A word from our sponsor!

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How do you rate on AI? 

Thanks to Tahnee Perry for alerting me to HubSpot’s new tool which allows you to find out what LLM’s are telling people about your business (whilst harvesting your data into their CRM. Actually, to date, I’ve had no outreach from them).

The tool asks you for certain bits of data which are clearly used to personalise the prompt and then generate an outcome. The responses come with some very nice graphs and a rundown of business strength and weaknesses.

I ran all my clients through the tool and my general impression is that it passes the sniff test. The results seemed about what I would expect in regard to genuine competitors and market share (HubSpot call it ‘share of voice’).

For the business sentiment analysis, it is clearly diving into a summary of reviews. On one media business I tried it with, it came back with nonsense because no-one actually reviews a media business that isn’t selling anything. So just be aware of that.

Again, in chatting with my clients and based on the discovery work we’d done previously on their already recognised areas of improvement, it all came out pretty accurate.

You can try it out on your own business here.

It is worth noting that what you put in will determine what you get back. Try and think how a customer would describe your sector of the industry - which may not necessarily be how the industry talks about it (I’m looking at you, multiday tour provider). Different inputs will get you slightly different outputs (and cost HubSpot a few extra cents).

Here come the agents!

It didn’t take too long from last week’s newsletter about getting ready for agents and Boom! Here they are! Well kind of.

PhocusWright caught up with the team from MultiOn who are building agent tech who have secured investments from none other than “ Amazon Alexa Fund, Samsung Next, Maven Ventures, individual investors from OpenAI and others” and “ according to The Information, another round of $20 million from many of those same investors is coming soon.”

Astute reader will have noted I mentioned the first glimpses we get in travel could be “the thing you probably don’t like - like comparison price shopping or reading 70 reviews or filling out the form on the checkout and delivery page” and MultiOn is zeroing in on exactly this area.

“You could use the app as you are traveling to book flights, to find places to visit – the agent can help you do a lot of this and make the bookings automatically.” Div Garg told PhocusWright. He also used the words “We are thinking of…” & “we’re looking at” quite a bit through the interview, so maybe temper your expectations when you first get your hands on it.

What I did really like was the explanation around the AI agent accessing (Your) money and spending it on your behalf. Garg likened the process to how kids bank accounts work. I know my daughter gets a real kick out me messaging her after every transaction she makes. 😀 

You put in limited funds and you get a notification when a purchase is being made - for you to click your approval or use some 2FA tech to push the transaction through. Alternately, the separate account sets a budget by how much money is actually in there. If you’ve got $3K to spend on flights and hotels, then drop $3K in there and hope it does a great job and leaves some change for snacks!

Otto bags $6M to help SME’s with their travel management with AI

Expedia’s former SVP of consumer product, Michael Gulmann brought the company out of stealth this week as reported by TechCrunch. “The service is designed to quickly facilitate flight and hotel bookings through natural language queries….. (&) users don’t have to re-enter preferences each time they use the service.”

It is the investor group and the benefits they bring that really make this sing. Behind the round is “Madrona Ventures, with participation from Direct Travel.” It is the Direct Travel piece which is crucial because should the bot fail in anyway by going through its own reasoning process, it will kick out to the human powered team at Direct.

Steve Singh, Madrona’s managing director previously founded a little company called Concur. And I think that went pretty well. “Singh is the executive chairman at Direct Travel and will assume a similar position on Otto’s board” so the whole thing is tightly wound together.

Singh said “The reason behind a large set of business travel being unmanaged is that services like Concur or other travel management companies are too expensive for small businesses. Typically, small business owners take the help of executive assistants for travel. That’s what’s good about Otto, it acts as your own executive assistant or a travel agent.”

Egypt uses AI to drive better results in its marketing

Head of the Egyptian Tourism Authority, Amr El-Kady penned a piece with Google this week about the results they had this summer using some of Google’s nifty AI AdTech.

The goals Egypt was looking to achieve were:

• Measure campaign conversions or visits to Egypt

• Calculate return on investment

• Offer insights to optimise our future campaigns.

According to the article “Artefact based the tailormade tool on Ads Data Hub technology.

“This cloud-based solution uses AI to combine different sets of data — for example event-level data paired with remarketing or first-party data — to help marketers make sense of their ad campaign data,” Margot Bletterie, data consulting director at Artefact explained.

The tool allowed Egypt to track he customer through the digital journey and pick the traveller up again for remarketing when they actually hit the Egyptian shores. With this follow-up campaign they were able to promote relevant experiences post arrival to drive footfall there.

The results: “this new digital campaign far exceeded our expectations. We measured 100K more visits to Egypt — an uplift of between 10—15% for the summer season — and saw a 40X return on investment.”

Unreal Travel

Spotted this (inevitable) article about the viral nature of places in Oregon, that don’t actually exist.

That’s right folks - some people out there are using AI to create versions of places that aren’t quite right, or in some cases are just plain imaginary. Fortunately, this is currently reserved for random (but large) Facebook pages but there is no denying the popularity of this breathtaking spots with “sometimes millions—of unsuspecting viewers” according to That Oregon Life.

I also saw on Janette Roush’s LinkedIn feed the story about Spotify apparently streaming “AI cover versions” of popular songs so they can avoid paying the actual singer of the real song the $0.000000001 they owe them.

And tech wonders why sometimes people have a problem with those creating it. Free advice here: try not to be an a-hole.

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:

SatisfiLabs takes off in the land of the DMO

Very excited to see Everything AI in Travel marketplace company, SatisfiLabs reported that business is booming!

According to the PhocusWire report, many DMO’s are embracing AI through the use of chatbots including “Travel Nevada, Visit Jamaica, Visit Denver” among others.

You can check out loads of great AI powered solutions, including SatisfiLabs on our marketplace here.

Special shout out to Slack group member and one of the hardest working people in travel, Dan Flores who heads up the tourism department over at SatisfiLabs. Congrats on the success.

AI in Hotels is breaking through

Some excellent insights coming out of Hotel Tech Report’s: 𝗦𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝗛𝗼𝘁𝗲𝗹 𝗚𝘂𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝗧𝗲𝗰𝗵𝗻𝗼𝗹𝗼𝗴𝘆 𝗥𝗲𝗽𝗼𝗿𝘁 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟰.

Jordan Hollander on LinkedIn broke down the main highlights:

1️⃣ AI chatbots now manage up to 80% of guest inquiries, reducing the need for staff involvement in routine interactions and increasing operational efficiency.
2️⃣ Dynamic pricing algorithms are adjusting rates dynamically, resulting in up to a 26% increase in revenue per available room (RevPAR) within three months.
3️⃣ AI-driven task management is reducing response times by 30% and enhancing team productivity.
4️⃣ AI tools are automating the creation of personalized, multi-language marketing content to streamline marketing operations.
5️⃣ AI is automating invoice processing and other accounting tasks, decreasing errors and improving workflow efficiency.

Hollander’s post also breaks it down by area of hotel operations and specific companies which are driving the breakthroughs.

The report itself can found on hoteltechreport.com

Slack Group!

How to work with Tony

The calendar is now very full I’m afraid.

The marketplace is now launched - please just jump on the site to grab your listing if you have an AI tool or service that you want the industry to know about. We are extending the grandfathering forever the lowest listing price for just one more week before 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! We’ll be closing our POC group in September.

Most clicked last week was the link to Zoey - the bot helping with traveller dispersal in Amsterdam and Copenhagen. 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 focusing. 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