Amidst the chaos, Roam Around gets fresh strategic investment.

OK. I lied. This story is a little bit about the drama at OpenAI but only because Roam Around has built exclusively to date on top of the OpenAI ChatGPT API.

As Sam Altman was shown the door, only to walk straight through another door at Microsoft & then have pretty much most of the OpenAI staff publicly say they were going to follow him there - it seemed for just a fleeting moment that there might be an $80B pile of rubble strewn all over Silicon Valley. And if that is where you get your AI juice from then you are going to be collateral damage.

Whilst Altman was experiencing his first doom loop of logging into teams I noticed this message come out from Shie Gabbai the CEO at Roam Around asking anyone in his network if they could patch him into people at Google (Bard) or Microsoft (Azure). As I found out when I had Shie on the (soon to be released) companion podcast to this newsletter, those programs are still invite only and in Alpha.

As it turned out, Altman ended up back where he started and the whole crisis was averted, unless you were on the board that sacked him in the first place. Crisis will be following those people forever.

In his own Lazerean moment, Shie then posted the news that Roam Around had secured a stratgic investment from FLYR as well as strategic partnership in helping airlines and large hotel chains up their game when it comes to consumer facing planning.

It was a rollicking ride. Stay tuned here for news of when the pod episode drops. It’s a good un.

Buy Now!

That’s the advice of Paul English to the lofty incumbents in travel. English talking at the recent Phocuswright conference said “every single company” will change with the advent of AI” & “Incumbents generally don’t lead platform shifts - it's never happened in the industry - newcomers do”

Small teams and fast cycles are what wins at this point and the best way to get that is to find those already small and spinning fast. “I think it is very wise for Airbnb and other companies to do some acquisitions (of) some young companies.”

Travel Weekly picking up on other threads of the conversation brought the personalisation question more sharply into focus and in particular the roles that “research sites and purchase sites” currently play. English believes it will be AI that connects these up, for each individual and at scale.

He used the example of his son doing his research on TikTok (where you can’t book) rather than on Kayak because 'Kayak is for old people.'

English has his own young startup in the AI personalisation space. He didn’t mention if it was for sale.

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:

ai is going to be awesome for this startup that is anti ai

New Australian startup Exceptional Alien, thinks ai is the best thing that could have happened to them. They are betting that the travelling public will quickly tire of the errors, mistakes and what Daily Item this week called a lack of soul and instead flock to their celebrity created playlists for cities and towns around the world.

Co-founders Michael Canning and Justin Drape also see their solution as an antidote to the scourge of fake reviews that a littering the interwebs. “Anyone making recommendations is putting their name and reputation against that recommendation … You can’t get that from AI,” Mr Drape told news.com.au

Their “Travel Playbooks” are curated by “exceptional creators” including Grammy Award winners, Michelin star chefs and Olympic gold medallists. They give you at least five travel gems they recommend like an art gallery, great place to eat, a park or a great place to shop,”

It wasn’t mentioned how Exceptional Alien confirms those recommendations are still open when travellers are in those destinations. The company kicked off in October 2021, well before the rise of GenAI and are currently doing a Crowdfunding raise.

AI robot dog offers physical & emotional support in space

That seems pretty self explanatory. Not a lot to add here.

For those looking for detail, the problem to solved here is how to keep all those folk travelling from the Moon to Mars calm and happy. “Unlike the aggressive robotic dogs currently available on the market, Jihee Kim has designed Laika with a friendly and organic finish that enables it to connect to its human counterpart on an emotional level when in use while monitoring their health conditions and assisting them in emergencies.”

There wasn’t any detail as to why people had previously been building aggressive ai powered robotic dogs. If anyone knows, please shoot me a….. actually don’t worry, I’m good.

FAA puts students through their paces on air challenges

The Federal Aviation Association’s (FAA) Data Challenge is a “national competition (which) required students to use real data and produce creative ways in which AI can create solutions for aviation challenges.”

One group from USC focused in on the challenge of planes hitting each other in mid air. Although plane travel is statictically one of the safest forms of travel, there are a lot of close misses. Nearly 300 in a year in US airspace, according to the New York Times.

In better (?) news, the students utilised to ai to discover that most of these are happening on runways and they “identified a theme of “unstable approaches”— landings in which aircraft do not maintain certain essential flight parameters within reasonable limits, such as the speed or descent rate being too high as they approach the runway — may be a contributing factor to runway incursions and excursions.”

The students urged for new standards to be considered for stronger analysis of risks and issues. Indeed!

