Regardless of one’s opinion of Donald Trump, he will likely follow through on his major initiatives and the threats he makes.

In many ways, his approach to U.S. politics mirrors Ryanair’s, using the strategic threat of withdrawal of support to secure favourable terms. Like Ryanair, which frequently leverages the possibility of removing its flight operations to negotiate ultra-low airport rates, he employs similar tactics to ensure his demands are met.

The United States is a global superpower, and Trump’s decisions will affect the UK and its economy in various ways. Focusing specifically on travel, let’s examine the potential impacts on outbound holiday prices.

Trump has pledged to end the Russia-Ukraine conflict, using the leverage of either reducing or doubling arms support to Ukraine to bring President Putin to the negotiating table, accepting current territorial gains and a ban on Ukraine joining NATO as conditions for peace. I believe this approach will succeed, significantly easing restrictions on Russian gas and oil exports.

Similarly, he plans to push Israel toward a Palestinian agreement, stabilising the Middle East and further reducing oil prices.

Finally, Trump intends to roll back Biden’s green policies to control global warming, adopting a ‘Drill, baby, drill’ approach to boosting U.S. gas and oil production.

Conclusion: Aviation fuel prices will likely fall in the coming years, reducing holiday costs.

The dollar’s strength is the second most significant factor affecting flight prices, as nearly all low-cost airlines lease aircraft in dollars. Since Trump’s election, the dollar has strengthened against the pound, pushing up costs.

The trajectory of this trend hinges on the economic ramifications of Trump’s “America First” agenda, including potential 60% tariffs on Chinese imports and the deportation of up to 10 million undocumented workers. As many analysts predict, these policies could trigger an inflationary spiral, potentially leading to interest rate hikes that may paradoxically bolster the dollar while diminishing domestic wealth.

Elon Musk’s appointment as a special advisor on government efficiency could prove more impactful. By leveraging AI technology to reduce federal spending by $2 trillion over the next decade, Musk’s initiatives could significantly boost economic growth and strengthen the dollar.

Conclusion: Uncertain, but a stronger dollar seems a more likely outcome pushing up flight prices, but this is likely to be more than offset by reduced fuel costs.

The strength of the pound relative to the Euro of other European beach destinations impacts both accommodation costs and customers’ spending power in resort.   

The value of the pound fairs is primarily due to our own government actions, and so far, the city has not reacted well to the massive increase in taxation required to fund the Labour Government’s investment in public services.

I believe an impending trade war within the next six months could reveal a significant Brexit advantage. Unlike Europe, which is constrained by conflicting interests among its major economies, the UK could strategically position itself as a neutral party and potentially negotiate favourable terms with both the USA and China.

The electric vehicle market exemplifies this opportunity. U.S. tariffs will likely stifle domestic demand for non-American EVs, affecting Chinese manufacturers like BYD and European automakers. Consequently, these companies may view the UK as an attractive market. The question is: what trade concessions should we demand in return?

Historically, the UK has maintained a laissez-faire approach to free trade. However, it’s time to pivot towards becoming a strategic tariff-trading nation. For example, if we reached an EV tariff-free agreement with Europe, we could offer USA and/or Chinese manufacturers a cost-effective gateway into Europe, contingent on establishing production facilities within the UK. This would leverage our unique position in the global trade landscape.

Conclusion: Impossible to predict, but given the pound’s current low value, I could see a build-back if Labour get these tricky negotiations right, reducing holiday prices.

President Trump is not even in power yet, and many are rightly scared of his potential impact on the world. However, I prefer to live in the positive camp and think we will implement one of my political party’s key objectives, “Kill less People.” Consequently, he will stabilise the fossil fuel energy supply, reducing aviation costs and boosting travel. However, the impact on the “Green Revolution” is highly worrying, and I do not doubt that Trump’s election will harm global warming and the planet’s long-term health. However, we can at least have some cheaper holidays while the world burns

Travel Companies know the importance of driving repeat bookings from previous bookers but often fail to do this effectively.

Acquiring new customers through Google PPC often incurs costs that match or exceed the profits from their initial holiday bookings. This is due to intense competition, as many holiday companies bid on long-tail traffic and core terms, driving up costs to sustainable levels only by companies with high repeat booking rates.

Traditionally, travel companies have sent “One to Many” offers with minimal personalisation, relying on customers to revisit the company’s website to check availability if they find an offer appealing.

Fortunately for the travel industry, open rates remain high at 57% due to its appealing nature, and marketers often consider this channel highly cost-effective due to its low cost. However, this perception may significantly overstate its benefits.

Recent research shows that customers who receive non-personalized emails are 40% less likely to purchase from the sender. Thus, email campaigns might generate inexpensive leads but could also decrease overall repeat bookings unless they are personalised, with 71% of customers demanding personalisation in exchange for loyalty (Ref McKinsey).

I have therefore focused the efforts of my AI Business Neural Voice in solving both this quandary whilst providing a cutting edge “Dream Stage” tool for customers.

Seeing is believing so watch a video of how it works https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XY4AKYDnGfo

And/Or have a play yourself https://www.neural-voice.ai/characters/emily/

Previous bookers receive an email two months before their booking anniversary, inviting them to engage with AI Emily to discuss potential holiday destinations.

AI Emily has access to comprehensive internet knowledge, enabling detailed conversations about any global destination, from top hotels to the best bars and beach clubs and providing a “dream stage” tool for customers to use when deciding next years holiday destination and holiday type.

