What Matters To Tour Operators In An Age Of AI Agents?
?? Peter Syme ??
Strategic Travel & Tourism Advisor | Speaker | Travel Tech Advisor | Podcast Host | Adventure Specialist | Community Building
I recommend becoming an AI obsessive if you intend to or need to keep working for another five years or more, whether in tour operation or any other industry you are considering.?
Not up for that? Fair enough, you want to gamble and do not believe that much will change to justify the effort required. Plus, time is your most valuable resource, and you must invest it wisely.?
I get it. However, let's be clear. Regarding AI, Governments do not have a choice, companies do not have a choice, and you, as individuals running tour companies, do have a choice. However, your customers will adopt AI tools. They already are, and it will only scale, so if you want to retain and get new customers, do you have a choice??
Those who have read my ramblings over the years will know I greatly advocate human travel experiences, especially if physically and mentally challenging in inspiring destinations. Technology should be used to enhance this, not replace it. I am always People, Ideas, and Technology in that order. However, I also learned early on in life from my military days that you cannot defeat an irresistible force but can work with it to achieve your ends. You can only swim upriver so long before you get swept away. Or you can go with the river and have the time of your life.??
The Impact of AI Agents on the Tour Operator Industry?
In the next 24 months, AI agents—autonomous apps that serve humans—are set to transform how your customers access information online. Instead of individuals manually browsing travel websites, AI agents will efficiently search the web, find relevant information, and even perform tasks like booking flights or planning itineraries—all through a single, user-friendly interface. The chances are the first interfaces doing it will not be travel companies. Think Google!? The era of travellers visiting multiple websites is coming to an end. It will not just stop suddenly. You will see a decline over time.?
I have been travelling to over fifteen countries this year using AI and only going to the website to complete the transaction. For business travel, which is my majority, this is super efficient. For leisure travel, not so much at present, but it will get there.?
The Current Online Experience for Travellers is Inefficient
We all know that people spend a tremendous amount of time online each day, and a considerable amount of it is wasted time on inefficient searches, ads, and cumbersome booking processes. The current online experience is fragmented, filled with distractions, and often results in travellers spending more time than necessary to get to what they intended to do. Remember, the Dreaming, Planning, Booking, Experiencing and Sharing journey is the travel customer journey. Each phase of that will be impacted dramatically, but the journey will stay the same, and how it is carried out will change.
AI Agents: They Will Be Used By Tour Operator Customers Going Forward.?
AI agents will take on the heavy lifting for travellers, sifting through travel options, gathering data, and handling bookings. These agents will mature from performing basic tasks that they do today to solving more complex travel problems, such as suggesting personalised itineraries or managing changes in travel plans. Travellers will receive all this information in a single, unified interface that adapts to their preferred format, whether it be text, voice, video, or even virtual reality. I suspect that it will be messy as people have different preferences. For example, I have been trying to retrain myself to be a voice-first in everything I do, and I have found it extremely difficult because of many decades of being text-focused. However, I suspect a twenty-something will have no problem adopting voice or video first.?
This will not be popular, but the importance of visually appealing travel websites and traditional user interfaces will diminish. As AI agents take over the task of gathering and processing information, the focus will shift away from human-centric designs. The AI Agents will be able to read video. Think about it. Why do people go to OTA websites? Is it because they are stunningly designed, inspiring places to spend time? No, it is because they want to quickly find what they want and get what they need done.?
How Should The Tour Operator Industry Should Respond?
One of the advantages of being my age is I started working in the 1970s part-time and full time in 1981. I have seen the internet and social and mobile revolutions and can critically compare them to the pre-internet. I was thrown out of FTSE boardrooms in the 1990s for calling directors much older than me dinosaurs who were about to be extinct by the internet, which they thought was a fad. The travel industry rapidly went beyond static websites to include social media and user-generated content. It all seems normal today, but these shifts were not normal when they happened, and there were winners and losers. This AI shift is so different from the last ones that it is hard to grasp. We are rushing to a time when creating content and interfaces must be tailored for AI agents rather than people. I know that sounds stupid and crazy. You have been told for decades to create content for people, not SEO, etc. This was good advice at the time. However, think it through. If I do not need to go to a website, why would I? My use of search engines has collapsed, and I spend hugely less time on websites. And we only have the worst AI tools they will ever have at this stage.?
Today, early AI agents simulate human click paths and rely on large language models (LLMs) to fill out forms and complete tasks. While this approach is still error-prone and slow, it will rapidly improve. As tour operator websites begin to see that AI agents, rather than humans, are their primary visitors, they will have to adapt their website strategies. Otherwise, they will be hosting traffic but getting no customers.?