Meanwhile in China….

 Jing Daily put out a great piece this week on what is happening on the China travel scene and it seems ai is hot there also.

Safety ranked as the number 1 factor when considering a holiday and the article also touched on how some Middle East countries like Qatar had moved to a visa free on arrival for Chinese travellers & Saudi Arabia had put visa applications online in Mandarin and was utilising recognised Chinese payment solutions (presumably WePay). This led to “bookings made by China-based travelers to the Middle East have surged over 400 percent in 2023”. Of course “post COVID” came a little later in China and this wasn’t touched on in the article as to how this may have influenced these percentage bumps.

The ai part comes from Trip.com whose TripGenie GenAI bot is said to have “doubled Trip.com’s order conversion rate and has a retention rate that is 30 percent to 40 percent higher than average.” This comes on the back of Trip Advisor’s earning call info reported earlier in this news letter of a 3X coversion bump for customers using their ai travel planner.

There might be something in this ai stuff after all!

The other piece touched on in a wide-ranging article on travel trends in China was the rise of livestreaming to sell travel. Livestreaming has been an incredibly effective sales tool in China for sometime and seems king for those in the creator economy. This fast fashion livestreamer for example sold 10 million items in 7 days netting $21.7M. Her style of only showing an item for 3 seconds is quite mesmerising. Of course AI is coming for her too. In travel, Trip.com Group, for example, launched a destination-based livestream series, called the “Super World Trip,” at the beginning of 2023 to promote short-haul travel to Chinese mainland consumers. The first event, held in Thailand, achieved a gross merchandise value of 40 million RMB ($5.5 million) and sold over 20,000 room nights.”

Everything ai in travel is not written by ai

This was made abundantly clear in the way I called Booking.com’s Glenn Fogel,, “Brian” in last weeks edition. I had Brian on the brain for sure. Thanks to those eagle eyed readers who pointed out the error.

If this newsletter were written by ai it would probably read something more like this. I mean this article is given a person’s name as a byline but, well, you know…….

Great to see some SEO’s now targetting the “AI in Travel" keywords. We must be doing something right!

ai is important for destinations, but not as important as TikTok

Sojern released their “State of Destination Marketing Report 2024” and naturally ai came in for some god coverage with 49% of destination marketers from more than 300 DMO’s surveyed expecting ai to have a “significant impact”.

The report suggests that ai will “disrupt the wider creative process” but that recreating an end to end digital activation is probably beyond its means (today).

The focused heavily on the importance of data but strangely didn’t seem to make the connection of how ai could help destinations make sense of their data. ai is the salvation that big data has been waiting for. For a decade we’ve been told that data is king, so found numerous way to generate it and put it in a folder somewhere for a rainy day. Now it actually becomes usable!

Other highlights from the report were 96% of DMO’s were investing in paid social media and despite “60% of U.S. travelers have stated an increased desire to visit a destination after seeing it on TikTok” only 29% of DMO’s had TikTok in their Top 3 platforms. All the money is still being Zuck’ed away.

Intrepid predicts ai powered carbon trackers

In an article that unpacks Intrepid’s recent ‘A Sustainable Future for Travel’ Report, it was highlighted that “By 2040, it will be unusual to see members of Generation Alpha without a carbon footprint tracker on their smartphones. Every Uber ride, plane journey and trip to the supermarket will be logged in their devices, noting their carbon footprint in real time.”

The article calls out a number of companies making strides in this area notably “Ariel, a sustainability platform, is recognised for its accuracy in gauging carbon footprints and subsequently offsetting emissions for individuals and businesses. Other platforms, such as Klima, Earth Hero and Joro, calculate travel and everyday footprints travel, aiding people to achieve decarbonisation goals.”

The report also touches on the market. “By 2028, the global travel technology market is predicted to reach £11.2bn, up from £7.3bn in 2022.”

Seemingly the next step is to connect those pieces up at the planning stage so that travellers can predict their footprint before hitting the departure lounge.

For something a bit different in this section this week, I came across this thread on the Y-Combinator forum which talks about how OpenAI built their Wanderlust demo for the Dev Day which we reported on in this newsletter previously.

One of the respondents even recreated the entire demo and put the code in GitHub.

There are some great philosophical discussions in the thread and also comments on the measure of value that ai can bring. This one in particular caught my eye: “I want my ai to have as little financial incentive for itself and only maximize my needs. I'd pay for THAT.”

Most clicked last week was the X link to the 10 free tools to turn yourself into a productivity master! Great to see so many people dipping the toe!

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