Everything AI in Travel

Watch the full video episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NaQ0ESczQM
In this episode of the Everything AI in Travel podcast, I speak with York Lu, Head of AI Partnership at Dida and co-founder of RollingGo. York was one of the first three people in Trip.com's US office, spent three years as a VC investment manager in Shanghai, and is now building what he calls B2A - business to AI agents - on top of one of the biggest hotel supply businesses most people in the West have never heard of.
Connect with York on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/york-lu-5b419b116
Got a travel problem AI might solve? Find the AI you need: tell me what's frustrating you and I'll personally introduce you to someone who can help. https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdVYizRw_UgfX9CpvkeUmkpOeRGFj_iiF0W2KmX_EECIqSUsA/viewform
Dida is a B2B travel platform that York says is already the third-largest in the world - bigger than the listed player TBO on GMV, by his numbers - with over 2,000 staff, 19 offices across 40-plus countries and around 100,000 directly contracted hotels. RollingGo is the new Dida-invested entity taking that supply and packaging it for machines: net rates through an API, product interfaces designed for agents rather than humans.
We dig into:
- Why Dida's own AI journey started with building agents for hotels - and why they walked away from it (efficiency gains, but no new bookings)
- The moment the board sent York and one colleague to Hangzhou, home of DeepSeek and Kimi, with no plan and no office: "find your way"
- What B2A actually means: selling hotels and flights to personal AI agents, not to people
- Why RollingGo stayed deliberately quiet while signing up most of China's top AI companies - and why 1 November changes that
- York's story of a Google closed-loop booking announcement that knocked 10-20% off Booking.com, Expedia and Trip.com shares in a day - and the reversal a month later
- The Hyatt contract that landed because York's professor happened to be the VP of Revenue - and what that says about travel as a relationships business
- How net rates through the API leave room for the agent platforms to take their margin - the "toll booth" model
- Why he thinks OTAs and travel agencies gradually get replaced, and what that means for anyone selling travel
One of the most interesting ideas from this conversation is that the AI platforms and the supply owners need each other more than either admits. The AI companies are trying to close the loop inside their own apps and hardware, while the big B2C players fight to keep the customer. Meanwhile Dida quietly contracted 100,000 hotels directly, the hard way, on the ground.
If York is right, the winners on the supply side are the ones whose inventory an agent can actually read, price and book - and that is a plumbing question, not a marketing one.
The battle for who owns the booking is starting now, and it is being fought in the APIs.
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#AIinTravel #B2A #HotelDistribution

Watch the full video episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiPdlV9r1U8
Scout spent $30,000 building two million AI-written travel insights. Then they deleted all of it. Why?
In this episode of the Everything AI in Travel podcast, I speak with Chris Stockwell, Founder & CEO of Scout, a trip planner and travel journal built around real travellers' content. Chris is a former consultant and "road warrior", a long-time solo traveller (45 countries and all 50 US states) and an ex-professional poker player. He has since gone B2C, in a category known as a graveyard.
Scout's first plan made sense on paper. The content already exists on Reddit, TripAdvisor and local sites, so have AI agents gather it and rewrite it for one place. It worked. The information was right. But you could tell it was AI, it had no photos, and people didn't want to read it. So Scout pulled it all and now shows a "be the first to share" prompt where there's no content yet.
Got a travel problem AI might solve? Find the AI you need: tell me what's frustrating you and I'll personally introduce you to someone who can help.
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdVYizRw_UgfX9CpvkeUmkpOeRGFj_iiF0W2KmX_EECIqSUsA/viewform
We dig into:
🧳 Why a travel discovery app needs real people's stories, and what happens when the feed is AI-written
🤖 The $30,000 experiment: agents running in parallel, two million insights, and why it still failed
⚖️ "Easy to create" vs "interesting to consume", and how AI titles meant users wrote less of their own words
🛠️ Why Scout is heavy on AI behind the scenes but "not vibe coding" a product with five or six modules
💸 The business model: affiliate partners (eSIM and travel insurance), feed ads, and booking links, with incentives kept clear
📈 The UGC engine: 12 creators, around 500 videos a month, and weekly active users up 30% week over week for four weeks
🥊 Where Scout sits against Polarsteps, Wanderlog and Instagram Explore
🧠 Is "anti-AI" a positioning opportunity or a trap? Why Chris would rather be pro-human than anti-AI
🃏 What poker taught him about startups: decisions with limited information, risk and reward, bankroll management
🔍 Where to learn from startup failures when everyone posts only the wins
One of the most interesting ideas from this conversation is that AI made the supply side of content almost free, and that was the problem.
Scout could generate a guide to anywhere in the world in minutes. What it couldn't generate was the reason someone trusts it. A thin human post from someone who was actually there beat a complete AI summary every time, and retention went up when the AI content came out.
For anyone building in travel, the question isn't what AI can make for you. It's what your customer still wants a person to have made.
Chris is looking for investors, a marketing and UGC specialist for a founding head of growth role, and travellers who want to try the app. Visit scout.travel or find Chris Stockwell on LinkedIn.
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#EverythingAIInTravel #AIInTravel #TravelTech

