AI in Travel

Hyatt's annual 10-K provides a handful of notable details, including the final prices it paid for Mr & Mrs Smith and for Dream Hotels.

This week's podcast revolves around three Megatrends: AI's potential in the travel industry, extreme wellness in luxury travel, and the potential impact of weight-loss drugs.

The AI that powers the latest chatbot craze is still in the experimental phase, but not everyone knows that. This example brings into question whether companies should be more cautious about experimenting with unreliable tech.

If you work for an online travel agency and suggested it open brick-and-mortar stores to bring customers online, you would get very quizzical looks, at the least. Let's see if it works in Argentina and Brazil for Despegar/Decolar.

No, Brian Chesky isn't necessarily talking about launching flights on Airbnb when he refers to becoming a "cross-vertical company." Google Flights, relax.

Multiple travel startups raised nearly half of a billion dollars a couple of weeks ago. It's a bigger group again this week, but they're all smaller numbers this time.

The new Trivago ads tend to be one-size fits all, except for languages, and may be too generic to be effective in some parts of the world. Trivago will likely scrap them or adapt them until they resonate.

The jury is still out on whether either of these sectors will be able to carve a secure space in the industry.

Even startups that began experimenting early with generative AI generally aren’t seeing a payoff yet in terms of revenue. But they are generating interest from buyers that want their workers and intellectual property.

All hotel companies will eventually need to be completely in the cloud to take full advantage of new tech like generative AI.