TikTok Go launches in the US adding a booking button directly on to creator videos

Pretty big news in the Travel + Creators world this week with TikTok launching its TikTok Go program in the US to get its foothold into the travel industry.

How it works
TikTok GO surfaces lodging and things to do across the ways people already discover content on TikTok – through videos, search, and location pages. When users find something they love, they can view details, check availability, and complete a booking in just a few simple steps.

Booking partners span accommodations and experiences – including Booking.com, Expedia, Viator, GetYourGuide, Tiqets, and Trip.com

This is an important change, because our own data at Videreo is that it has been very hard to move people from TikTok to somewhere else. The tricks you can do on Instagram don’t exist on TT and so up to now, you needed to try and get someone to a profile page, then click the link-in-bio and then click a link - this basically just never happens.

This is bigger news for the experiences businesses than the hotel ones, I think. Hotels are rarely a spontaneous purchase (unless associated with a great offer) but 50% of experience bookings come in the last 48 hours and social media is a huge source of inspiration on those choices.

The problem for individual experiences businesses now is whether anyone is actually posting about your business?

We recommend our clients set up a program that will gift an experience to a travel creators once a week. This gets that business 52 chances each year to show up when people are searching on social for things to do in their destination. Given most of the competition have next to zero videos in play - this is a huge advantage.

Videreo is the place to find the creators who can post about your business on TikTok.

Contact me to learn how we can make this happen for you.

This content is provided by the newsletter sponsor Videreo.com

Disney to remove the complexity (they built) with AI

Disney built so much complexity into its product, many families needed to enlist the help of a Disney specialist travel agent to book their trip.

In an article this week in this seemingly Disney focused publication (Inside The Magic), it reported that in the Q2 earning call “CEO Josh D’Amaro confirmed that the company is actively working on artificial intelligence tools designed to simplify the vacation planning process and personalize trips for guests from the very beginning.”

Can a trip to Disney really be that complex? Turns out the answer is yes.

Guests now have to think about:

Lightning Lane Multi Pass & Single Pass selections
Resort booking windows
Dining reservation timing
Crowd patterns
Transportation strategies
Virtual queues
Extended Evening Hours
Park hopping logistics
Special event scheduling

This level of complexity spawned its own cottage Travel Advisor industry. “That complexity is one of the biggest reasons Disney travel agents have become so popular over the last decade. For many families, using a travel agent is no longer a luxury. It feels necessary.”

Now it seems AI is coming to rescue of all (except those advisors) with natural language queries soon to be able to help plan the perfect Disney day in seconds.

D’Amaro also emphasized that Disney wants human creativity to remain central despite the company’s AI ambitions.

“We’re committed to implementing AI in a way that keeps human creativity at the center of everything that we do, and of course respects creators and the tremendous value of our own intellectual property,” he said.

Is this just a public company afraid to go backwards in an AI hype storm or is this a lightning in a bottle experiment that could then translate more widely into all leisure travel? The big differentiator here is that Disney has and controls all the data - so should be able to make as good a system with AI as is possible.

Be interesting to watch.

Chesky says the current AI UI doesn’t work for travel (or eCommerce)

In other earnings call news, Airbnb’s Brian Chesky again pushed that the current way AI interfaces with the consumer doesn’t work for travel, so he isn’t running towards AI in its current format.

“I do not think anyone has figured out AI for travel or e-commerce yet," Chesky said. "The design of a chatbot, as currently constructed, does not work for travel or e-commerce. There are four problems:

1. too much text (most of e-commerce is photo-forward);

2. no direct manipulation (you have to type everything rather than adjust sliders);

3. poor comparison (you can get lost trying to compare thousands of options in a thread); and

4. most bookings are multiplayer, while chatbots are primarily single-player, and not map-native."

Are these just excuses or is there actually something here? Let’s look at each one:

1. too much text (most of e-commerce is photo-forward) - first I’d suggest travel is best displayed in video - so there’s that step we never made it to but that aside, if you have the photo imagery (which Airbnb does) then surely you can show images as the answers to queries? There is no rule that says the chatbot has to respond with text?

2. no direct manipulation (you have to type everything rather than adjust sliders) - you can use Claude to code in whatever UI elements you want. Just ask if you think sliders are the best as part of the question and answer with a bot.

3. poor comparison (you can get lost trying to compare thousands of options in a thread) - AI never gives thousands of options? I don’t really know what he means here..

