Tourism Australia AI Webinar for the travel industry - starting soon

In just a couple of hours after this newsletter lands in your inbox or on your LinkedIn feed - Tourism Australia will be hosting an industry webinar on the practical application of AI in tourism businesses. The webinar begins at 11am AEST/8pm ET/5pm PT.

You can register here. Whilst the webinar is made for the Australian travel industry, anyone is welcome to register and watch along. You don’t need to be a 🦘 

Tourism Australia's General Manager Digital & Marketing Operations, Melinda Walters will be joined by Paul McGrath, CEO YHA Australia, Tony Carne, Co-Founder, Videreo + Everything AI in Travel newsletter, and Michael Herrmann, Owner & Founder, Bonza Bike Tours, President & Founder, TourConnectAI to see how they are using AI in practice today and what they have learnt along the way.

Videreo was asked to participate because we are an AI native company that is helping many DMO’s, brands and agencies in the travel industry. With just 2.5 people we are saving 100’s of hours in time for our clients when running content creator campaigns as part of their marketing mix.

Videreo is an AI native company but actually our customers don’t care about that, nor should they. 

They care about saving 80% of the manual workload in finding, booking, managing and paying creators & influencers for campaigns.

They care about scaling their marketing but not their headcount.

They care about how to redeploy that time to drive greater effectiveness in other parts of their marketing.

They care about having the business performance data of creator campaigns to know which ones and working so they can concentrate on repeating that success.

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

This content is provided by the newsletter sponsor Videreo.com

Maybe travel is harder to sell via AI after all?

The biggest story of the week was Sam Altman indicating that early data suggests that selling stuff via an AI platform chatbot is harder than initially thought.

The effect was immediate for the incumbents in the travel industry as their rapidly declining stock prices suddenly did a U-turn.

“The rally followed a report ⁠by The Information that OpenAI found ChatGPT users were researching products in the chatbot but not completing purchases through it.”

Booking and Expedia had been on a PR offensive to sure up their plummeting stocks - but nothing THEY could say could stop the slide.

“Shares of online travel agencies surged on Thursday after a report that OpenAI is scaling back plans to integrate direct bookings into ‌ChatGPT, easing investor fears that the AI chatbots could eventually cut out travel intermediaries.

We see the OpenAI news as ⁠incrementally positive for online travel agencies, Bernstein analyst Richard Clarke said in a note.

"This means that Booking and Expedia can ⁠continue to get in front of consumers on AI-platforms, lowering the risk of disintermediation," Clarke added.”

We said last week here that words matter, but not all words from all people.

As we can see, Sam Altman’s words matter.

As Gilad Berenstein said “As we all already knew, building in Travel is a lot harder than it seems from the outside!

(and just because someone has traveled a lot does not mean they know anything about how to build in this space)”

The reporting was specific to travel. Business Insider reported “The shift, reported by The Information, amounts to a notable strategic retreat. OpenAI had been testing integrated checkout features inside ChatGPT, allowing users to book hotels or buy products without leaving the chatbot.

Now, the company is evolving its commerce strategy and moving its Instant Checkout feature into apps run by other companies, where purchases can happen more seamlessly, according to a TD Cowen research note published on Thursday.

The TD Cowen analysts called this a "stunning admission."“

As we also reported here last week - this “app” strategy also has come significant flaws.

How are other people using AI

Whilst I’ll be sharing both how I personally and Videreo as a business uses AI in the webinar mentioned above, I’ve seen a bunch of other people recently generously sharing how they are tactically using AI - which tools specifically and specifics on the how:

Katalina Mayorga posted this week “When I posted about automating my workload with Anthropic Claude and Cowork, many of you wanted to join. I promised to document what's actually working.”

Katalina breaks down the recent steps of success in the post and chats through where she has been using Cowork versus Claude Code and the differences in those approaches.

She even drops a trick on how to use skills.

Meanwhile Rafat Ali wrote he is “95% Claude and 5% ChatGPT these days.” Ali talks about his annoyance with what he is terming “promptbait” which is the way ChatGPT always finishes by finding a way to extend the question, even after the answer is clearly given.

