Is AI just a massive flop?

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Is AI a flop? Where can I see ‘AI that just works?’

With the markets in freefall because supposedly the hype bubble around AI is popping, many people are trying to sort the mud from the clay in AI. I think first we need to question whether the markets are any more of an all-knowing oracle than LLM’s themselves are (hint: neither are).

To really know if it is working or not at a company level, a good place to look is in the public company earnings calls. The Company Dime this week reported from AMEX “that artificial intelligence and related technologies would increase productivity by 6 percent to 8 percent on inbound call routing and 2 percent to 4 percent on the use of client knowledge bases and policy assistants.” So that seems like something, not nothing.

This article from Business Travel Mag this week I thought had a very solid list of AI being used to great effect in a production setting. Their list included:

1. Pre-trip approvals

2. Sustainability checks

3. Flight delay management

5. Regulation compliance

6. Events proposals

7. Airline negotiations

8. Customer onboarding

9. Flight emissions reduction

10. Service level monitoring

Great to see a couple of these are focused on sustainability! I wasn’t previously aware of the Green Stay Initiative where “HRS is using large language models to vet the sustainability data provided by hotels. If a property has mistakenly (or deliberately) provided incorrect data, the technology can spot and flag up anomalies, triggering additional checks.” I’d be interested to hear from anyone who uses it to know how effective they are finding it.

The event proposal tech from HeadBox was also a new one for me. From conversations I’ve had with people in the hotel industry, the current RFP model and the essentially monopolistic position of CVENT make this a sector absolutely ripe for disruption. We are already seeing that disruption in other industries where RFP’s are the norm in business such as Government contracts and civil engineering thanks to startups like AutoGen. Strangely even Headbox as a new startup hasn’t embraced video as an exploration tool for those researching event spaces - so maybe some more innovation or disruption to come given that would seemingly be a 10X on UX!

If looking for more of your garden variety things you can do on your own with AI, this list from David Arnoux on LinkedIn again I thought showed an excellent list of things you can be playing with to make some decent productivity hacks and get to know and understand the technology better (thanks to Dom Exmann for sending it over).

The problem with these types of lists is that looking for solutions that others have solved is not really a great strategy in solving your own problems. Ultimately this is why things like ChatBots have dominated the early AI conversation. Pretty much every business does customer service - so it is all pervasive and a solution that nearly everyone is looking to solve.

Chatbots are also a solution well suited to the current capabilities of AI. It is a circuit of knowledge and communication - two things when provided the right information on the knowledge side of things - AI can do a very good job at communicating that information to the customer. And it can do it multimodal - so can type or speak - whatever the customer prefers. As Glenn Fogel points out in the article below - the big save here for companies and customers is no wait time. Nobody enjoys wait time.

The new Everything AI Marketplace has a number of great Chatbot builders for you to take a look at including SatisfiLabs, Watermelon, Yonder, Align Systems and MyTrip.ai - go check them out for yourself.

Got your own Chatbot you want to promote? Go to the site and grab yourself a listing.

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Look out for some special features coming directly to you as subscribers of this publication on some case studies from travel businesses on AI that just works in their world.

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Chesky says yes to AI, but not yet…..

In a pretty major backflip on previous public statements, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky this week said on his own earnings call that “.. it will take years to rebuild Airbnb into a fully AI-powered application.” as reported by Skift.

Chesky had previously told Skift “the company would be “rebuilding the entire app with AI at the center” by May 2024.”

Chesky sees the future of Airbnb as an AI powered concierge service for travellers. From this we can probably extrapolate that he doesn’t see a lot of value in the current UI of AI and how that relates to the Airbnb business and is waiting for the evolution of agents to be able to offer something deeper and more meaningful in terms of overall UX.

Of course the risk here is that the agent evolves as personal to us and lives on our phone (eg: Apple Intelligence) and therefore doesn’t wait for us to navigate to Airbnb.com and start working with their agent over there. That is not a small risk!

