Most travel brands are racing into agents…
…but they’re skipping the one layer that decides who gets trusted.

In this episode of Everything AI & Travel, I sit down with Robert Cole (Rock Cheetah) — Cornell hotel grad, ex-Four Seasons marketing leader, Sabre/Travelocity-era hotel distribution veteran, and a longtime Phocuswright analyst.

We get practical on what “AI readiness” really means for travel businesses:

• Why digital identity becomes the foundation for the agentic world

• The difference between traveler identity vs hospitality entity identity (hotel ≠ just a building…)

• Why “standards” are hard in travel (and why the tech world solved this decades ago)

• How Robert uses Claude / Gemini / OpenAI (and his “reasoning gauntlet” to rip drafts apart)

• What small operators should do now (security, schema, sources of truth…) before agents arrive

If you’re a hotelier, tour operator, DMO, or travel tech builder trying to understand what’s coming next — this is one to save.

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Hear the episode here.

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