A word from the sponsor!

Keep your eyes and ears open for our upcoming podcast episode with Brennen Bliss, the Propellic founder.

In it, Brennen discusses the prevalent issues in travel marketing, which often include overreliance on vanity metrics and ineffective channel strategies. He criticizes this all too often taken approach, saying, "We fix really crappy travel marketing which is most travel marketing." Propellic, focuses on revamping these outdated strategies, aiming to transform poorly executed travel marketing by leveraging data-driven insights and cutting-edge technology to enhance effectiveness and efficiency. Check Propellic out for yourself here.

Live translation changes the game in travel

The OpenAI “Spring Update” was a fairly understated affair. No Sam Altman. No big auditorium filled with screaming fans. No black turtle-neck sweaters. Instead it was company CTO, Mira Murati taking us into a cosy lounge room for the intimate update on a couple of things. One was more features are heading down into the free versions of GPT and the other was a new flagship model was released - dubbed 4o - available to pretty much everyone but especially available to developers at a 50% reduction in cost to the 4Turbo model. Better, Faster, Cheaper. It’s a smart strategy to keep people moving along!

One thing I didn’t see a lot of people talking about but I personally thought was a great initiative, was the custom GPT’s that any pro member can create, can now be shared with anyone at all. Before they were only accessible to other pro members which meant there was very limited usage. Now, BOOM, access is universal. As a consultant I’ve created a number of GPT’s to demonstrate how something might work or to give access to businesses who can’t afford a consultant to come into their business, a way to self serve their strategic approach to bring ai into their business via my ai strategy builder for tourism businesses custom GPT. Feel free to try it for yourself. It mimics my guided sessions with companies but stops short of deeper exploration of specific opportunity spaces, vendor selection and so forth. But at least you can have A plan to follow and build it in about 20 minutes.

The huge unlock however was the demo of live translation which you can cut straight to by checking out this post. This is MASSIVE for the travel experience. Now anyone can communicate in real time with anyone else. If that doesn’t blow your mind, I don’t know what will. No more confusing miscommunication at check in or when ordering something. Think of the ability to have a proper chat with the owner of a small pension and what they might be able to tell you? Or a proper conversation with the cleaning staff at your hotel. Information, connection and knowledge previously not available to the monolingual among us - is now solved! It is FREE. To everyone (who has a mobile). Incredible.

How will your business embrace this shift to enhance both the traveller and employee experience? If you aren’t getting all your teams who cross the path of your guests to play with this new function, I’d suggest you don’t really understand hospitality.

Has Google burned the boats?

This was the suggestion made by commentators like May Habib after the Google I/O developers conference.

“The years of handwringing around generative AI and the core search business have resulted in a conclusive decision in favor of pushing innovation. It's great for consumers but scary for businesses.” was how Habib explained it, following with “all things equal AI search summaries most certainly mean fewer clicks to your website — which is actually going to most impact B2B websites.” Ouch.

So what exactly has happened? As reported by SearchEngineLand “AI Overviews is rolling out to all US based searchers in Google Search….. (&) will launch in more countries soon and be available to more than a billion users by the end of the year.” AI Overviews are the new Google-speak for SGE (Search Generative Experience) which is now one acronym we no longer need to know. In short, these are short paragraph answers to your search query, instead of a bunch of relevant links that you then need to figure out if they have the answer or not. The difference between SGE and AI Overviews is that the overview is accompanied by “cards” that are the source material (with links) that the paragraph response created from. In short, you can continue to dig down and verify whether the answer is the right one for you.

This approach is the one taken by the ai search engine Perplexity which most pundits suggest has spooked Google the most. In a survey of one, I can confirm that most of my initial search on mobile has moved to the Perplexity app. I’m sure I’m not alone.

According to the SearchEngineLand report “Google will begin reporting AI Overview impressions and clicks in its Search Console reporting, but won’t distinguish those generated by traditional search and AI Overview.” and Barry Schwartz who wrote the report went on to ponder “To me, this makes me feel Google (and Bing) are hiding something from content creators. That the clicks and CTR from these AI powered answers may not generate a healthy click through rate to publishers. I mean, why else won’t they show those details?”

Fellow ai commentator Paul Roetzer said in his summery of the event “This has the potential to rapidly deteriorate the value exchange between brands / publishers and Google. Publishers create helpful content, and Google rewards that content with traffic. That’s how it’s worked for 20+ years. But if the traffic doesn’t come, will there be enough incentive for publishers to create it? No one really seems to know what happens next here, and what it will mean to marketing and business.”

So where does that leave us all (apart from dazed and confused). I’ll leave the final piece of advice to Habib, “Does that mean you stop investing in content? No. But understanding that the content is for training LLM data scrapers (for LLMs that are updated max 3-4 times a year, for now) and agents that are browsing the web on BEHALF of your users (not just Google's) is important — imo it means that you'll need to close the loop to connect your brand to your users in the channels you KNOW are more likely to be their human eyeballs and not their AI ones: the almighty social.” Seek your own advice - but this is pretty much the biggest shift in marketing in decades and comes alongside the slow death of outbound. Owned marketing channels remain the only thing you can keep control of - so hold them tight to your chest and your strategy.

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:

More from Google

It wasn’t just Google’s hari kari to ‘search as we know it’ on display at Google I/O. They showed off some pretty neat, real time ai tricks too.

Connor Grennan did a pretty great and succinct write up on his Linked In the moment he walked out of the presentation. Highlights included:

•  Project Astra, “Google’s new AI agent capable of understanding and responding to live video and audio in real-time.” You can see the video here. (More preparation on mind blowing required here. Especially if you always forget where you put your glasses)

• Gemini upping the stakes with a 2 million token context window

• Workspace

• Photos

• Video Generation

The Verge specifically zeroed in on the Gemini part of the show and tell and this is relevant to us because it focused on travel specifically.