The earnings call also covered the return of experiences in 2025 with a video first approach. I applaud half of that. Further validation that video is the premier inspiration, storytelling and sales tool out there but when it comes to experiences, Chesky has said he wants both exclusive and cheap product in its experiences category. Even when Airbnb was booming back in 2019, it couldn’t fill to a profitable level any of the 100’s of trips Urban Adventures sold through the Airbnb “experiences” platform. Not sure why they think that might have changed. As they make the operator carry the can on losses and want these products to be exclusive - don’t bet on this bringing Airbnb back to its early glory days. Funny also how they seem to care less about the pricing on the accommodation side but want to dictate pricing on the experiences side…

Of course, the one out they have here is AI powered digital experiences which can fulfil both of the exclusive & cheap criteria. They can also be hyper-personalised. What is less clear is if anyone actually wants those types of experiences.

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State of Marketing Report 2024

Ex PhocusWright researcher Tahnee Perry delved into the 2024 State of Marketing Report released by Paul Roetzer, the founder of the AI Marketing Institute which dropped this week.

Some of the reporting highlights were:

AI Usage is Soaring

• 99% of marketers are using AI in some capacity.
• 36% have integrated AI into their daily workflows, a significant increase from last year.

Top Outcomes Desired with AI

• 80% aim to reduce time spent on repetitive tasks.
• 64% seek more actionable insights from marketing data.

Barriers to AI Adoption

• 67% cite a lack of education and training as the biggest hurdle.
• 56% report a lack of understanding and awareness.

In Perry’s newsletter you’ll also learn practical stuff like how to build custom GPT’s (you can see a custom GPT in action with the free-to-use AI Strategy Builder for Tourism businesses GPT we here have built for you), what LLM’s are bad at math and loads of other important things to help your overall understanding of how you can best utilise AI tech.

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Mindtrip says you can start from anywhere with AI

Mindtrip dropped their latest “start from anywhere” feature this week. By “anywhere” what Mindtrip means is you can take a Reddit post or an Instagram pic and upload that to their platform and from there the system will build you out an itinerary based on this starting point.

I can certainly see how this would be exciting when brainstorming features, but in reality it still requires the user to remember that Mindtrip and this facility exists. If it was one click in Instagram - that is a different thing. As it is, I have to see the thing I’m interested in, recall that Mindtrip can help, copy the link, go to Mindtrip and drop it in. That is probably a few bridges too far for us lazy humans.

A bit of a warning also this week was spotted deep in an article in Costar who were talking to a range of folk in the hotels sector about AI which was where this sentiment popped up:

“Similarly, revenue managers are still trying to wrap their minds around the full implications of AI in hotels, and some worry that AI-powered trip planning through third parties such as online travel agencies could have a negative effect.

If we just become a supplier, and [OTAs] are able to push a spa service that's outside the hotel, the [food and beverage] if they're integrating with the recommendations that they're getting from Toast instead of the hotel ... we have to make sure that we're reaching out to the guest and customizing so that it's not a third party in between us and a customer," said Harry Carr, senior vice president of revenue management at Davidson Hospitality.”

No doubt this type of thinking is all pervasive. I remember working once on a project with one of the big hotel chains who wanted to leverage Urban Adventures to help them build deeper connections with their local communities. We would take guests on free walking tours of the local neighborhoods but then had to return those guests back to the hotel restaurant & bar for an optional dinner…

If the Trip Planners are going B2B, this is the stuff they are up against.

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Glenn Fogel talks all things AI at Booking

Booking.com’s CEO Glann Fogel found himself on The Verge’s Decoder podcast this week with Nilay Patel. In a wide-ranging interview that is really worth listening to yourself - Fogel had quite a lot of things to say about the AI journey thus far at Booking Holdings.

One of the highlights of the interview was this comment: “One of the wonders of doing an AI agent is that there’ll be no hold time — you’ll go right to the machine. That’ll be a great thing. And, by the way, the AI agent is never going to get angry back at the customer. Sometimes customers get really angry, justifiably sometimes, and they may say things that would upset the agent, and the agent may then yell back, if it’s a human. The machine’s never going to yell back, it’s always going to be nice, and it’s never going to come with a bad attitude because it had a fight with its spouse in the morning. It won’t come really tired because it stayed out too late the night before. I tell you, there are a lot of benefits to having an AI agent versus a human. And I hope we get there.”

