’ fantastic video demos of travel planners. He dropped a news one this week on Meta.ai which is also well worth a look 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