Everything AI in Travel

I always love catching up with Alex Bainbridge. Not only is he the number one member of the Everything AI in Slack community but the way he looks at and conceives (rather than perceives - this man is a doer, not a watcher) the world is just so different to most of us. I therefore jumped at the chance to co-host a session at the upcoming Arival event in Washington DC with Alex where anyone who has...

The McKinsey report into the impact of AI agents in travel runs at 47 pages. Only the truly dedicated are reading that one. For the rest of us - here is a podcast made by AI about AI using NotebookLM to get the jist of what is in the report.

I saw a post by Amir Mohajer of HostAI on LinkedIn that stopped me in my tracks. Amir posted about how the chase of shiny new objects in the AI landscape nearly killed his entire business. Whilst the business survived, there were casualties, including Amir's two co-founders. This story is a warning and a celebration all rolled up into one.

Richard Savoie from Adiona is a patent-holding executive and engineer that is currently reinventing urban mobility, logistics, and transport planning. His company Adiona is an award-winning AI-powered delivery route planning and optimization platform for large fleets, currently powering millions of deliveries globally for the world's best brands like Coca-Cola, Amazon, Australia Post, Marley S...

This week I chatted with Tata Crocombe. Tata is a hotelier in the remote Cook Islands but he is not letting his remote location hold back his advancement with AI. In one of the most remarkable conversations I've had since starting this podcast journey, Tata takes us through how going all in on AI has completely transformed not only hotel operations, but also the hotels fortunes. Whilst many st...

AI is disrupting search as we've known it. Recently Skift in conjunction with Dune& & SEO Clarity did a deep dive into what was happening here and what it means for every business in travel. We sit down with two of the co-researchers here, Seth Borko and Jared Alster to dig deeper into what is happening here and what businesses need to be considering as a result. We also have special o...

Gabby Gonzalez-Bux is one of the OG female founders of the AI + Travel space. Tango is personalised booking platform for the mass affluent traveller. Gabby had leant on her experience from building digital experiences in cruise industry (where people sail on ships, not boats!!) to give her the grounding around what great curation looks like. We dive deep on what personalisation actually is and how...

Square pegs and round holes is how we've cobbled together the travel industry over 3 or so decades online. Actually chatting to Stu Waldron of the Open Travel Alliance, it goes right back to the 70's. Stu breaks down all things open source in travel for us. We talk about why many things are not a competitive advantage and therefore there is no reason to try and build your own new wheel and...

Jason Kismet is a man working his way from the inside of the hotel industry to the outside of travel technology . Jason is solving problem he and his teams feel personally and intimately everyday. His business, Kismet is at the cutting edge of helping his fellow hoteliers, especially those special independents, at getting discovered in the new mode of search - AI agents. In this episode we talk bo...

Gam Dias is at the leading edge of Agentic Commerce—where digital wallets, personal data, and AI agents converge. He is the author of the book Agents Unleashed and has used travel as a core case study in much of his research and examples. We sat down with Gam to break it all down for us as to why AI agents are such a transformation shift in commerce and what it means for travel specifically. Not o...

Michael Goldrich knows the hotel marketing business inside out. From digital marketing roles with Starwood, Dolce and Wyndham among others, Michael has learned the trade on the floor. Now Michael is one of the core leading voices in the hotels industry in why and how AI can be applied to gain an advantage. We spoke to Michael as he prepared for his upcoming keynote at HITEC in Indianapolis in the...

Luke Bujarski has had research roles at PhocusWright & Skift before moving on to found Extenteam and now Jethire. Luke is used to breaking things down and taking a look inside so we caught up this week to talk about how Airbnb's move into services may have been accelerated by AI advancements. We also dive into the jobs market and how that might be being affected by the US slow down in tour...

Mike Todasco is the former Senior Director of Innovation at Paypal and is now a Visiting Fellow at the James Silberrad Brown Center for Artificial Intelligence at SDSU. Mike is at the forefront of education around AI and spends a lot time trying out the new tools and explaining their capabilities and flaws to help the rest of us know whether we should invest our time, and for what specific purpose...

