The trillion-dollar travel industry has a major blind spot.

According to Beautiful Destination’s Jeremy Jauncey there is “a remarkable disconnect” happening in travel.

“While twice as many travelers find their next destination through social media versus traditional search (like Google Search or OTAs), most travel brands still treat social as an afterthought.

Let that sink in.

The primary channel driving travel discovery is being handled as a secondary marketing function, with many brands simply repurposing their traditional campaigns for social.

This is a fundamental misalignment between where travelers look for inspiration and how brands allocate resources.

The uncomfortable reality?

By the time someone reaches your hotel, airline, or travel destination website (or any third-party booking platform), they've already been inspired (or discouraged) by what they've seen on social media.

This disconnect represents one of the largest missed commercial opportunities in modern travel marketing.”

Hint: the travel consumer almost certainly isn’t getting this inspiration from your own brands’ social media account (sorry).

Quite incredibly, Jeremey has laid out the exact hypothesis on which Videreo is built.

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

Remember OpenAI’s Operator system for AI agents?

They say a week is a long time in football. Well, it’s an absolute eternity in the World of AI.

“Operator’s” fame lasted about as long as an organic Instagram post (which is 19 hours if interested in that sort of thing) before DeepSeek from China launched research showing its model was equal to anything already created and sucked all the oxygen out of the AI room.

In that brief moment however, Intentful CEO, Marina Petrova had just enough time to let operator loose on her own AI assistant and get those robots dancing together to get shizzle done.

Luckily she filmed it so we can all have a look.

OK, let’s talk about DeepSeek

“DeepSeek has become the most downloaded free app in the US just a week after it was launched.” This in the shadow of the TikTok ban (then no ban) is particularly remarkable. You would’ve thought the US public would be on high alert to Chinese tech. As it essentially gives the user the power of ChatGPT’s $200 Pro plan for FREE shows that consumers will flock to the better, cheaper, faster over and above any other concerns.

What has really shocked everyone is the reported cost to build it. BBC reported ‘DeepSeek is powered by the open source DeepSeek-V3 model, which its researchers claim was trained for around $6m (£4.2m) - significantly less than the billions spent by rivals.”

Initially the US rivals called shenanigans on this claim but then cried foul on the suspicion that the Chinese company had actually used their models, to train DeepSeek.

The irony of those who took the whole internet to train their model without any compensation to those who created that content - then complaining someone took their thing was both eye-rolling and amusing (if you love delicious irony like me).

DeepSeek is also Open Source making it very difficult for those with closed systems to get any moral high ground.

Whatever happens from here, this will go down as one of the great blindsides in tech history. The $600B (yes B) wiped from Nvidia once everyone realised you don’t need all those fancy chips, showed where the markets thought the truth may lie.

Brand USA drops some RFP’s to get going with AI

“Brand USA has just released two RFPs in the AI space - one for an itinerary builder for our websites, and a second for a trip planning chatbot for use on platforms like WhatsApp” reported Janette Rouch on her LinkedIn this week.

It’s not clear if those who have built on top of DeepSeek would be welcome…. 😅 

A great opportunity however to get the outsized validation of being chosen here. It is likely not just one contract to be won here as sales would cascade down through the entire US (and other) ecosystem for the winners here you would think.

Links to apply are in Janette’s post.

Good luck to those entrants from the Slack group!

Arival drops report on AI usage in the Tours & Activities market

“…just 12% of tour, activity and attraction operators say they are using Gen AI actively in their operations.”

That is the headline stat from the report and doesn’t really surprise. The highly fragmented Tour and Activity segment is characterised by very small businesses who have never been quick on the uptake of technology (but getting better).

“Three in five are using AI to write product descriptions, followed by website copy and marketing content for blogs and social media. Tools such as ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude and other Gen AI apps are getting better and better at producing high-quality, consistent content.”

Ex Google head of BD & PM for Travel drops thoughts on AI

When smart people talk is when you should be listening. It’s great advice to lie by.

This week Simone Lini (Ex-Head of BD & PM @ Google Travel, CPO & CCO Metasearch @ Lastminute.com, CEO @ Waynaut) dropped his thoughts on where we are all at on AI to start a conversation around what should be built next.

Lini’s thoughts range from the place of OTA’s in an AI world (a popular topic this week), a website less internet, agents being the new meta-search and lots more.

“Every big paradigm shift is a golden time for fast moving innovations. I'm not planning to become an opinionist - I want to build a company.” Lini said.

Watch this space!

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:

Marketplace Spotlight: Satisfi Labs

Big News: Satisfi Labs Secures Growth Funding! In an announcement on LinkedIn Satisfi Labs said “Satisfi Labs has secured funding from Level Structured Capital to propel our next phase of growth! This investment will enable us to: 🌍 Expand globally and enhance our platform capabilities. 🔗 Build a stronger partner ecosystem and grow our Engine App marketplace for more integrations and skills. 🤖 Develop innovations that better connect our conversational engines for seamless customer engagement.”

Founded in 2016, Satisfi Labs is a leading conversational AI company. Early success came from its work with the New York Mets, Macy’s, and the US Open, enabling easy access to information often unavailable on websites.

Satisfi’s Answer Engine platform has expanded over the years to include integrations with real-time feeds, external NLPs, and in-chat ticket commerce for an advanced chat experience.

They’ve got a great and growing segment headed up by one of the good guys in the travel world, Dan Flores. You can learn more by listening into the podcast episode we did with Dan last year or just reach out to chat with him on LinkedIn.

If you have a B2B business underpinned by AI and looking for people to notice you, you can sign up to the marketplace for peanuts (top right corner, 5 mins, bring your logo).

I’ve priced for bootstrapped startups but also accepting larger companies too.

Which of the platform models are sending traffic?

Interesting piece of info from Peter Caputa of Databox on which of the LLM platforms are actually sending traffic at this point?

Peter says “I'm rooting for ChatGPT. At least they're sending some traffic. Google isn't even sending diddly squat.”

Here is what it looks like:

The graph looks great. Everyone loves an up and to the right graph but Peter tempers that enthusiasm: “This may be a good volume for your business, but it's insignificant for us. Just so that you can get a feel for how insignificant this is, our website gets ~250k sessions per month. As you can see from the chart, we got 8k total sessions referred from ChatGpt from all of last year. Rough math: it's about 0.27%”

Early days.

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:

• OpenAI’s operator searching for hotels with saunas (Video)

• Google’s report on 101 real world use cases for AI (H/T Tahnee Perry)

• TravelPerk raises $200M “to invest in AI”

• OECD report into the risks of AI in tourism (I created a Notebook podcast to talk me through it - let me know if you want to hear it and I’ll post in on LinkedIn)

• PSFK’s teaser on American Airlines research about how they should use AI

• TSA Showcase on getting us through security quicker at airports with 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.

Sponsorship Opportunity:

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There is a unique opportunity right now for YOUR BUSINESS to come and take pole position in the AI + Travel world. We are currently fielding expressions of interest from suitable companies to take an owned media strategy like no other for 2025.

Available is blanket naming rights and coverage across both the Everything AI in Travel newsletter & podcast, with all the research, writing, scheduling, recording and publishing to an established and growing audience of decision makers in travel done in turnkey fashion. I’ll dig out each week what moves your company is making and make sure everyone knows about it.

Brands like Encora and Lufthansa use this owned/borrowed media tactic to huge effect and now you can too for about half the cost of a marketing coordinator. Shoot me a message if interested.

Most clicked last week was the link to OpenAI’s Operator demo. Actually, it’s the most clicked article there has ever been here.

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