“Based on the user’s prompt, the AI model will now research publicly available information as well as tap into specific details like flight times and hotel bookings to work up a custom, multi day vacation itinerary “in a matter of seconds…… According to the company, an example of a prompt could be something like “My family and I are going to Miami for Labor Day. My son loves art and my husband really wants fresh seafood. Can you pull my flight and hotel info from Gmail and help me plan the weekend?”

Again all the focus here is on speed. I suppose when that speed is also matched with extreme accuracy to what the user really wants, then that is a massive win. Unless the user just actually wants to pull their own thing together, in which case it could all be a bit of a waste of time. Of course there are people in both camps but no-one really knows which one is bigger. I guess we are going to find out once and for all!

Don’t forget Expedia!

The team at Expedia would probably be wondering whether picking this week was the right one for their swathe of new announcements. It is hard to get some clear air when Google and OpenAI are doing their announcements at the same time.

Anyhoo, I’m there for them as they rolled out some new ai tools within their suite. The big announcement was for Romie “an AI-powered “travel buddy” the company says serves as a “travel agent, concierge and personal assistant, all in one.” as reported by PAX news. 

Romie (who I think is pronounced Roam-y) because it will “roam the world with travellers“ (Hi to our friends at Roam Around!) is an “an AI assistant with hyper personalization in mind so that travellers can choose when they want Romie’s help on their own terms. Romie can assist throughout dreaming, planning and travelling or even when things don’t go as planned, all while getting more intelligent as the traveller interacts.” according to Rathi Murthy, CTO of Expedia Group.

The only non PR release type info we could find was from Slack group member Christian Watts who attended the launch and posted: “The new Expedia Romie agent is conceptually the best application I've seen so far in travel”. High praise from someone who tries them all! The key word here however is “conceptually” because Christian did go on to say “I haven't tested it yet - it's in Beta on iOS.” Someone get that man an iPhone. The Nokia 1100 has served its purpose. Time to move on!

eDreams have go some stats and some thoughts

eDream released results from a global survey they conducted recently and the results line up fairly similarly to those we reported from the YouGov survey a week or two back. I got my friend to summarise the main statistics for us here:

- Global AI usage in travel:

- 86% of respondents aged 18-24 are using or open to using AI tools.

- 84% of respondents aged 25-34 are using or open to using AI tools.

- 43% of respondents aged 65 and over are using or open to using AI tools.

- UK market AI usage in travel:

- 78% of consumers aged 18-24 are using or open to using AI tools.

- 70% of consumers aged 25-34 are using or open to using AI tools.

- Global awareness of AI in online shopping:

- 50% of global respondents are fully or partially aware of AI’s role in enhancing online experiences.

- 61% of 18-24-year-olds are aware and appreciative of AI’s role.

- 64% of 25-34-year-olds are aware and appreciative of AI’s role.

- 23% of those over 65 are aware and appreciative of AI’s role.

- Belief in AI’s potential in online shopping:

- 4% of 18-24-year-olds globally do not believe in AI’s potential.

- 18% of Baby Boomers do not believe in AI’s potential.

- UK awareness of AI in online shopping:

- 25% of respondents across all age groups report full or partial awareness.

- 64% of 18-24-year-olds report full or partial awareness.

- 12% of those over 65 report full or partial awareness..

Dana Dunne, CEO of eDreams ODIGEO followed this up with an opinion piece in Forbes about how we need to adapt to the changing needs and values of our customers, especially the younger ones. “We found that younger people were far more likely than older generations to make decisions about how and where they travel based on digital connectivity, social inclusiveness and health and safety.”

Dunne told us that “Research shows that 82% of shoppers want a consumer brand’s values to align with their own, and they’ll vote with their wallet if they don't feel a match, while three-quarters of shoppers reported parting ways with a brand over a conflict in values……. (&)….the values that dictate how Gen-Z consumers make decisions will be significantly more different from previous generations than at any time since World War II.”

Alaska Airlines rolls out ai tool that understands your “miles” balance

Probably not as earth shaking as live translation but this report from Geekwire did catch my eye.

Whilst the bulk of the report took up the usual ai planner guff starting with some high level inspirational ask like “find me somewhere Sunny I can go next week for under $500” which admittedly isn’t the worst use case I’ve seen in the trip planning space, what caught my attention was the ai ability to find out where and how far people might be able to go on their loyalty “miles”.

Of course, that is only 1/10th the battle because most airlines have calculators that will give that info and what is actually difficult is finding actual seats on actual planes you can actually fly in with those miles. Or maybe that is just a QANTAS thing - but I see people raging online about it all the time, so I know its a real thing Down Under.

The shift to action is real

This is just an anecdotal note that the shift from discovery to action has happened. For the months through to around mid March, almost all the business inquiry I received in the consultancy side of my business was around helping businesses understand what was happening, and giving a high level perspective of what ai is, how it works and what it can do.

I haven’t had a single inquiry like that now for more than two months. Now it is specific problem/opportunity focus, vendor selection or build options with technical consultancies and so on.

For a long time I thought no-one was moving but now everyone I’m encountering is running. Great to see.

This is real. There is an order of magnitude shift that has happened in the ability of machines to understand language and communication, a very human (and maybe whale and dolphin) thing.

All services businesses are essentially about the transfer (communication) of knowledge. A massive part of travel is a services industry including nearly everything happening in your HQ. This game is on.

Where are you and your team at?

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 & 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 FREE course run by Allie K Miller on Maven. It might have been the mos clicked ever. I hope you got some great value from the course. 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