In this REWIND we talk about the hot button topic of personalisation with AI.

Stephanie Daniel from Legends isn't just theorising about the possibilities, rather she and her team are building the pieces needed for this to become a reality.

Generative AI can absolutely tweak each piece of consumer content making it specific and relevant to the user. However it needs to know who that user is and build that into the prompt that creates the content.

All possible but not easy and things like GDPR and the potential disappearance of cookies make it harder. Legends however think they've got the answer. Listen in to this episode to hear what it is.

Brennen Bliss and his Propellic Marketing are a force in travel SEO and digital marketing world.

In this REWIND episode Brennen breaks down what those in travel need to know about he impact of AI on how marketing can and will work in the future.

Brennen doesn't pull any punches and his customer's results seems to tell the story for him.

All my guests are inspirational in my eyes but I think, publicly at least, it was this conversation with the CEO of the hottest AI startup in travel, Andy Moss from Mindtrip that really got people interested and noticing this little podcast venture.

And Andy didn't disappoint bringing his huge brain and vast experience to the table to lay it all out for us.

Andy is one of 12 co-founders in the Mindtrip business. That is crazy enough in itself but what becomes clear in the conversation is that this is a group of people who have all done successful work with each other before, banding together to go again after a really big prize.

In this REWIND episode from early in 2024, I really wanted to niche down to the Hotel industry specifically and find out what might be happening in that particular sector of the travel industry.

I got Susan Barry from the Top Floor Podcast, one of my favourites, because Susan had previously chatted to many innovators in accommodation who were leveraging AI on behalf of the sector.

Susan gives us the lay of the land and breaks down some of the important pain points especially in accommodation to give us a great overview of where things were at with hotels in that moment.

The explosion of AI trip planners was one of the core characteristics of the early generative AI boom.

In this REWIND we talk to one of those early founders, Connor Wilson from Pilot. Actually, by the time in early 2024 we had this chat, AI Trip Planners were starting to go the way of chatbots in the way they could induce a collective eyeroll from the travel tech audience.

Whether through feature differentiation or different tactics to eliminate hallucinations, each new entrant was looking for a way to stand out and demand relevance. Pilot was no different here.

In this REWIND we go back to the chat with John Lyotier from Travelai.com

Travelai.com have been forerunner in creating a cash flowing business from leveraging generative AI. There aren't too many others out there in travel who can say that, even less who are actually touching the consumer.

Beyond that, John is one of the really big thinkers in the Travel + AI world. He is the guy playing chess three moves ahead of everyone else and that makes what he has to say really worth listening to!

In this REWIND we look back on the chat with Eduardo Schuch, co-founder at the hot AI startup, Tailbox.

Tailbox came spinning out of MIT with smart people and money secured to see what they could bring to the new AI driven market in travel.

With no-one from travel on the initial team, this was a real outsiders view of what is possible, not worrying about what is not.

In this REWIND episode we caught up with our first female founder in the AI + space, Kim Bennett.

Kim is building Atlas Guru, an AI tool for the travel advisor industry to help streamline the process of building out a complex bespoke itinerary and getting a comprehensive and beautifully presented offer in front of a client.

Whilst much of the attention (as usual) is focused on consumer apps in the AI planning space, Kim quickly saw there was a B2B opportunity here to get advisers tools to help them do their work more efficiently. That might make the market opportunity smaller, but it certainly makes the chance of building a successful business much larger!

The very first episode for the year of 2024 looked at the subject everyone was thinking about, contemplating or actively working towards - chat bots!

I spoke to Dan (The Man) Flores from Satisfi Labs who were well ahead of the curve on this one having built out their own native AI pre the release of open generative AI capabilities.

The chat bot is much maligned, partly because of the poor output of early versions forced on us by banks and airlines and others which took us on circular routes to nowhere. And partly because of the perceived lack of true innovation.

I never really bought into the whole "Not another chatbot" mentality because the truth is that the generative AI superpower is the order of magnitude improvement of the ability of machines to communicate with humans. A core business problem everywhere, it seemed was customer service. So we have a hand-in-glove match for what the tech is good at colliding with a real pain point.

That's not a weakness, that's a strength.

In this early episode I chatted to Christian Watts from Magpie. I can't think of another person from travel who paid as close attention to the rise of AI than Christian in the early days.

Christian's almost daily video explainers on LinkedIn were an incredible source of knowledge for the industry as we all figured out what generative AI was and more importantly, what it could do for our industry.

In this chat we look back on the whole of 2023 (!) and go through the main points in which the rise of generative AI shook up the travel industry, and in many ways, also didn't.