Watch the video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/IHg6neBdXHw
Search can show you ten great trips. Who helps you choose the right one, and negotiate for it?
In this episode of the Everything AI in Travel podcast, I speak with Michael Culhane from Mindshare about a proposed agentic marketplace for travel. Michael's career runs from safari lodges in Botswana to travel aggregation and payment systems. He brings an operator's view to a question that has followed him through that work: how can travel businesses connect with the right customer without losing so much value along the way?
Got a travel problem AI might solve? Find the AI you need: tell me what's frustrating you and I'll personally introduce you to someone who can help.
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdVYizRw_UgfX9CpvkeUmkpOeRGFj_iiF0W2KmX_EECIqSUsA/viewform
Recorded on 8 October 2026. Michael discusses launch plans for November 2026 and January 2027 as future targets. This episode does not confirm whether those launches happened, or whether the proposed marketplace is available today.
We dig into:
🦁 Michael's move from economics into building safari camps and lodges in Botswana
🌍 The role of local communities and skills in a high-value, low-footprint tourism model
📉 Why customer-acquisition cost became his long-running travel-distribution problem
🔎 The difference between finding options and making a useful judgement about them
🧠 Why the same traveller may want something different on a family trip, a business trip or a golf holiday
🤖 His vision for a marketplace where suppliers and travellers each have agents
🎓 Combining specialist travel knowledge with information the traveller gives their own agent
🤝 How supplier-side agents could negotiate offers for particular customer needs
🏨 A hypothetical hotel example of targeted offers rather than public rate cutting
💳 Using existing rewards infrastructure as a route to travel customers
🧾 Where Michael thinks blockchain could help with payments, commissions and reconciliation
❓ My pushback on whether an AI should recommend its own idea of the trip or help fulfil the traveller's existing choices
Better search is not the same thing as better judgement. We explore how agents might combine traveller preferences, specialist knowledge and supplier offers, and whether that would help people buy the trip they actually want.
Recording-date metadata uses 8 October 2026, the Descript project-created date. Marketplace scale and reach figures are Michael's claims, not independently audited here. Product plans, launch dates and onboarding offers may have changed since.
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#EverythingAIInTravel #MichaelCulhane #Mindshare

Watch the video version on YouTube:
https://youtu.be/W351rvSAq5Y
In this episode of the Everything AI in Travel podcast, I speak with Antonio Picozzi, co-founder and CEO of dAirect, about helping hotels get found through AI assistants without handing the customer straight back to an OTA.
Got a travel problem AI might solve? Find the AI you need: tell me what's frustrating you and I'll personally introduce you to someone who can help.
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdVYizRw_UgfX9CpvkeUmkpOeRGFj_iiF0W2KmX_EECIqSUsA/viewform
Antonio came into hospitality through a luggage-delivery business after working at Accenture and Amazon. Hotel managers kept asking him about a different problem: how to get more direct bookings. His first answer was a resellable room rate. Now he's working on what happens when AI becomes another layer between the traveller and the hotel.
The problem is simple: having a hotel website doesn't mean AI will recommend it. And asking ChatGPT once whether it knows your property isn't much of a measurement strategy.
A romantic hotel with a private beach needs to appear in different conversations from a city-centre business hotel. The sources AI uses can differ too. Antonio's approach is to test those specific situations, work on the hotel's digital presence and keep measuring as the answers change.
We dig into:
🧳 Why a luggage-delivery startup became Antonio's introduction to hotel distribution
🔄 What resellable room rates taught him about direct bookings, and why building a secondary market proved difficult
🏨 Why fragmentation, trust and loyalty matter as much as giving guests a better rate
🤖 How dAirect tests the answers AI assistants give for a property's particular positioning
📊 Why Antonio says they run 5,000-10,000 prompts per property each month across different markets and assistants
🔍 Why a pre-work baseline and a peer group are more useful than checking whether your visibility went up
🔌 How the work spans the hotel's website, managed digital channels and earned presence
⚙️ Why he wants a product that does the work, rather than another report for a small hotel team to action
💰 The subscription model Antonio describes: around €200-€300 per month, with no booking commission
🛎️ Why tracking the journey through to the booking engine matters more than simply appearing in an AI answer
One of the most interesting ideas from the conversation is Antonio's admission that there isn't a fixed secret sauce.
His bet is on building a system that keeps testing and learning, rather than selling hotels a formula that assumes AI answers will stand still.
For hotels, the commercial question is still the same: who gets the customer, who gets the booking, and what does it cost to acquire them?
If AI becomes the place travellers make their shortlist, direct distribution could start well before anyone reaches your website. But visibility alone isn't the win. The booking still matters.
More about dAirect: https://dairect.io/
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#TravelAI #EverythingAIinTravel #DirectBookings

