Great to see so much discussion around generative AI at ITB Berlin last week. In particular I heard there was significant debate within the sightseeing & experiences sector, where generative AI is fundamentally a product innovation, as opposed to flights & hotels sectors where generative AI powers retail innovation. However several key topics remain undiscussed. […]

Publicly available autonomous vehicles (e.g. robotaxis) are here. My Autoura service is available (for early testing) operating tourism experiences in four US cities – San Francisco, Las Vegas, Austin & Phoenix, using publicly available robotaxis. We have no vehicles ourselves. I have been disappointed that the tour bus sector hasn’t grasped the incoming disruption that […]

In the last couple of months there has been a whirlwind of tech news much of it lead by discussion about generative AI such as ChatGPT. But underneath all of that, innovators in our sector have begun to tentatively hint at what they are focussed on. Therefore it is worthwhile documenting what people have said, […]

Generative AI such as ChatGPT is an era defining technology and it merits the number of articles and videos created on this topic. However we are ignoring one core debate, we need to talk about what happens when this and related AI technologies scale, which they will. This article focusses on this important topic with […]

Is it thousands per city like today? Or is it tens of thousands perhaps? Or could leading retailers just have 10 experiences per city that are each highly configurable & personalised? Today’s upper bounds example is Rome on Viator, where Viator has 7000 things to do just in Rome and the surrounding area. I am […]

With 1% of the year already gone it might be a bit late to do 2023 trends article, however here goes: 10 – local Including the ongoing transition to merge the tourism industry with the leisure industry, at least within local experiences. 9 – sustainability Has to be on the list – I worry this […]

Firstly, what exactly is the alignment problem? Lets ask Chat GPT… The AI alignment problem is the challenge of ensuring that an artificial intelligence system will behave in ways that are beneficial to humans, rather than causing harm. This involves designing AI systems that are aligned with human values and goals, and finding ways to […]

This sudden and recent interest in AI from mainstream tourism, brought about by Chat GPT in the last few weeks, has been a bit of a sea change event. I first spoke about the impact of AI on local tourism at World Travel Market London in 2017, ITB Berlin in 2018 and Arival Las Vegas […]

Been a lot of chatter about AI (such as ChatGPT) in the last week or so, but what is the impact of all this extraordinary capability at a strategic level? To set the scene, for the last few years my major concern when strategising vs significant digital incumbents has been, “how do we create something […]

Niche topic, perhaps only of interest to technologists, however…. lets summarise the case for and against OCTO standards. What are the OCTO standards? When you connect a rez tech with an OTA, you have to make the product data continually align between the two platforms. This is tricky, e.g. on booking cancellation terms, how are […]