4. most bookings are multiplayer, while chatbots are primarily single-player, and not map-native - there is definitely something here, but current systems also do multiplayer poorly + if you can code a solution that is multiplayer - then AI can code that solution also? You can also now query Google Maps directly with AI (in the US).

I think this is all just about typing (which could also be speaking if we wanted) versus searching (clicking filters to refine etc).

I do think there is probably a bigger transformation, (AI’s iPhone moment) coming but if that doesn’t come for the next decade - does that start to make Airbnb start to seem very old school? Maybe Airbnb is having its Facebook moment…

There are a bunch of other opinions here.

Navifare becomes Zerolook and uses AI to predict airfare pricing

In building Navifare, ex Googler Simone Lini found a new problem - the cost of API calls.

In an article this week he ran us through the math.

On a query like “find me the cheapest flight to spend one week on a Greek island in August”.

How many queries do we need to answer that question? Say that I’m in Milan. There are three origin airports, 30 airports on Greek islands with passenger service, 24 one week windows in June: that’s 2160 queries.

If conversion rate is 1%, that’s a 216,000:1 look to book. That’s an 864 GBP bill from Duffel, for one booking. Ouch.

Lini thinks there is going to be a need for a different solution for agentic style booking so he has pivoted to build it.

The bet here is that people will forgive a little inaccuracy. “We’re making an ambitious bet: if you feed the right information to a machine learning model, you can get to a price that’s almost right but cheaper to compute - and this has commercial value.”

He cites “ Filip Filipov (OAG CEO) made the point in a recent article that indicative pricing can be good enough for high-funnel queries. If you’re still figuring out flights for a Greek island in June, you probably don’t need the exact price.”

Is the bet here that if you click through and it is roughly the same, most people will continue the transaction? I think there is a point where it looks like a bait and switch - its just knowing what that tolerance number is for most and how often you can get inside it with the prediction.

Essentially this is a digital twin for the GDS.

Similar to the Disney example above, these problems seem man made, purely for extraction.

If particularly interested in this topic - something similar is happening in India for train bookings.

HBX snaps up Bridgify to use AI to add experiences to its customers

HBX announced this week it has acquired the AI startup Bridgify.

“The acquisition supports HBX Group’s strategy to broaden its Experiences offering while enhancing the use of AI across its operations.”

HBX already has a ton of existing customers using it for hotel sourcing, so why not let them also take experiences here too if it reduces complexity?

“At the core of Bridgify’s proposition is an AI-native experiences infrastructure platform providing access to more than one million curated experiences, sourced from leading global suppliers and enhanced by proprietary AI recommendations algorithms to match the right experience with the right traveller.”

I presume most of these transactions will happen within existing OTA’s (Viator, GYG, Klook etc) and so the core advantage here is one-stop access + the personalisation piece to drive more bookings - but I expect the margins would be pretty slim on those with all those hands in the pocket.

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Marketplace Spotlight: TravelAI

In huge news, TravelAI this week announced it had picked up two new executives - one being the second ever podcast guest on the Everything AI in Travel podcast - Shie Gabbai.

Shie was the founder of RoamAround, one the very first ever AI trip planners to emerge not long after OpenAI exposed its API’s letting people build from their imaginations on top of the companies AI capabilities.

RoamAround was then snapped up by Layla in I think the first AI company exit in travel (that I can remember.)

Now Shie joins TravelAI as Director, AI Experience where he will “help scale TravelAI’s commercial ecosystem and strengthen supplier relationships across the company’s rapidly expanding agentic network.”

Brianna MacNeil, who has already been leading AI product development within TravelAI, formally steps into the role of Director, AI Products & Personalization was the other executive announced.

If you have an AI business in Travel and looking for people to notice you, you can sign up to the marketplace for peanuts (top right corner, 5 mins, bring your logo).

I’ve priced for bootstrapped startups but also accepting larger companies too.

Are you treating symptoms or solving core problems

My favourite read this week was this article which suggested that a lot of the internal AI use cases developed so far were mere bandages over the open wounds, where maybe we should be looking at stopping the patient getting injured in the first place.

“Since early January, airlines have announced apps that help customers manage disruptions manually. Instant rebooking. Digital vouchers. Real-time bag tracking. All from one screen. Industry publications celebrate it as empowering customers and closing the tech gap.

I think they're building solutions for a world that's disappearing faster than they realize.”

Slack Group!

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Most clicked last week was the link to the video of robot luggage handlers from JAL

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