Secret Food Tours launches it 100 cities + 100K 5-star review campaign with content creators

Realizing that they were going to hit two incredible milestones in the same month, Secret Food Tours (SFT) saw an opportunity to tell the world about both its breadth and quality of offering.

Then disaster struck.

The team at SFT wanted to really build momentum into this campaign. Both the 100 cities and the 100K 5-star review milestones are hard won, and they wanted to ensure this campaign hit in the communities where their clients and potential clients lived.

They engaged their PR firm to gather a group of creators to get this campaign shot out of a cannon and have ‘travelgram’ flooded with trusted people talking about the company and its huge milestones.

Just 2 weeks before launch date the PR team told them they couldn’t pull it off.

A day of manual outreach from their own team quickly showed this was going to be tough. Manual outreach takes time. People don’t respond immediately and when they do that begins a negotiation with many asking for the whole campaign budget for just their post. That’s if you do it the old way.

The SFT Team had been chatting to Videreo about a more ongoing campaign relationship but decided to shoot off a message to see if we could help with this campaign.

Within 48 hours the 20 slots were filled with top quality creators aligned to SFT’s market. This was achieved well within budget. The campaign launched this week with posts like this.

Videreo is the place where we cut 80% of the manual work around content creator & influencer campaigns in travel. Oh, we also measure the business impact of each post too.

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

This content is provided by the newsletter sponsor Videreo.com

Travel falls behind in AI adoption

The NYU School of Professional Studies (NYU SPS) Jonathan M. Tisch Center of Hospitality and Boston Consulting Group (BCG) this week dropped a report on the uptake of AI in the travel industry.

The news was not good (unless you’ve done bugger all yourself - in which case, you are still on par with most).

The key headline is “In the travel and tourism workforce, 2.9 per cent of full-time employees possess AI skills compared with 21 per cent in tech and media.”

It isn’t because there isn’t opportunities. “AI-skilled hospitality roles are growing nearly five per cent year-on-year.” So there is a gap. Will that be filled from people outside the industry or by people inside the opportunity upskilling?

Maybe also consider the pay difference in AI skilled roles. Right now, is a huge time of opportunity for both individuals and businesses.

The report also found the hospitality industry needs to get on top of an overall labour shortage. “In North America, 65 per cent of hotels reported staffing shortages in 2025, alongside an 11.2 per cent year-on-year increase in labour costs.”

Putting this all together, we have an industry that could fill the staffing shortage gap just through AI productivity alone - but seemingly there isn’t much interest in doing so…..

What a strange place.

Sabre is an AI-native company 😶 

According to the PR people at Sabre, it isn’t them holding the industry back. They’ve transformed in an AI native company.

"I'm proud to say that Sabre is no longer keeping pace," COO Shawn Williams said. "We're absolutely setting it.

He stressed that Sabre's platform is AI native, which positions the company well thanks to the large swaths of data and logic Sabre houses.”

I mean, I work at an AI native company. There are 2.5 of us and that is really all we need at this point alongside our AI helpers who write all our code, build out our product marketing GTM and many, many other things. I’m pretty sure where I work looks pretty different to Sabre - but good one, if that is what you have achieved.

They did start announcing staff layoffs - and that is something I absolutely would expect if the company has transformed to AI native.

Booking phones a(nother) friend

Last week we saw Booking getting airtime on the McKinsey podcast to explain why they (like Sabre) are at the bleeding edge of AI in travel.

This week it was Morgan Stanley suddenly spruiking a narrative that AI is good for OTA’s rather than it being disastrous as the market was indicating.

Was this a realisation they just suddenly came to in this moment?

“The bank said early agentic AI travel tools are not bypassing online travel agencies but instead redirecting users to their apps and websites to complete bookings.” And I think that is absolutely true - in this early moment. The best way to test if what you are building right now is to connect it in with Booking or Expedia or someone else with the feed and checkout.

What is less clear is whether in the future, huge, curated lists of products provide any type of moat what-so-ever.

Right now, the best thing Booking has going for it is the 2.9% AI adoption rate of those who could play a role is disrupting them. And maybe that is enough.

As Christian Watts said on LinkedIn this week - he just wants his agent to book the preferred property at the very best value for him. If that is $0.01 cheaper elsewhere - then elsewhere is where it will be booking. This was in response to Skift article where the Booking CFO had said that AI isn’t a threat at all.

I believe denial is step one of the grief process. I’m not sure if there is a correlation. Let’s see keep an eye out for anger and then negotiation.