For those who are saying they are going to hide their content from AI, that is an interesting strategy, one which 99.9% of tour operators should avoid with the same level of passion that I avoid video “shorts.” Yes, I know they get reach and eyeballs, etc., but they are a brain-destroying, time-sucking global disease. Anyway, back to the task at hand: AI and tour operators.?
Preparing Tour Operator Websites for the AI Agent Revolution?
Tour operators must prepare by developing Agent APIs that allow AI agents to access information quickly and easily, bypassing the need for simulated human interactions. However, many in the travel industry—from small tour operators to sizeable online travel agencies—are unprepared for this change. Mainly because they do not yet see or understand what is coming and have not spent serious time trying to figure it all out. This is a threat and opportunity. We will see an emergence of startups that will bridge this gap for tour operators. Today, the vast majority of small tour operators do not run their own API’s. It is all via their booking systems. It is time to have discussions with the current industry booking systems on how they will deal with this and serve their tour operator customers.
Global platforms like WordPress, Squarespace, etc., will start offering Agent APIs, but that will not help tour operators, as the software that runs your bookings and operations will need to do it.?
The Bottom Line for the Tour Operator Industry
The future of tour operating distribution and booking lies in catering to AI agent surrogates, not just human clicks and page views. Tour operator websites will have to attract human visitors and AI Agent visitors and then manage the growth and decline over a sustained period. So, I repeat, the Dreaming, Planning, Booking, and Sharing phases will all change, and you need to be ahead of that, as do all the technology services you currently use.?
What About The Experiencing Phase? Will This Change And Impact Tour Operators??
Yes, 100%, but it will not impact all tour operators equally. Think of your tour business as being in one of three categories: Green, Amber, or Red, just like traffic lights. If you are in Green or Amber, you need to make plans and actions now. If you are in Red, you have more time to learn and then act.?
Green
Simple in-destination day tours that take a lot of last-minute bookings and only have a few assets like bikes, buses, boats, etc., just the customer and the guide and all their knowledge. These types of tours are focused on passing knowledge from the guide to the customer. Often, walking tours. Or tours of attractions like museums. If you run self-guided audio tours, you must work eighteen hours daily as you will be the first in line in this disruption. It has already started.?
You all have to decide how good you think the giant tech company LLM’s will get and how deep they will go in the travel vertical. They will be phone-based without needing to connect to the internet. Other devices like glasses will follow. They will have every bit of knowledge of everything in every city if it has ever been published. The logistics and mapping data will complement this. If you are a tour operator, you must ensure that what you design and market can beat what will be made available to everyone for free.?
Amber
Destination day tours use assets like buses and boats but use public transport rather than their own and provide the guide and all their knowledge. These tours are focused on passing knowledge from the guide to the customer but also need assets to assist in that.
Red?
Day tours that the customers get active in by doing touch, feel, and action. Think about where you do not just go to the local bakery and eat the fresh bread but get involved in making it. You do not just go to the vineyard and experience wine tasting but get your hands dirty helping with tasks.?
Activity-based businesses include kayaking, diving, rafting, climbing, and biking, although the last one will be disrupted.
Multi-day tours, which have a complex mix of transport, accommodation, food and tours and activities
?What Should Operators Do?
It is not just the dreaming, planning, booking, and sharing phases that will change; the actual experiences are going to change as well, which is strategic. Tour operators should design with AI in mind, both offensively to build bigger businesses if that is what you want and defensively to build the moat between your human-guided experiences and AI experiences.
Example: Offensive
Imagine you are a walking tour business operating ten tours in three different cities, a total of thirty tours. You already know how difficult and challenging the scale-up has been, and you are considering how to get to five, then ten, then fifty cities. Very few have managed this because the front end of tour operations does not scale well. It is people and resource-heavy.
Now, you can test new cities with AI-guided tours first before making the heavy commitment to human-guided tours, and when and if you get traction, you can decide to add higher-priced human tours.?
You will be faced with AI Guides at scale, so you must decide to be in that game or out of it. Hybrid tours of AI Guides and human guides offer considerable opportunities to increase revenue, profit, and customer satisfaction without increasing costs in the business. Think about taking a current two-hour human-guided tour and making it into a six-hour tour, but four hours of it are AI.
Example: Defensive
Design tours with AI in mind by creating experiences that AI cannot and is unlikely ever to do. Design in “doing’ more than “listening” Think hands-on painting, baking, kayaking etc. If you want nothing to do with AI in your tours, you must design to ensure it stays out. It will still be involved in the dreaming, planning, booking and sharing phases, but designing tours to stop AI from being in the experiences phase is possible. See Video 92 Below, which is Called Beat The Bot.
