The DMC that cracked over $500K in sales* from social

I’ve been sharing this post with some of our clients this week, but it is too good not to share with everybody.

This is both a masterpiece in storytelling but also a story that most small DMCs or local tour operators could also tell about their own destination and product.

The core lever these local businesses have over big global brands is price. They don’t have the 40-60% overhead of brand, marketing and business to support and yet often they are the ones running these products for those large brands.

Quality and experience of actual product is identical.

But they don’t have trust in the market.

This post created the trust. 

If you check the comments, you will see more than 1000 people asking for the contact details of the on-ground supplier so they too can access this epic experience (Gorilla Trekking in Uganda) at a bargain basement price. *If half of them end up booking, that’s $500K in GMV. That’s 500 people to upsell into the other things needed for this trip - like transport and accommodation.

The funny thing about it is that I don’t think this started out as a commercial piece of marketing (and there in lies the secret to social media!).

Why this worked so well:

• the experience, Gorilla Trekking is highly desirable (what is your number 1 USP - make sure that is core to the story)

• the hook is irresistible; she wired $1000 via Western Union to a person she didn’t know in Uganda. Everyone wants to know how that turned out.

• the value is real. She demonstrates it by showing the prices others are paying as part of the reel - no more research to be done. (Is your value real? If wanting immediate SALES from social, you need a killer offer. DMC’s have this.

• the storytelling is exquisite. Most travel reels are dull. This one is an epic ride

If I operated a globally desirable experience in a remote part of the world, like Everest Base Camp hikes, Machu Picchu treks, Blue Cruises in Turkey and 10,000 other incredible experiences and wanted a direct access to market - I would hire creators and copy this model.

Contact me if you need a hand. Its what we do every day.

Videreo is the place where creator marketing is made simple and effective for everyone in travel.

This content is provided by the newsletter sponsor Videreo.com

Navan ‘clawing’ their way to the top?

Eric Leopold this week dropped some thoughts on Navan’s new agent - TravelClaw

Leopold suggests that what could be coming to Managed Travel is “👉 "a new agentic layer that unlocks proactive, autonomous personal assistance"

However what is more likely coming first is “=> the use case sounds like proactive notifications, whereas the potential is autonomous actions based on personal traveler information 🤓”

I think many people can see the possibilities of what Agentic action will mean for travel. And there are plenty rushing for the door right now - even though, actually the wiring isn’t really hooked up just yet.

As Eric says in his final sentence: “The challenge with teasing and with popular names is to manage expectations. I hope Navan can deliver the true TravelClaw, not simply another trip notification tool 👨‍✈️”

The link to what Navan is up to is in the comments of Eric’s post is you are interested.

Does MCP kill NDC (after NDC killed GDS?)

Is there an industry that loves acronyms more than travel? That isn’t really the point of this spot - but it needs to be said.

An article this week in Business Travel News, Serko VP of business development Johnny Thorsen said "MCP will eliminate NDC. It's going to happen, not overnight, but every day it's going to become harder for an airline to justify investing in NDC."

By way of explanation his thesis is “If an airline has an MCP server for its content, that means AI agents can access it without having to adhere to whatever schema of NDC an airline is following.”

Meanwhile Steve Clagg, a travel technology consultant and former procurement technical program manager for Microsoft takes the counter point argument "I would undermine any position that says MCP is going to replace outright or diminish NDC," Clagg said. "It's a different discussion to say whether NDC becomes superfluous in the long term, but in terms of technologies, they're not in conflict."

If you’re new to all this New Distribution Capability (NDC) was “developed more than a decade ago to enable airlines to be able to modernize how they sell their products, adoption is still lagging, especially in corporate channels, amid the complexity of building and maintaining the connections.”

AI is coming to disrupt many things so we will see lots of stories like this in months and years ahead.

Perhaps the most salient point is that made by his spot below about where the data layer ultimately comes from.

Right now, adding a MCP server to the front of your database proves basically nothing. It certainly won’t hurt, but there is a fair way to run here to see how agentic commerce unfolds.

Using AI got this businesses meta Ads account banned - permanently

As we all rush to do everything that is possible, it is worth remembering that sometime in the past you might have ticked the “I agree” box to a long read of T&C’s that you probably didn’t read.

Over at Meta, in their T&C’s they say don’t go messing around with external AI’s that are hooked up to our systems.

The natural first thought many are having is to automate the manual things they do as a way to dip their toe into AI. For Saharsh Agrawal that was all the time he was spending in his Meta Ads Manager account.

“I saw everyone talking about using Claude Code to run Meta ads so I tried it myself. connected the API, had it pull all my campaign data, had it generate new creatives, optimize targeting, and manage budget allocation. I thought I was about to automate my entire paid acquisition and never touch Ads Manager again.

for about a week it was working great. campaigns were running, creatives were going up, budgets were shifting automatically.

then Meta flagged my account and shut it down.

lost thousands of dollars worth of campaign data, all my custom audiences, my pixel history, everything. one of our best performing acquisition channels gone overnight because Meta's system flagged the API activity as suspicious.”

