A word from our sponsor!

This time you get to literally hear from our sponsor as we’ve just dropped the podcast episode recorded with Propellic Founder and CEO, Brennen Bliss.

We’ve dropped a few breadcrumbs along the way but now you get to hear the full show end-to-end. If you like what you hear and want to know more: Check Propellic out for yourself here.

ai travel planning is working as a business

Despite the fact that SEO Travel found that ai itineraries are wrong 90% of the time, Skyscanner came out this week in The Drum to say they are more than happy with the partnership they’ve got with two of the big travel planning startups.

Skyscanner’s director of paid marketing, Friederike Burge said of their partnership with Layla, “The collaboration opens a vast library of travel inspiration and Skyscanner’s flight inventory to users and gives advertisers a new route to market.”

Burge followed on to also mention Guidegeek by saying it “offers users flight information and booking links and enables Skyscanner to advertise to new audiences.” No solid numbers in that but seems strange they would mention it if they weren’t happy with the results?

Nasdaq.com also weighed in on the argument by saying the rise of ai travel planning “highlights a significant opportunity for online travel agencies (OTA) to increase their booking share up to 17 percentage points by 2029 if suppliers continue to ignore investments into AI capabilities. OTA’s can gain revenues in the form of commissions amounting to more than $2 billion from suppliers.”

Quoting a report from MMC company Oliver Wyman “travel companies could not match the pace of technological innovation and failed at launching customer facing gen AI tools. Hence, developing such tools is expected to enhance the loyalty of customers and improve direct bookings and customer experience.”

All of this seems born out by the Skyscanner experience.

Tailbox goes after museums

Another of the funded ai experience startups, Tailbox looks to be going down a different route to revenue. According to this post by Tailbox employee Maru Rivera “Museums store absolutely gargantuan amounts of information about the pieces they display and have very little space to display all of it. Instead, with the Tailbox App you and every visitor of a museum will have access to view, listen and talk to all the knowledge behind the exhibited artifacts.”

This puts them head to head with the likes of STQRY and others who have been at this for quite a while, and there is always the issue of inertia with these things, especially in institutions like museums.

Undoubtedly Tailbox will have the better user experience (IMO). I’m sure also that this is only part of the story but what looks clear here is that Tailbox is not going after the “get eyeballs, sell them a flight” market but rather an industry partnership model based around actual experience.

ai for safety

In what has all the makings of a very solid business that no-one else is really going after is the announcement of an ai powered app for safety reported by Silicon Republic.

The app called Kowroo is being developed by former police officer Dr Sheelagh Brady. Brady “has 25 years’ experience in policing and security. She has worked with An Garda Síochána, the EU Common Security and Defence Policy assignments and the UN on various international missions… (&) the last 10 years, she has consulted with businesses, governments and NGOs on security and risk management.” In other words DEEP domain knowledge. The idea itself was first thought up during an evacuation from Libya.

The company works with companies to enable “them to comply with their duty-of-care obligations to their employees in a manner that users engage with, addressing the current issue of underutilisation of travel risk management solutions.” Think all Government employees, mining and other deep pockets who go off to more dangerous parts of the globe.

The ai component here is to “leverage the power of multiple global datasets to produce personalised actionable insights in real time to travellers and support teams.” Indeed every globally operating tour operator should also be interested as we lurch into more uncertain times.

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:

New research paper into ai and hospitality released

A research paper coming out of Ohio State University has taken a deep dive into the future role of ai within hospitality. The findings make for fascinating reading for anyone trying to crystal ball the future ahead of us here.

The paper came out with four high level scenarios to consider around the role of the concierge:

• Dialog Interface: For simple text or speech-based interactions, useful for on-the-go assistance without requiring visual attention

• Virtual Avatar: For a more engaging digital interaction, providing a relatable and emotionally connected experience online or via mobile apps

• Holographic Projection: For an immersive on-site experience, useful in public areas within the hotel to provide personalized greetings and information

• Tangible Service Robot: For physical interactions such as carrying luggage or guiding guests through the hotel, ensuring a seamless and efficient service delivery

I find this particularly fascinating in the context of maybe what Airbnb are cooking up in the background. Might we see phase 1 & 2 here when they finally launch? That would be groundbreaking and they do like to break ground.