The chart below needs to be built to reflect tour operations. Plus regular visits every 3 or 6 months to see where the changes happen.
What Will The Tour Industry Look Like?
It will be a complicated, fragmented, chaotic mix like now. We will still have human-guided tours and experiences. Still, increasingly, tour operators will have to justify the higher prices they charge, and I strongly recommend that they go upmarket and raise prices as quickly as possible.?
We already have billions of people self-guiding around every city using technology. They will all get superpowers to do this better than ever. The price will likely be super cheap and free. The LLMs will be in the hardware inside your iPhone or Android phone, so they can deliver without being connected to the internet.?
We will have a more complex transition, not simple or quick. It will be messy; people with new modern phones will have faster access than those that do not. Tour operators who adopt new tech will be able to provide experiences others will not. As always, the customer will decide on what they want and what they are willing to pay for, and the last thirty years of data and evidence show that if something is digitalised and customer-focused focused, it scales. The price often goes down rapidly and sometimes to zero.
As it happens, I just read this Tour Guide Test By Alex Bainbridge. He has devised a framework for judging AI tour Guides versus Human Tour Guides— The Touring Test ?not the?Turing Test !
Research And Learning?
Below are over 100 hrs of the sharpest minds in Strategic AI and its likely impacts on society. It is up to day over late July and August 2024. I will keep adding to it until the end of 2024.?
You will notice that none or very few are from the travel industry because, as an industry we are following, we are not leading this society-level change. That is fine as long as we learn and act quickly. If we do not, technology companies you and your customers do not consider travel companies will command the Dreaming, Planning, Booking, Experiencing and Sharing phases to significant degrees beyond which any tour operators will be comfortable. Customers will not care as long as they get what they want, where they want when they want it.?
?1hr 14 ( This has been taken down. Shame as it was fascinating. Maybe the bit about him now being a licenced arms dealer in order to create AI and robotics for the military was the wrong thing to go public on.) here is the same video,?"Eric Schmidt, Former Google CEO, Attends a Secret AI Conference at Stanford University" ?It will probably get taken down again.
Richard Sutton - Humanity Never Had Control in the First Place (Worthy Successor Series, Episode 2) 1hr 27
Machine Consciousness | Joscha Bach 1hr 3 mins
"Life Will Get Weird The Next 3 Years!" - Future of AI, Humanity & Utopia vs Dystopia | Nick Bostrom 1hr 32
Ethan Mollick: Why OpenAl Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken | E1184 1hr 10
Meta’s Joe Spisak on Llama 3.1 405B and the Democratization of Frontier Models | Training Data 42.00
Silicon Heartland 22.00
Sal Khan: AI in Education 1hr 17
领英推荐
"Life Will Get Weird The Next 3 Years!" - Future of AI, Humanity & Utopia vs Dystopia | Nick Bostrom 1h 31
Israel’s BOOMING Artificial Intelligence & Drone Industry Trailblazing Modern Era | TBN Israel 25.00
How AI defeats humans on the battlefield | BBC News 22.00 The military has traditionally been ahead of society in technology. Not so this time, when they are racing to catch up and spending billions. The USA has made AI the same level of risk as atomic Weapons and biological weapons—just the third risk to get this classification in history. They are also forecasting that within ten years, 25-33% of lethal force will be autonomous robotics!
Can AI Read Your Mind? 44.00
Maria Bartiromo interviews real-life clone on-air 7.00 ( yes, it is not perfect, but 12 months ago, it would have been witchcraft)
How Waymo Is Using GenAI to Build a Better Driver ( Waymo is Google, so stop thinking Google will not do transactions in B2C!) 37.00
Humanoid Robots, the Job Market & Mass Automation - The Current State of AI w/ Emad Mostaque | EP114 2 hrs 2?
Michael Levitt: Studied Physics, Masters Biology, Won Nobel in Chemistry | Endgame #193 (Luminaries) 2h 16 This guy is the smartest guy in most rooms. He is not an AI expert by any means but it is hugely worth listening to how he uses AI?
Ilya Sutskever | OPEN AI has already achieved AGI through large model training ( Bullshit title, but this man is always worth listing to)? 58.00?
DTFH 620 Eric Weinstein This is not specfic to AI but Weintein describes LLMs near start of video 1hr 49
1hr 49
Database of risks https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1-O9LOFT4eHbHUdHDARzQR_ExBKTgnU84WOkmYJpTi5o/edit?usp=sharing ?
Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life | Lex Fridman Podcast #440 3hrs 44 ( Not all AI but about startups)?
2hrs 16
"AI Scientist" Can Discover New Science! (Self-Improving AI = AGI) 19:00 to go with this read https://sakana.ai/ai-scientist/ and if technical read [2408.06292] The AI Scientist: Towards Fully Automated Open-Ended Scientific Discovery ?
