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Pangea Buys an AI ‘Genome’ for Travel Itineraries in Third Acquisition: Exclusive


Skift Take

If chatbots use the same content to recommend the same places to everyone, travel is heading toward a homogenization problem, reckons Pangea. Its hedge: buying a ‘Spotify’ for trip itineraries.

Pangea, a social travel platform focused on digital nomads, will announce on Wednesday its third acquisition in five months: Flaire, an AI startup with a personalized recommendation engine that maps traveler preferences and social connections.

Flaire’s system scores locations based on qualitative attributes — then matches them to a user’s preferences. The company calls this a “Place Genome,” which maps sentiment and taste data for destinations. It functions much like Spotify’s recommendation engine, which maps songs to listener preferences.

For Pangea CEO Matt Gray, that’s the answer to a notable dilemma for travel looming on the horizon: AI models ingesting