Fogel says the human agent has long been in decline! “But the truth is that the human travel agent has been a declining population for a very long time. And I’ll tell you, [with] the things that we’re working on right now in AI and things of that nature, I suspect it’s going to continue to decline as we create the virtual travel agents, we use all the skills we have in AI, all the new things that are coming out, particularly in generative AI, and try and recreate what was, once upon a time, where the only way you could do travel was speaking to a human being.”

Unlike the Airbnb example above, Fogel isn’t waiting for agents to come to get started but he is expecting them to have a huge impact. Here is referencing the Crowdstrike mess which took down airlines and hotels all over the place. “But the complicated ones? We’re nowhere near that, which is unfortunate because we do need it badly. I mean, look at what just happened the last couple of days, where things go down, people are upset, and customer service numbers go off the charts. Then you have to try and figure out, “Okay, how are we going to fix this?” and it requires a lot of humans to do it as opposed to the AI. Someday we’ll be there, just not sure when.”

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YGO Trips makes a big raise

In AI funding news this week, EU Startups reports on the €2.5 million in funding raised this week by YGO Trips.

If not familiar with YGO “their pitch is to offer a new way to book, experience, and visualize holiday packages – i.e. tailored to a new generation. YGO say they are the only player in the industry that enables users to combine any experiences (like festivals, concerts, retreats, etc.) with flights and hotels and book it directly with their platform.”

The raise is backed by a high profile group of people deep in both travel and AI including “GetAway Group, a leading specialist in themed short trips, and has the full support of HomeToGo co-founders Dr. Patrick Andrae (CEO) and Wolfgang Heigl (CSO), as well as GetAway Group’s CEO Jan Seifried. German leading startup investors Felix Jahn (founder and former CEO of McMakler), Ralf Usbeck, Kiana Mardi from Lucy Capital, and Expedite Ventures.”

In even more exciting news, EU Startups are also the brains behind the annual Future Travel Summit held in Barcelona at the end of November and they’ve given us a handful of tickets to share with some lucky subscribers! To have the chance of getting your hands on one - please re-share to your network this LinkedIn post you’ll find under my profile that relates to this edition of the newsletter. I’ll get AI to choose the eventual winners next Tuesday from everyone who has re-shared.

Thanks to Ana and the team for their generosity towards our subscribers here!

Got a tip or seen a story I’ve missed? Let me know by simply replying to this newsletter.

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New AI product can predict your likelihood of getting a visa in time to travel

An interesting one out of India where getting the visa for your upcoming trip is never guaranteed - Atlys have built a tool which “uses advanced AI and machine learning models to predict your chances of getting a visa. According to Atlys, it can help reduce visa rejections by 80%. This is particularly useful for Indian travellers facing frequent last-minute rejections, leading to financial losses and ruined travel plans.”

Harshil Shah, Product Lead at Atlys, says, "We encourage users to assess their visa probability even if their travel plans are 1-2 years away. This foresight allows ample time to address and strengthen any gaps in their application."

Soak that in for a bit. If you think travel is a little complicated for yourself - think about the work people in some parts of the world need to do just to enjoy travel like so man of the rest of us do with a lot less effort.

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Slack Group!

The Slack group is full of the brightest minds in ai in travel. They are the ones actively building or buying ai solutions and running them as businesses or in their business. If looking for community based feedback on your ideas, approach or tools you are considering - this is the place.

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How to work with Tony

The calendar is now very full I’m afraid.

The marketplace is now launched - please get in touch to get information about being listed. We are extending the grandfathering forever the lowest listing price for the next two weeks, then moving to normal pricing. Jump in now if cost is a core issue.

Between existing consulting work and joining Videreo as co-founder, there isn’t really a lot of time for new consulting work I’m afraid. Still please reach out if you have something non urgent and is a decent piece of work and let’s discuss what might be possible.

At Videreo, we still have a couple places left in proof-of-concept group. If you are an organisation looking to really bring the power of video and personalization to your business and partners - please get in touch. In return we are offering a full service approach, the opportunity to shape the product to suit your business and heavy discounting as our way of saying thanks in advance!

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Most clicked last week was the link to the marketplace! Thanks for checking it out .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 hit me up here 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