In this episode of the **Everything AI in Travel podcast**, I speak with **Emmanuel Annor, co-founder and CTO of Equera.ai**, about using AI to connect some of tourism's smallest and least-digitised businesses to the global travel ecosystem.
Emmanuel brings an interesting background to the problem. Before Equera, he built fintech and agritech products used by more than **70,000 farmers across Africa and Asia**, learning how to design technology for remote environments, unreliable connectivity and low-end devices. :chatgpt-content-reference{index="0"}
Now he's applying those lessons to travel.
The problem Equera is tackling is deceptively simple:
**AI can't sell what it can't see.**
Some of the most authentic community-based tourism experiences in the world aren't sitting inside reservation systems or OTA databases. They're being managed through **WhatsApp, pieces of paper, phone calls and conversations**.
So rather than trying to force these businesses into another extranet, Equera is building technology around the tools they already use.
We dig into:
🌍 Why community-based tourism is both economically important and home to some of travel's most memorable experiences
📱 Why Equera abandoned the assumption that suppliers should simply learn to use a portal
📝 The operator who wrote their coffee-tour itinerary **on a piece of paper, photographed it and sent it through WhatsApp** — and how that helped reshape Equera's approach :chatgpt-content-reference{index="1"}
🤖 How AI could turn a WhatsApp message, photograph or even a **voice note in a local dialect** into structured, bookable travel inventory
🔌 Equera's ambition to become an infrastructure layer connecting fragmented offline experiences with OTAs, AI agents and the wider digital travel ecosystem
📅 Why digitisation needs to go beyond simply listing an experience — suppliers also need capabilities such as live availability
🔎 How Equera's status as a **Google Things to Do connectivity partner** can make previously offline community experiences discoverable and bookable through Google :chatgpt-content-reference{index="2"}
📸 The challenge of collecting the photography, video and storytelling required to merchandise these experiences properly
❤️ How that content could also communicate the wider social and economic impact tourism is creating inside communities
🧠 Why Equera is benchmarking different AI models rather than automatically assuming the biggest and most powerful model is the best tool for every job
🤝 And how an emerging world of AI agents and agent-to-agent commerce could create entirely new distribution opportunities for these businesses.
There is a bigger issue here that I think is going to become increasingly important.
As travellers shift from Google searches and OTA filters toward simply asking an AI **"What should I do?"**, we risk creating a new digital divide.
The large, structured and already-digitised tourism businesses are easy for AI to find.
The woman running a cooking experience in her village, the family offering a homestay, or the local guide organising experiences through WhatsApp may effectively be **invisible**.
As Emmanuel puts it, if we're increasingly depending on AI for travel discovery and booking, we need to make sure the businesses that aren't currently represented in the data don't get left behind. :chatgpt-content-reference{index="3"}
That's what makes Equera particularly interesting.
It's not simply using AI to make an existing digital travel business more efficient.
**It's using AI to help bring an entirely offline layer of tourism into the digital economy.**
And potentially giving AI agents access to some of the best stuff in travel in the process.
#TravelAI #AI #CommunityBasedTourism #TravelTech #AIAgents #Tourism #Experiences #SustainableTourism #TravelStartups #Africa #Equera