Many travel companies grow by buying traffic. Some companies grow because customers do work for them. This question is about what creates the second type of growth.
A message in a bottle thrown from a Canadian ferry has just washed up in Scotland. It sailed 4,350 kilometers and spent two winters at sea, Found intact There is a dog on the beach. People share it everywhere. Bottles are of no use. It just has an impossible story, and impossible stories are extraordinary in the original sense: worthy of review.
Psychologist Robert Placzyk defines happiness as “joy + surprise.” The bottle offers both functions. Travel products are often built around functionality. Easy booking, speedy check-in, seamless payment. All of these are important, but almost none of them are mentioned.
Pack your bags + go Let customers book travel without knowing the destination. A few days before departure, I received an envelope: “You are going to ______” and needed to be opened at the airport. People film it, film it, share it everywhere. No practicality. Just an unlikely moment to land exactly right. Most travel products are optimized for certainty; Pack+Go introduces uncertainty at just the right moment, bringing surprise and joy.
Just like the bottle, it's not the object that matters. This is the story it tells.
If customers have no reason to talk about you, then growth has to come from somewhere else, often at a high cost.
Seth Godin makes a useful distinction. You know exactly what it would be like if Nike announced they were opening a hotel. If Hyatt announced they were making shoes, you wouldn't know anything.
Casa Camper does just that. The Spanish footwear brand has opened hotels in Barcelona and Berlin, and anyone who knows Camper can predict how they feel: understated, design-led, and slightly unconventional.
Godin’s answer to brand building: a sustained perspective, the confidence to make a claim, and the discipline to consistently deliver on your promises. Through design, services and products, not through logos or advertising spend. This is a longer game than most companies are willing to play.
Try any tour company you know. If they released a product in the adjacent space, do you have a clear idea of what it would look like? If not, they don't really have a brand yet.
Eli Strick, Head of Customer Experience, Wells Fargo Bank, Shared a simple CX framework Marriott CCO's advice: Get the basics right → Make it simple → Build an emotional connection. For the last one (emotional connection), small gestures can make a big difference. In Strick's case, enjoying a plate of matzah in the United Club lounge during Passover costs next to nothing. He might skip it himself, but he'll notice and appreciate the thought behind it, and that's the point.
Ideas like this come easily. What is rare is that they are repeated day after day in hundreds of locations and at moments that matter to travelers. This is where most brands lose consistency. Those who get this right create something that competitors cannot easily copy.
The number one reason young consumers turn away from brands is that brands are trying too hard to reach them. Generational positioning mainly serves to distract from the hard work: building something noteworthy. Most of the time, “trying too hard” means marketing is doing the job that the product is supposed to do.
Danica Smith says very good: “If a logo makes me laugh, I already like the hotel more. Low cost. High impact. Pure personality.”
Tim Peter Discovered This is in a hotel bathroom. Whether it looks careless or committed to sustainability, it all depends on how the hotel already makes you feel when you get to the bathroom.
2019, I shared this quote Dara Khosrowshahi (then CEO of Expedia, now CEO of Uber) speaking to hoteliers:
“You all criticize me for charging exorbitant fees for guests who come to your hotel. I think you are wrong about that. Think of us as the cheapest referral source you can imagine. If they come to you through me, you pay me once, and if they come back to me again and again, shame on you. You should make them loyal customers.”
The following cartoon published by Savvy makes the same point. The hotel had an opportunity to make them a direct customer for life, but they missed it.
Most companies survey everyone and hear mostly noise. Signals come from your best customers; the ones who come back, refer someone, or choose you over cheaper options. Ask them why. The answer is often simpler than what your marketing team can come up with.
Such as “Cracks appear in OTA oligopoly” reflects a common view that AI spells trouble for OTAs. Just tracked Meltwater Which travel brands are most recommended by Master of Laws? Across cues and models. Booking.com (55% exposure) and Expedia Group (54% exposure) dominate European AI-generated recommendations in spring 2026, while Tripadvisor, Hotels.com and Kayak lag far behind.
Meltwater has a product to sell (so think of these numbers as directional rather than conclusive), but the signal is that even in an LLM-first world, the brands that won the last era of online travel still dominate AI searches today. The question the data doesn't answer is what proportion of traffic and bookings start with the LLM today.
Also worth noting: some European OTAs with significant market shares in Europe do not appear on this list at all. For them, the discussion about the visibility of the LL.M. is even more pressing.
The research I wrote about in the last issue of Harvard Business Review Showcase AI enhancement work rather than reducing it.
Parkinson's Law explains why this is to be expected. By law, workload increases with available time. Due to limited time, it persisted for 70 years. Artificial intelligence removes this ceiling. The law has not changed, but the constraints have. Now, as workloads expand to fill capacity, expectations rise.
Time constraints are obvious, but there is no natural upper limit to ability limits, and there is no upper limit to expectations. No one calls them out and the dilation just happens until it feels normal. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it's worth knowing it's happening.
Acquisition costs rising? Can the user come back? LLM Not in the answer? A ball that won't hit the ground…
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