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AI is already working for travellers with a disability

A study by Matador this week found that 20% of those using AI to plan trips either had a disability themselves or were planning with a disabled tripmate in mind. Out of those “More than four out of five travellers (82.5%) who used AI to plan travel for someone with a disability were satisfied with the experience.”

Ross Borden, CEO at Matador told Travolution “We are deeply committed to making travel more accessible and enjoyable for everyone, including people with disabilities,”

Matador didn’t do this survey for love. “GuideGeek, Matador Network’s free AI travel genius, has integrated AI capabilities which can assist travellers with disabilities to find accessible accommodations, transportation and attractions.”

But still this is such a great focus area and something I’ve actually heard from other entrepreneurs working in this space such as Hannes Bos from Travel Genius who told me: “We are launching next week a Series A round to find investors to help us launch an OTA for disabled travellers.” Reach out to Hannes if that is of interest to you.

How is China doing with AI?

This week just gone was China’s “The World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC), with 500 exhibitors, 1,500 exhibits, over 300,000 attendees, and even an appearance from Chinese premier Li Qiang.” as reported by Yahoo.

The results? Mediocre according to the correspondent. “…the conference left me disenchanted. I’d hoped to witness the sector’s technological advancements. Instead, WAIC confirmed my suspicions: There’s a gap between what China’s AI can do and the cutting-edge innovations emerging from Silicon Valley.”

The reason behind this lag were thought to be two-fold. One, the Great Fire Wall means that the local Chinese LLM’s haven’t had the depth of information from which to train off. The second was around GPU’s with China not having access to the latest chips. “U.S. policies that curtail access to cutting-edge chips and chipmaking technology will mean that Chinese companies are lagging behind their non-Chinese peers.”

My understanding there are 3 global hubs of chips - the US; the Netherlands and…….. Taiwan………. Hmmm.

The star of the show was “Kuaishou’s text-to-visual application Kling, a Sora-like product that I found genuinely impressive.” I saw other reports on LinkedIn this week also saying good things.

I do wonder however what is going on with image generation these days. I needed an image yesterday and asked my old mate GPT for one and it said “No Dice”. Actually it said give me an image and I’ll change it for you. So I went to Meta and same thing………… Maybe I’m behind the times here because it’s been a while since I needed to generate an image?

Talking about AI video generation…..

I used my column in the Travel Daily Media this week to look at if and how destinations should be thinking about AI generated video.

My first gut instinct is a hard no on trying to replicate your destination in video via an AI simulation. It just isn’t going to be authentic and so therefore what are you actually promoting.

After some more thought, I did find a couple of possible ways where it could potentially work. “I like to use the “Walking on Dream” campaign by tourism Western Australia as an example of a creative idea that potentially could lend itself well to GenAI tools in video. The campaign features a huge flying whale shark flying over landscapes synonymous with West Australia and aboriginal dancers, dancing among surreal depictions of landscape. No-one really believes there is a huge flying whale shark or grapes floating like balloons over vineyards. The concept is grounded in the unreal.”

What I really believe though is that actually this is the wrong way of looking at AI when it comes to tourism video. What I’d really like to see more of is people leveraging AI to amplify authenticity. That to me is what is the exciting prospect here. What is hard about scaling authenticity now? Every destination wants to differentiate through its authentic self. “You do you” is the catch cry of the current generation. How can AI make it less hard for destinations and organisations to show their true selves? How can we use AI to get each person to the exact authentic place that will be most inspirational for them? For that we need to scale variety, not polish.

If you are a Destination or organisation that wants to amplify authenticity leveraging AI - let’s chat.

Time to get personal

There are few things wrong with personalisation. One is that part of the world likes it spelled with “z” and the with an “s” (and don’t get me started on travellers/travelers).