Many in travel run their business off the back of paid ads on Google and Meta. Imagine if that just got turned off tomorrow because you or your agency were chasing “efficiency”.

Maybe a good time to check in on your agency BTW.

“Four companies, four architectures, four completely different answers to owns the orchestration layer….”

We’ve long pushed the line in this newsletter that if you are going to use AI for your video creation in travel, you need to lean into the “unreal” vs photorealistic.

Marko Lukicic this week laid out a very interesting scenario for hotels.

“Which architecture is your next PMS contract betting on, and what happens to your data if you pick wrong?”

The set up here is “Mews just raised $300M at a $2.5B valuation for agentic AI in hotel tech, Lighthouse got $370M for analytics, Canary Technologies launched an AI Agent Studio for 20.000+ properties, and Apaleo shipped an MCP server converting 237 PMS endpoints into agent-accessible tools.”

They can’t all be right, right?

It’s a bit a theme this week around where the source of data lies and how is it unlocked.

As Marko puts it “Nobody's doing a $300M raise for "we sorted out your spreadsheets". And yet that's genuinely what needs to happen before any of these agent architectures deliver on what they're promising.”

Is wait, actually a good strategy right now?

The rewards of early AI investment are starting to be reaped

For the exact counterpoint to that suggestion around waiting……… Hotel News Resource (via Skift, via JP Morgan) this week suggested “2026 could be the first year in which large U.S. hotel companies begin to see measurable profit benefits from scaled AI deployments.”

I note the word “could” there.

In terms of evidence “Skift reported that Hyatt said its group sales teams became about 20 percent more productive after deploying AI tools, while Wyndham Hotels & Resorts said AI-powered call centers have reduced labor costs for franchisees. These examples suggest that the industry is starting to evaluate AI less as a novelty and more as an operational lever.”

If you think someone (or everyone) you know or work with could grow from being more informed on the topic of ai + travel (or could use the training above) then please forward this email to them and they can click the button below:

Marketplace Spotlight: Tripian

Jeff Kischuk, co-founder & CEO at Tripian, is getting tired of the headlines about hallucinations in travel.

“Forbes posted an article that hit my inbox today, where a travel insurance company tested 3 common LLMs on the same Itinerary. The errors and pricing gaps it surfaced were there as expected, and of course they are worth understanding.”

As Jeff points out, what the problem here is not the LLM’s but the data feeding them.

“…the problem doesn't rest with the models. The problem is, and has always been, what data the model is working with. They just don't know how current or accurate the information they're working with actually is.

That's not an AI hallucination problem. That's a data infrastructure problem, and that structured layer, that sits underneath the models, is what is often missing in travel today.”

This is true.

But people love to point out when AI is wrong. So that isn’t going away until they have nothing to point at.

If you have a B2B business underpinned by AI and looking for people to notice you, you can sign up to the Everything AI in Travel marketplace for peanuts (top right corner, 5 mins, bring your logo). You’ll then see your company featured here from time to time.

It’s priced for bootstrapped startups but also accepting larger companies too.

60% of interactions with Trip.com’s AI Genie are booking related

Trip.com got the news out this week that reported “a marked rise in booking-related interactions, which now account for close to 60% of exchanges, and a shift from a functional helper to an end-to-end travel companion.”

Even more interestingly they broke it down by different geographies.

I got AI to turn it into a table for us:

Slack Group!

Podcasts and Sponsors

Podcasts now on Spotify and Apple Podcasts:

New podcasts are now showing up on Spotify and Apple Podcasts for your easy listening pleasure!

This week I caught up with Jason Swick on the Everything AI in Travel podcast and chatted about SwixAI, an AI orchestration layer for DMO’s that has something for everyone regardless of their current level of AI proficiency.

On the Everything Social Media in Travel podcast, I caught up with Walter Biscardi Jr. who has made $9M in cruise sales, 70% of those coming from TikTok. Walter breaks it all down for us - exactly how he did it. A good one if you like sales!

Partner with Us

This newsletter and the podcasts are open for sponsorships, takeovers and other clever marketing for those who have AI products they want the world of travel to know about.

Send me a message on LinkedIn if you want to tap that audience.

Most clicked last week was the link to the post about proactive and reactive AI.

That’s it - you’ve made it to the end of this edition. If you’re thankful for this newsletter - you can always buy me a coffee.

I’ll be putting the result of the most clicked post in next week’s edition so you can see where others are focusing. If I’ve missed something, you’ve got a tip or any feedback at all - you can simply reply to this email and it will come straight to me. I’m doing this for You so please don’t be shy to tell me what you think