Jeremy Jauncey is busy guy. He is founder of not one, but two incredible businesses in travel. One is the B2B, Beautiful Destinations which started out just as an Instagram account and has transformed into what Fast Company has called one of the most innovative businesses in the world. The other at Layla is B2C and is leveraging the power of AI to completely redefine the customer journey as we've...

David Amsellem has already succeeded once before with an exit to Accor for his first concierge startup, John Paul. When generative AI came online, David couldn't sit back and not bring this superpower into a new version of concierge, this time in the travel distribution landscape. David has partnered with the HBX Group in a joint venture and launch the new Luxurist platform so that travel advi...

Phocuswright have dropped a huge trends report on the effect of AI across travel and made it available free to everyone. I chat to author Mike Coletta about the findings in the report on areas like business operations, marketing, in-destination experience and of course, distribution! The report also raises the question around digital identity and how that interfaces with generative AI and how that...

Greg Oates is a legend in the DMO world. Many people know Greg from his work with Skift but since moving out of journalism, Greg has worked agency side specialising in working with CEO's and the C-suite at DMO's on their strategy. Recently Greg moved to Matador Network's Guide Geek as Director of AI Advocacy and is doubling down on educating decision makers on both why and how AI adopt...

Hands up if you've ever rolled your eyes when someone mentioned influencer marketing? This one is for you. Today's guest is my co-founder at Videreo, Adrian Villabruna but this isn't some kind of love fest about our own product. Adrian was one of the very first to build anything with generative AI in Travel at AI Adventures and brings a complex web of knowledge from his time doing product classifi...

Ed Morris is doing extraordinary things with big data & AI. And he is doing it for a good reason. One of the most surprising things to come out of the AI boom is how few people are thinking about how it can solve the big pressing issues we prefer to pretend don't exist: Overtourism; Carbon; Leakage and many more. Ed from Equator AI takes us through how his early work with USAID gave him both t...

Kevin Indig is a legend in the SEO industry. His resume speaks for itself with stints at Spotify, G2, Atlassian as well as being a growth advisor for businesses such as Snap, Reddit, NextDoor and Dropbox to name just a few. In this episode we talk about Kevin's recent deep dive into the travel industry, how TripAdvisor have doubled their organic traffic with AI summaries and what might be coming n...

 Today we've got something really different and special for you because today's podcast is almost 100 percent brought to you by AI. Everything except for the little piece I'm recording now has been made by AI. Everything from the introduction song, the little piece that introduced me just before this, the cover art, and the entire podcast itself has all been created 100 percent by AI. So we spend...

Welcome to the New Year and the start of Series 2 of the Everything AI in Travel podcast. We expect it to be a big one in the AI + Travel world. For an Everything AI in Travel first, we have a return guest for the first time in the podcast history. Christian Watts, founder of Magpie.ai and AI pundit has returned for the new year to give his predictions for what we might see in the year ahead. He a...

This chat with Barb Hyman from Sapia.ai was a real eye opener for me. For this episode we moved away from strictly looking at travel and moved into the operational area of HR and hiring, relevant to all businesses and industries. The impressive thing about Barb Hyman is she is not looking to simply accelerate existing processes but instead rethink the process, starting with the end goal and workin...

I was astounded one day when on LinkedIn to see that I was a second degree connection to Barak Obama. I couldn't see how that was possible - but it all had to do with Anna Jaffe. Anna runs one of the most innovative businesses in AI and Travel and has a long history of trying to solve really hard problems for very important organisations, including the US Government. I shouldn't really have a favo...

Mark Phillips is a digital nomad and yet in 2024 he found himself on the French President's private jet and being talked about in high level delegations between France and Serbia. And he isn't French, he's Australian. Join us for this fascinating tale that takes us through the French Tech Visa process right onto the President's private jet. Oh there is a fair bit of AI stuff too.