Skyscanner is latest in travel to have a GPT app

Piero Sierra, the Chief AI officer at Skyscanner this week announced they too now have a GPT App.

“Today is a big one for us.

We’ve launched the Skyscanner app in ChatGPT in the US and UK, giving travellers in those markets access to Skyscanner’s global flight options.”

I think these “apps” are actually pretty helpful. But I wouldn’t know for sure because I’ve never really used ChatGPT and called an App except for doing a one-off experiment.

The UI is not intuitive. need to know Company X has an app in the first place and then call it as part of my prompt. No-one I know does that.

I think maybe these apps are a pre-cursor step to some ad play by ChatGPT. Click the ad and it will then call the app from the ad owner and use just their data set to solve your problem.

If I compare it to what Simone Lini is building at Navifare, which a is a skill I can equip my agent with and gives my agent the knowhow to search everywhere with my exact known specifications around what I will and won’t tolerate in terms of flight times, stopover lengths, price etc - I think I know which approach might win.

(For the record - Simone Lini works by himself and ships new things a couple of times a week. Pretty sure he has an AI native company).

Navan launches AI assistant for unmanaged business travellers

I like what Navan is doing here.

I like it mainly because when it comes to business travel, I’m generally lazy compared to leisure travel.

I also want all the expenses in one place with one invoice for myself and the rest of the company (that being Adrian). I don’t want to be finding lots of different things I need to screenshot to make the accountant happy.

I also want good prices and don’t really want to sign up to some SaaS thing.

If it has an AI assistant that helps with other things - that is fine too. Whatever gets the job done quickly and efficiently.

If my AI agent somehow pulls all this off for me - which it should - I also don’t need it. But that doesn’t exist now - so for now this looks like a good option. The TAM for this must be enormous.

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: COAX

COAX Co-Founder and CTO, Ivan Verkalets dropped this strategy for uncovering pain points that I thought could be useful for everyone to know.

Stop building features nobody asked for. Search for them instead.

One Google query I use to validate product ideas:

site: reddit.com "chatgpt" "i wish there is"

This pulls real users expressing unmet needs. Raw frustrations. No surveys. No focus groups. No assumptions.

Replace "chatgpt" with your domain - "hotel booking", "travel planning", "fleet management" - and you get dozens of real pain points in minutes.

A few more combinations that work:

• site: reddit.com "booking system" "why can't"

• site: reddit.com "hotel software" "switched to"

• site: reddit.com "travel app" "frustrated"

"Why can't" reveals missing features. "Switched to" reveals competitor weaknesses. "Frustrated" reveals where current solutions fail.

Before your next sprint planning, spend 20 minutes with these queries.

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.

Meanwhile in China…

An article out this week showed just how much AI had penetrated the booking patterns over the recent New Year travels.

“Major travel platforms reported a sharp surge in AI-driven bookings over the Spring Festival holiday, with orders for cultural and tourism products jumping more than 800% from pre-holiday levels and AI-assisted scenic ticket purchases soaring 24-fold.”

Spring Festival is the biggest annual movement event in the world as the entire nation goes from where they are to where the family is. As such you’d expect a decent rise in usage of everything.

The impact on destination and activity marketing here could be stark.

“As AI becomes a new traffic gateway, marketing strategies are adjusting. Research cited by industry observers shows that on some AI platforms, the top three scenic spots on an answer page account for more than 80 percent of bookings, while those not included in recommendations see average traffic declines of about two-thirds.”

Presumably this also leads to huge overcrowding and not great experiences also.

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 Robert Cole from RockCheetah who is also a Senior Analyst with PhocusWright and ex Mark Travel (Tour Operator), Budget Group (Car Rental), Sabre and part of the American Hotel & Lodging Association - so has got a pretty solid view across the breadth of travel. Robert talked about how digital identities of both individuals but also businesses are critical for us to move safely to the agentic age.

If you want to join Robert and I in the 2.9% with AI skills, the special FREE education series on practical AI usage with Santiago Rodriguez is available and best to watch and listen so you can see exactly the steps Santiago is taking you through, so maybe try this one on YouTube.

Partner with Us

Most clicked last week was the link to Videreo.com which was the pre-cursor to the biggest week of inbound we’ve ever had. Thanks, and it’s been nice to meet with a great bunch of new clients this week. We appreciate your trust in decreasing your workload and increasing the transparency of your creator marketing efforts. Second most clicked was the Google Patent story.

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’d appreciate that.

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