Owain Evans - AI Situational Awareness, LLM Out-of-Context Reasoning Technical paper that goes with this https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.04694 ?
Elon Musk Adviser: Are We ‘Sleepwalking’ into an AI TAKEOVER? | The Glenn Beck Podcast | Ep 224 59.00
Stable Diffusion Founder's Advice for Indian College Students, Jobs, 2025 AI Predictions?&?more! 1hr 14
Scaling Superforecasting : AI Forecasting Tournaments & Road to Epistemic Security, with Deger Turan 1hr 55
1X Robotics Founder on How AI + Robotics will change labour work, The Future of Consumer Robots... 1hr 26
?
Arvind Narayanan: AI Scaling Myths, The Core Bottlenecks in AI Today & The Future of Models | E1195 50.21
If you want to avoid watching 93 and increasing videos and not become obsessive, just read this PDF and the article below it.?
Bonus For Technology And Travel Industry Geeks
Why not listen to public technology and public travel tech CEOs on their quarterly calls? At the end of each call, there's always a Q&A section with different industry analysts. You see them respond to tough questions and discuss their vision for their industry.
Google https://abc.xyz/investor/
Telsa
Travel Industry?
Booking Holdings https://ir.bookingholdings.com/events/default.aspx
Inviting travelers worldwide to discover the wonders of Argentina and South America! Let’s speak about it on WTM 2024 (Nov 5 to 7 London) | Chief Marketing Manager @ Azeta Incoming Argentina
2 个月??
At Local Booking you're starting a journey that will change how you do marketing. It’s about developing a new way of thinking, which will help you boost your profits through careful analysis and smart strategies.
2 个月INTERESTING! ???? Tour operators in nature-based destinations are the link between last remaining biodiversity, communities, governments and the rest of the world. Recognising these important connections can empower tour operators to educate communities, enforce sustainable practices and raise awareness to the rest of the world. This is why I am so passionate about helping tour operators market to maximise the flow of tourism revenue into the local host economies of destinations. Not only fair, but necessary!
Founder & CEO at Travmonde Oü
2 个月another good thought-provoking post….however, when we tell Tour Ooerators what they should do, we need to have a deeper and comprehensive analysis of their area and the prriod in which a tour is active (your Experience phase)…Driver-Guide tours for FIT, Combined Bus+Walk day tours, Services like Tour Escort(Tour Manager) for Multi-Day tours, Multiple Guides doing in parallel 6 x Walk tours for 140 Cruise pax in Trier….list is long and these are TOUR OPERATORS industry…is there any correct and sufficient analysis of all these before we tell them what AI will do with them?
Travel Founder | Building a Book Direct Marketplace Platform w/ Rewards, Community & AI | Travel rebel alliance v OTA empire | apes ?????? together ?? strong
2 个月I think one BIG question for the coming era of AI agent to AI agent interactions is whether OTAs will continue to dominate in booking transactions, or whether other or more direct booking models will emerge. Eg. Is your traveler AI agent also a meta search agent? in case of direct, many travel operators like hotels already have AI agents on their websites capable of processing bookings (from GuestChat, D3x, Asksuite, HiJiffy, etc). Theoretically, buyer AI agents could directly interface with these seller AI agents and there would be no need for a middleman (apart from someone to function as the directory and trust broker? Eg. so you know you're dealing with the official seller). Does anyone have thoughts on what the future re OTAs vs direct bookings? Cc: Jason Noronha Rodrigo Teixeira Tiago Araújo Nima Anvar Jan Popovic
Help influencers go full time by making their entire video library shoppable, straight out of link-in-bio *Newsletter & Podcast Host*: Make sense of AI with the Everything AI in Travel Newsletter & Podcast ??
2 个月“Dreaming” has already changed and not everyone likes it: “…tour operators should avoid with the same level of passion that I avoid video “shorts.” Yes, I know they get reach and eyeballs, etc., but they are a brain-destroying, time-sucking global disease.” Great forward looking article ?? Peter Syme ?? . I mainly agree but with some nuance. Humans won’t be giving up what inspires to have AI make those decisions - give some recommendations, sure. But us humans will decide where & when for our whys. Whilst some see a perfect outcome of every traveller having their entire travels personalised down to their exact needs, the AI in it’s current form can only predict via its input what the best output should be. It will bring back many crappy options as well as some good ones. On the supply side, giving the AI the right signals to enter in and explore more will be critical and probably gameable but the AI doesn’t care if you waste its time - it doesn’t care about time, it is indefatigable. It also probably will never come back, marking your site like a dog lifting its leg on a tree.