Oliver Green gave Claude Skills 2.0 a run and then shared his repo on GitHub so anyone could just grab the skill he had built around writing tour content specific for certain platforms such as Viator, GetYourGuide and even your own website. I actually took Green’s skill and used it myself in a presentation with a client this week.

Janette Roush basically full-time shares everything she is personally experimenting with. This is a great example she shared this week on re-purposing content to make a little effort go a long way using Claude Code.

There are lots people giving you the tips, tricks and tools to be doing basic things to make your time and business go further.

You just need to carve out some time to follow along.

Sabre goes hard on filling the developer gap left by Amadeus but does it deliver?

Sabre probably couldn’t believe its luck when Amadeus came out to say it was sunsetting its access to its developer portal.

Amadeus opened the door and Sabre walked right through.

This week Martijn van der Voort dug a bit deeper into what all this means for those experimenting, innovating and hacking away.

“The Amadeus portal functioned more like an open experimentation playground.” suggests van der Voort

“Sabre’s setup feels different. Even though they now expose an MCP interface designed to allow AI agents to interact with their stack, much of the capability still sits behind provisioning, credentials and product-level access. In other words, technically modern but still commercially gated.

So while the MCP concept simplifies the technical interaction for agentic systems, it does not automatically create the kind of open developer playground the Amadeus portal once represented. Think less “one open pipe” and more “one front door leading to several controlled rooms.”

Travel comes dead last when it comes to agents

Interesting post from Andrew Lockhead this week highlighting the latest Anthropic reporting on agent use by industry.

“Anthropic just published data on AI agent usage across industries, and travel is in last place. I can’t really say I’m surprised.”

So why is that?

According to Lockhead “I talked about this a few weeks back when I mentioned that travel sits in the worst quadrant for AI agent trust. Most decisions have high consequences and low reversibility. If you book the wrong hotel on the wrong dates, that mistake will cost you and is hard to undo.”

He doesn’t however think we will be sitting in last spot for long.

“…if you look at the Anthropic data from a different lens, it also shows the market is wide open and ripe for disruption and innovation.

I’m absolutely sure that in the next few years, there will be a new wave of travel tech that leverages this gap until we reach a point where AI agents are the new norm in travel.”

Lockhead thinks the bottlenecks currently are around personalisation and accountability.

“Imagine this: You show up at the airport gate or the hotel front desk and find out the AI didn't book the right dates, it got your passport number wrong, or selected “no luggage” when you have a huge suitcase trailing behind you. What then?”

The AI inspired traffic collapse in travel

Rafat Ali has done it again by dropping another consequential piece of news this week.

Ali researched some of the top travel websites to see how they were faring in the brave new AI world.

“Topline:
-- the six largest consumer travel websites in the US lost ~60% of their estimated organic search traffic between Jan 2024 and Feb2026. Travel + Leisure collapsed 80%, from 4.3M to 869K monthly. AFAR dropped 79%. Condé Nast Traveler fell 56%. The Points Guy lost nearly half.
-- these brands still get millions of total visits. Travel + Leisure still pulls 16M/month.
-- Caveats: Ahrefs doesn't capture Discover, newsletters, direct visits, or long-tail queries. SimilarWeb total traffic shows these brands still doing decent monthly traffic.”

Ouch.

Whilst plummeting, the audiences are still significant suggested Ali. But for how much longer?

“The connection between editorial presence and consumer discovery is breaking...in other words, moving towards, dare I say it, obsolescence in the referral world, search or AI...”

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: HostAI

Welcome to HostAI who recently joined the marketplace on the everythingaiintravel.com website.

They have also recently released a report into The Repeat Guest Problem in the Short Term Rental industry.

We analyzed over 230,000 confirmed bookings across 115 vacation rental operators in 2025, spanning urban apartments, beach houses, mountain cabins, and resort destinations. The data reveals a systemic problem: operators are paying OTA commissions on guests they've already acquired.

We call it repeat guest leakage. And it adds up.

If you have a B2B business underpinned by AI 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.

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 the Tourism Australia webinar substituted the regular podcast on the Everything AI in Travel channel. Only so much time in the week! Got some great guests coming up with a flurry of recording happening in the next two weeks.

Partner with Us

Most clicked last week was the link to the Instagram posts for the Secret Food Tours campaign we ran at Videreo last week (which was surprising - but great!).

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