Sabre Releases New AI Product Plus Lots More

Sabre launches Lodging AI, expanding its suite of intelligent solutions powered by Sabre Travel AI™

Sabre’s new tool claims to help improve attachment rates, the latest part of a multi decade battle to get agents to book more than just flights through the GDS. "Artificial intelligence combined with data and insights, such as profiles and preferences, is a very powerful tool in removing friction from the travel booking process," said Sabre Chief Product Officer Garry Wiseman. This has been built as part of Sabre’s strategic alliance with Google. You can read more here.

This post on X (that’s Twitter by the way) by indie hacker @levelsio caught our eye

Did you catch it? Seems like the photos you see on Airbnb might be better (more sales) but you might be in for a surprise when you actually get there!

Booking.com’s Glen Fogel is prepared to “spread the bets around and see where the return is coming back” when it comes to AI

Fogel sees a role for generative AI in building out the fabled connected trip. Meanwhile over at Expedia Peter Kern has said the impact on conversion of their initial chatbot experiments have been "basically de minimis". Kern feels better integration is the key. Read the full story here.

Meanwhile over at TUI Sebastian Ebel is saying the “advent of artificial intelligence (AI) and ChatGPT will "significantly" impact how it produces and sells package holidays……is it something that will come tomorrow or in the next five years? We don’t know – but it will come quicker than we anticipate,"

What bets are you making?

Can AI help you respond to reveiws?

I took the Three & Six Agency Review writing tool for a spin and tested it out on a 2 star review (from long ago) from a business I know well. The result was actually pretty good. It blended the context of the complaint with a good amount of empathy. It would still need a human to run an eye over it. In the example I looked at the business definitely would’ve refunded the customer and it doesn’t go that far. As a time saver for small hotel or tour operators however, probably most do a worse job writing it themselves from my experience. It’s also not a job they love and can take quite a bit of time. Polishing up writing is where generative AI is currently quite good as a productivity hack.

Doron Meyassed, co-founder and CEO of rental home provider Plum Guide is using AI for supply curation but says the biggest issue to date is…. inaccuracies.

Plum have moved from in person vetting of their supply to AI trained models. They select just one from every 19 properties for their curated list. They also use AI to do review sysntheis. Specifically they “use AI to pool keywords and collate consistent sentiment across stays”. Similar to the example above, Plum are also using AI for the writing production. “A listing used to take 60 minutes of copy writing to produce. Today it takes 15 and converts way better” was the big takeaway. You can read more here

Let us know if you like this idea by voting here and we might build a plug and play version of this in the Venture Studio. I’ll put the poll result in next weeks edition.

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Great to see smaller businesses embracing the new technology.

In this post on Linked In Katalina Mayorga, CEO at El Camino talks about how they used AI survey comapny HEARD by Elis to gain deep insights from their customers. Even better, Katalina managed to get into the beta of the program with HEARD because the founder from Elis was an ex customer of El Camino. Loved that.

“Shoddy guidebooks that appear to be compiled with the help of generative artificial intelligence, self-published and bolstered by sham reviews, that have proliferated in recent months on Amazon” according to this post originally from the NYT but syndicated here into the SMH so you can read it even if not a subscriber.

This was somewhat inevitable given the current capabilities (not always accurate) and strengths (can write as much as you need) of LLM’s. It is probably more of an indictment on Amazon’s systems to detect the BS of sham reviews, more than anything. On a side note, it seems the professionally written guidebooks have also taken a big drop in quality according to this blow up on Reddit.

I was keen to try AHBI, the AI chatbot built into the Mondee App and Web

Skift had reported in July that “the integration of generative AI into the platform has led to one of the most impressive final products in this early stage of the tech, certainly more useful than anything released so far by the large online travel agencies.” Mondee has the quote on the front page of their site.

Here is how it worked out for me:

I’ll drop back and try again later. You can try it out for yourself here. Let me know if you have better luck.

Tip! The best way to embed knowledge is to talk about what you’ve learned with someone else. Share this email with a curious friend with whom you can brainstorm the ideas.

That’s it - you’ve made it to the end of edition 1. 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.