I decided to run my own GPT experiment with the research paper to help envision what that fully formed future might look like for a hotel and then work backwards from there to determine all the elements involved and what might be required to build them. I’ll probably release that as a standalone post - but you can get a sneak peak of it here

ai in the real world

Google released 100 of the best real world examples of businesses using ai - in case people had not yet managed to find any yet.

A couple of them came from travel:

• IHG Hotels & Resorts is building a generative AI-powered chatbot to help guests easily plan their next vacation directly in the IHG One Rewards mobile app

• Alaska Airlines is developing a personalized travel search experience using advanced AI techniques, creating hyper-personalized recommendations that engage customers early and foster loyalty through AI-generated content.

Honestly, there are probably better insights to be found in what others outside of travel are doing. Dig in there for gold.

Korean Air are building an ai contact centre

Korean Air are teaming up with AWS to build a fully ai powered contact centre. According to the TTG article, apart from being a new acronym, an AICC is a “cloud-based intelligent customer service platform that uses AI to power voice bots and chatbots to answer customer inquiries.”

The article suggests the AICC surpasses normal (human) contact centres “by integrating AI capabilities, reducing costs with centralised management, adding new features and expanding service channels” thereby “providing personalised experiences and swiftly resolving issues are key to developing and reinforcing customer trust”

I’m sure they won’t be the last and everyone in the BOP world will be watching on.

Who do you trust??

Short follow up to the story last week about OpenAI getting rid of all its risk people and closing its “Superalignment” branch that was there to stop the ai from going rogue and destroying humanity…..

TechCrunch is reporting that one of the deposed, Jan Leike has immediately landed at competitor Anthropic! A quick and smart move to give the world full of potential partners a very stark choice on who they can choose to work with and what those partners might stand for.

Over to you…..

Whilst on the subject of risk, I noted this great list of traps to avoid from Martin Crowley around internal risk mitigation:

1. Neglecting AI Risk Management 🥽 Skipping this crucial step is like sailing into a storm without a compass. Your business can get lost in ethical and legal chaos.

2. Ignoring Ethical Implications 👀 AI can make decisions, but are they the right ones? Ignoring ethical considerations can tarnish your brand's reputation irreparably.

3. Underestimating Bias ⛔ AI can inherit biases from data. Failing to address this can lead to public relations nightmares and legal issues.

4. Neglecting Data Security 🔐 AI relies on data. Neglecting data security can result in costly data breaches and loss of customer trust.

5. Overlooking Continuous Monitoring 🕵️♂️ AI isn't a set-it-and-forget-it tool. Failing to continuously monitor its performance can lead to costly mistakes.

Finishing with some numbers

Washington State University this week released their latest report on consumer travel sentiment taking into account the more recent cost of living pressures we all seem to be experiencing.

Good news is people are still mainly planning on travelling with “more than three in four of the respondents (76%) say they will travel in the next 12 months. Of those who plan to travel, 95% will travel domestically, and 37% will travel to at least one international destination.”

On the ai front specifically there started to be some concerns emerge around privacy and security with Seventy-five percent of the survey respondents are worried “increased use of travel systems with AI can lead to more data breaches,” and 60% “don’t feel comfortable using travel systems with AI due to privacy concerns.” We often hear people are willing to swap data for personalisation, and personalisation is seen as one of the big advancements with ai - so this does seem to somewhat fly in the face of that?

The full report has some more fascinating stats particularly around the differences in approach to planning and seeking out destinations and bargains between the sexes.

How to work with Tony

The calendar is now very full I’m afraid.

Lots of work going on to launch the marketplace for buyers and suppliers to find each other with ai solutions. If you have an ai solution in market (product, SaaS tool, service) - please get in touch ot get information about being listed. We are grandfathering forever the lowest listing price for those who are in for the launch.

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 July 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.

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 booking 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 if your business doesn’t do fulfillment. 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 to the story about Frank Reeve new venture fund. 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