This kind of just very scary article talks about all the ways AI does nefarious things to get to our data. Here is the summary:

- Online Booking Platforms

- Analyzes booking data

- Collects personal and payment details

- Tracks travel dates and preferences

- Loyalty Programs

- Tracks travel history

- Analyzes spending patterns

- Offers tailored rewards

- Social Media and Online Activity

- Analyzes social media posts

- Infers travel preferences

- Tracks online interactions

- Mobile Apps and Location Data

- Gathers location data

- Provides location-based recommendations

- Tracks app usage patterns

- Customer Service Interactions

- Analyzes queries and feedback

- Personalizes future interactions

- Enhances service performance

- Search Engines and Browsing History

- Analyzes search queries

- Tracks browsing patterns

- Predicts travel interests

- Smart Devices and IoT

- Integrates data from smart devices

- Tracks device usage patterns

- Offers seamless travel experiences

- Surveys and Feedback Forms

- Processes survey responses

- Identifies trends and preferences

Thankfully the article finishes with:

### It All Comes Down to Trust

It’s important to note that while AI can significantly enhance the travel experience, it also raises concerns about data privacy and security. Ensuring compliance with regulations like the European Union’s GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and obtaining user consent are critical to maintaining confidence with how personal information is protected. As in all human interactions with other entities, whether that be other humans or artificial intelligence, it simply comes down to the basic element of trust.

Well thank God for that.

What I still don’t really understand is that I see lots of people working on the customer side getting all their data, but don’t see so many (any) people working on the supply side to get a matching data set over there. Maybe it’s not required? Maybe the (also currently theoretical) AI agent will just find whatever it needs through a kind of relentless searching that no human would ever endure to get the exact right things? That kind of makes sense - but no more or less sense than just asking people what they want, rather than doing everything in that long list above? And I think if we just leave it to the AI to go find the right stuff - it will do just an OK job for about 70% of the time and a terrible job the other 30% - just as it does out-of-the-box most other things.

Where is the great 99.5% of the time going to come from?

Business traveller ^(grrr) stats

Always love me some good stats. This week Travelweek Canada reported on some Travel Management Company (TMC) stats from a recent survey by Direct Travel, Inc.

The headline is “among the 650 respondents, 87% would be comfortable having AI make their travel arrangements and bookings automatically. Also notable, 90% of bleisure travelled, and nearly all respondents (93%) say TMCs must innovate with technology to maintain a role in the business travel ecosystem.”

This one also stood out “More than one third (37%) of business travelers do not believe the industry is innovative, with almost two thirds (63%) seeking a wider array of options for content, signaling a demand for industry-wide innovation.”

Ouch and Oooooh.

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:

Seinfeld roasts AI

At Duke Commencement speech for 2024 here is what guest speaker Jerry Seinfeld had to say about AI:

"AI is the most embarrassing thing we've ever invented in mankind's time on Earth."

"AI, on the other hand, is the most embarrassing thing we've ever invented in mankind's time on Earth. Oh, so you can't do the work? Is that what you're telling me? You can't figure it out? This seems to be the justification of AI -- 'I couldn't do it.'

This is something to be embarrassed about. The ad campaign for ChatGPT should be the opposite of Nike: 'You just can't do it.'

Making fake brains is risky. Frankenstein proved that. He was so dumb, he thought a monster needed a sport jacket. It's not a wine tasting. We're terrorizing villagers. No one's gonna tell you, 'I'm sorry Mr. Stein, it's jackets only this evening.' - Jerry Seinfeld

The whole thing is worth a watch (16 mins) if you’re a Seinfeld fan.

Slack Group!

How to work with Tony

The calendar is now very full I’m afraid.

Work on the marketplace is now (pretty much) finished with invitations to all those who have built great tools for other travel businesses, and who have registered interest with me now going out. There is still time to get in on the launch deals. If you have an ai solution in market (product, SaaS tool, service) - please get in touch to get information about being listed. We are grandfathering forever the lowest listing price for those who are in for the launch and have a bucket load of other extras. Be fast though - I’m closing the foundation partner list next Friday in preparation for launch shortly thereafter.

Please email me to deep dive into the specific opportunities within your business you might wish to explore. 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. The earliest I am available for this is now September with very limited availability.

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.

Most clicked last week was the link to the McKinsey podcast into Customer Care. 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 or hit me up on LinkedIn 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