Some things in this version are not as they seem. A popular housing policy without any evidence to back it up. The better AI gets, the more jobs it creates. Travelers who want personalization but don’t want to share their data. A cartoon that might be more honest than your brand guidelines.
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Barcelona's plan to ban all short-term rental licenses by 2028 is popular, but the data is more complicated. None of the cities that implemented blanket STR bans demonstrated measurable housing mitigation measures. Two years later, Berlin lifted the ban. New York rents rise after Local Law 18 cancels 90% of Airbnb listings. Hotel prices increased by 12.6%. The housing crisis continues.
i built This analysis Use Cloud to combine research, data, graphics, and design into a published work. It argued that Barcelona had chosen a story rather than a solution, with the main beneficiaries being the hotel chains that lobbied for the ban. The process is as interesting as the output: research, writing, visual design and publishing all happen in one workflow. It’s worth reading, and worth thinking about what this kind of AI-assisted work can bring.
JoseLuis Vilar (Co-Founder of Caravelo) requested ChatGPT draw a cartoon Average number of customers for Europe's four largest low-cost airlines. The result is the internet’s collective memory of a brand, averaged down to a single image. Comments, Reddit posts, TikToks, news articles, all compressed into one frame.
I asked JoseLuis to do the same exercise with the major OTAs. What the internet thinks your customers look like is your brand, whether you're built that way or not. This unexpected portrait may be more honest than anything your marketing team can produce.
Kevin Kelly has been traveling seriously for over 50 years. look at his list 50 Years of Travel Tips. Among them:
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If you hire a driver or use a taxi, pay the driver to take you to visit their mother.
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The enjoyment of your trip is inversely proportional to the weight of your luggage. Counterintuitively, the longer your trip, the less stuff you should bring.
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Don't avoid tourist traps. There's a reason they're world-famous: they usually have something special that keeps people coming back for more. The trick is to visit them in the off-season, early in the morning, late at night, on foot with the locals, through the back doors, away from the main streets, away from the vendors.
Dan Shipper has automated everything he can every. Yet his team continues to grow, with more human work than before. The better the model, the more work needs to be done.
exist After automationhe explained that advances in AI create more jobs for humans, not fewer, because AI is trained on the visible output of past jobs. Code, prose, support tickets, product specs, and more. It packages all this content at a low price. The problem is that once everyone has access to the same cheap output, the output no longer has value. What becomes valuable is the judgment behind it.
He calls it the frame/frame gap. Someone still needs to decide which issue is important and why now, for this customer in this market.
For tour operators, this judgment comes from years of watching things go wrong in ways no one expected. Pricing models that fail in certain edge cases. The booking process was working fine until something went wrong. Customer behavior means nothing until it occurs. These are not in the training corpus. It's too concrete, too vivid, too recent. That's why it retains its value while everything else gets cheaper.
“Quitting smoking is not the problem. Quitting too early is the problem.” — Neil Eyal
“You need three things: the ability not to give up on something until it works, the ability to give up on something that doesn't work, and trust in other people to help you differentiate between the two.” — Kevin Kelly
There is currently no reliable way to know. The line between stupidity and genius is only visible in hindsight. What you can do is improve your odds. Talk to customers more than necessary. Decide ahead of time which signals will cause you to change course and write them down. Find two or three people who know your field, have no stake in your results, and won't tell you only what you want to hear.
Travelers want brands to understand them, but they don’t want to be understood. one CapTech Survey 447 U.S. consumers found that people are 40% more likely to purchase from brands that tailor their experience to their needs. At the same time, 52% are reluctant to share data for personalization and two-thirds do not understand how AI uses their data. There is a huge gap between wanting personalization and trusting the system behind it.
This is even more important when traveling. Hotels, airlines and online travel agencies hold some of the most intimate consumer data: where we go, who we travel with, how much we spend, how often we cancel our trips. The potential for truly useful personalization is real, but so is the potential for things to go wrong.
Brands that solve this problem will make the value exchange visible by clearly telling travelers what data is being used, why, and what they get in return. But most travel brands aren’t even close to that goal. For example, hotels still struggle with basic issues like remembering returning guests' room preferences or not asking them for information they already have. This paradox does exist, but for most industries it remains a question of the future.
Expedia Group Director Artem Simenenko wrote that ChatGPT serves ads in 1-2% of prompts, compared to just one in most conversations. Adthena data shows that travel-related issues generate ads from more advertisers than apparel or consumer electronics, with Expedia, Airbnb, Hilton and Royal Caribbean already appearing.
Travel lends itself well to this format. Booking travel is a confusing, multi-step decision involving destinations, dates, budget, room type, cancellation rules, and more. The chat interface can see everything happening in a single conversation, meaning ads can appear the moment travelers narrow down their choices. Search cannot do this. Read+
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