AI is changing the customer digital journey in travel and it isn’t going back

Since the start of mobile and social the traveller’s digital journey has been:

Dream —> Plan —> Book —> Travel —> Share

AI is changing this accepted pathway and travel marketers are going to need to adjust to stay relevant.

What isn’t changing is the impact of social. At the Arival conference in Brisbane this week we saw the latest data on where travellers go to get information for their upcoming journeys. Whilst the point of the slide for the audience was show how AI search was rising (now number 8), what really stood out was that 4 of the top 7 were social media.

Google was still first. YouTube was 2nd. But that isn’t the story.

The story is that if the ‘social medias’ weren’t split out into their separate platforms (YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook) but were rather grouped as a “social media” channel, combined they would have trebled or more all the other sources.

Travel consumers are dreaming on social media. That shouldn’t come as a shock. As a brand, if you want to be seen in today’s market you need people telling your story on social media. Your own brand account won’t cut it. It is a volume, trust and quality of storytelling game. It’s actually incredible how few travel brands are playing this game well.

Good news is you can choose to play the game (or not). In the past weeks www.collabsmap.com has launched to connect travel brands and content creators who are already heading their way. Any brand can add an offer to the creator community and put in on the map for free in less than 2 minutes. Seems like a pretty easy choice to make? Start getting those stories told. Start showing in in social search for your important keywords. That is the point of creator marketing right now.

The new traveller digital journey looks like this:

Dream —> Save —> Book —> Travel —> Share

You will note that Plan has become Save. So what is going on here?

Whilst there are more than a few in the trip planning space who are betting it is the Dream bit that is going away, replaced with AI just telling people where and how they should travel based of random snippets of information, I don’t think that is how most people are wired. Most people want agency and input into the decisions around where they will go and what they will do there. The Dreaming phase starts from the moment you decide a trip is on the horizon and can therefore last weeks, months or even more than a year.

As the traveller collects snippets of information they get mainly from social, they will save them so that their full consideration list, something they have personally curated along with their travel companions is available to be used and useful through the Book and Travel phases of their journey.

Apps like Reely which you will find in the iOS App store become the central repository of this highly curated, highly personalised (by the actual person - not a guess, not a stringing together of disparate data points) trip centric information.

It is already immediately useful, as it plots every reel and post onto a trip map plus products associated with the videos surfaced where appropriate. I actually created one for lunch spots in Melbourne as we are always wanting to try new cool places we’d seen on social but when the day comes to pick somewhere, we could never remember what any of them were. That problem is now solved too! I’ve got 20 and growing all plotted onto a map and with the video to re-watch so I remember why I saved it in the first place.

Where this really gets to the new phase of travel commerce however is that this list is also a MD file which can be accessed via a MCP by the agent of any travel seller the traveller invites to take a look and make an offer.

This is where agent to agent (A2A) negotiation will take place. If the traveller is a Genius member, maybe they only invite the Booking.com agent. More likely they’ll invite all their favourites and most trusted to make them offers on all or part of the consideration list.

That could be Booking or Expedia but it could also be Flight Centre or Fora or it could be a local DMC or Marriott if that is the hotel brand they have saved from their social searches. Relly will help by making suggestions on who to invite.

Reely will host the negotiations on the consumer side and continually learn across its entire data set on what is and isn’t a good offer from those invited sales brands. This gives the consumer leverage but also takes away some of the annoying parts of the current process, like price checking and keeping straight what is and isn’t booked.

“Planning” is the automated piece in this new scenario. It is the annoying workflow stuff almost no-one likes. It doesn’t need a section in the digital journey because it isn’t an action of the consumer.

Saving what they like is the new (and simple) action. As a brand, you want the video talking about your product to be saved. That is the new goal.

I’d love to chat to any of the uber planners out there. Those who are dedicated to their spreadsheet or their Notion board or some other way of currently capturing the information that needs to be saved for their consideration list for each trip. If that is you or your travel partner - please hit me up on LinkedIn, I’d love to chat.

When it comes to AI Travellers have already moved, but suppliers..... not so much.

Coney Dongre at Web In Travel had a good piece this week on what looks like a very real AI gap opening up in Japan travel.

The article says close to nine in ten Japanese travellers are aware of AI, roughly a third have used it to plan a trip, and for Gen Z it is closer to one in two. More importantly, they are not just using it for a bit of inspiration at the top of the funnel. They are using ChatGPT and search to research hotels, compare options and build itineraries.

Meanwhile a lot of travel brands are still using AI for the safe stuff. Reporting, analytics, chatbots, multilingual support, model itineraries. Useful, sure. But the booking layer does not seem to have caught up with the behaviour layer.

If travellers are starting their journey in AI, and making real decisions there, then being good at your website, your SEO and your app is no longer enough on its own. Your product data, content, rates, policies, location context and booking flow all need to be understandable by machines as well as humans. Otherwise you are still technically online, but you are less likely to be meaningfully discoverable in the places behaviour is shifting.

Japan is interesting here because it makes the gap very visible. Consumers have moved faster than suppliers. I suspect that is not just a Japan story (the land where the fax is still in common use!!)

Actually, because I was at Arival this week talking to lots of travel businesses, I know for sure it isn't. Good news is there is lots of interest to get going faster and catch up to consumers.

Beehiiv added a MCP server so I created a new research report based on 200 newsletters

If you get this email directly rather via LinkedIn, you receive it from my newsletter software provider, Beehiiv.

Beehiiv are always adding new features and this week they sent an email saying they had dropped a MCP server meaning AI could connect to all the newsletter content I’ve ever produced and do fun things with it.

After a quick chat with Claude, we decided that we’d put together a new research report that is “A short History of Everything AI in Travel” which smartly and succinctly charts the main turning points in our brief AI journey to date. It looks at successes and failures. It charts where funding money has gone.

Most of all however it is pitched as an overview document you can share with your board or leadership team and it has a bunch of questions that group should be asking themselves right now to help shape the next stage in their AI journey.

It is a PDF so I can’t just drop it here but if you shoot me a message on LinkedIn, I’ll happily send it across to you.

The lesson here I think is to keep an eye out for what your existing vendors are doing that could help you do more and better for those you support also.

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:

Slack Group!

Podcasts and Sponsors

Podcasts now on Spotify and Apple Podcasts:

All podcasts are now showing up on Spotify and Apple Podcasts for your easy listening pleasure! Now is a great time to binge those you may have missed.

We start recording for the 2nd half of the year in June. If you have an AI story happening at your company you think the travel world should know about - let me know and lets get you on.

Partner with Us

Most clicked last week was the link to the Adobe trend report. It got clicked A LOT!

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