More importantly, she operates at 25% of the cost of a human agent and is available 24/7, providing “Instant Response” and engaging customers immediately in the holiday planning process. The AI stores a template of the customer information required to create a link to a live page of availability in the background, and Emily will tease this information out of a customer during a conversational process for selecting a holiday destination.

Hence, at the end of the conversation, she can directly send a WhatsApp or email link to current prices and availability to the customer while automatically updating the travel company’s CRM with these “Future Holiday” needs.

This enables the business to “Ultra-Personalize” emails by leveraging insights into the customer’s “Future Holidays” plans rather than relying solely on historical travel data.

Using McKinsey marketing metrics, Neural River estimates that this approach will double repeat booking conversions, significantly enhancing ROI from email marketing activities.

It also introduces a top-of-the-funnel “Dream Stage” tool to assist customers in selecting their holiday destinations for the following year, which may enhance customer loyalty as, frustratingly, most travel websites still require you to know where you want to go before you can use them.

The AI revolution extends beyond cost-cutting, providing new marketing channels like personalised emails and effective lead conversion from Instagram.

In the AI landscape, early adopters could outpace larger competitors, reminiscent of how low-cost carriers once disrupted large vertically integrated travel groups.

So get moving, guys.

AI is already impacting our children’s lives in the same way “Calculators” impacted my “Baby Boomer” generation. Initially, they were banned from exam environments but quickly became de facto tools as educators realised that “Mental Arithmetic” was doomed in a workplace dominated by spreadsheets and calculators.

Is humanity worse off because we have lost traditional skills such as Map reading, the ability to remember friends’ mobile numbers or the advent of “attention deficits” created by the explosion in social media? Potentially, but unlikely, unless a third world war destroys the world’s infrastructure.

Open AI created the ability to “Watermark” AI-generated content 12 months ago, allowing educational authorities to instantly spot “cheats” using AI to write/improve their coursework or exam essays. However, interestingly, it has not released the tool, as research shows that over 30% of users would abandon it for less scrupulous AI tools.

Personally, I think that just like with calculators, education needs to evolve quickly to accept the existence of AI and prepare our children for a digital world dominated by AI.

Although training children’s brains to focus for extended periods may involve reading and analysing large textbooks, the fundamental skills required will be understanding how to use digital tools to source information.

The ability to accurately “phrase” a question and delve into answers using AI tools has never been more relevant. This skill requires training, and the capability to navigate our digital world must be incorporated into the curriculum immediately.

Another rapidly evolving topic is who owns the “knowledge of the Internet”?

Large language models like ChatGPT have stripped the Internet of content to train their models on the assumption that this content is fair game as it has been published online. However, publishers like the New York Times, which copywrite their content, are already taking legal action to stop this, so it will be fascinating to see how this is resolved.

I believe that within the next 15-20 years, the “incremental cost” of creating knowledge will plummet to near zero, with knowledge freely accessible to everyone through open-source technologies, marking the true inflexion point of AI.

Humanity has always been a production engine of knowledge, with scientific breakthroughs enhancing our standard of living. Still, the AI Revolution is set to turbo-charge our creativity and working efficiency.

It also poses significant threats as “corporations” grow so large and powerful that they surpass state control. Fundamentally, AI requires vast amounts of “compute,” which only large corporations like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon can afford, likely resulting in these companies becoming even larger.

Interestingly, simultaneously, low-cost access via open-source LLMs will make the raw materials of “Entrepreneurship” cheaper and more freely available than ever.

However, the only protection for these new ideas lies in the size and scale of their user bases, with speed to market and consumer “stickiness” offering the sole defensibility in a world where technology can be instantly replicated

AI tools are anticipated to establish a new business ecosystem where small, agile businesses thrive alongside the giant LLM enterprises that supply the “computing” fuel for their operations.

Markets will “globalise” as the language capabilities of LLMs eliminate the language barriers fragmenting European markets, enabling ideas to scale more rapidly across these “mega” consumer markets, similar to the advantages enjoyed by U.S. firms over the past 50 years.

A crucial driver of national economic prosperity for a country like the UK will be the computing power it can support with its energy generation and National Grid network. The Labour government has established “GB Energy” to regain control over energy production and enhance clean energy sources such as wind, solar, and nuclear. However, the UK must also make substantial investments in its electricity distribution network, or National Grid, to ensure that this power can be efficiently delivered across the country to where it is needed to power new data centres.

In summary, encourage your children to be “open-minded” toward new technology, learn to navigate a digitally driven AI world, and speak multiple languages to maintain a personal touch in an increasingly global marketplace.

The AI genie is out of the bottle, and the world will never be the same, so adapt and ensure your children’s education evolves to meet its demands.

Being involved with an AI Incubator (Neural River) gives me access to bright young AI minds constantly monitoring new AI tools and developments.

Google’s new Jarvis AI tool for Chrome initially did not excite me as, in essence, it’s just an AI Driver “RPA Tool”. This is where a computer program can mimic the “key stokes” of a human being to complete a booking process.

These technologies have been in use for over a decade. In collaboration with the company ‘Traverse,’ I have automated various travel processes, such as booking verification and accounting reconciliation for low-cost carrier bookings, by extracting data from confirmation emails and matching it with back-office booking databases.

Once the team began experimenting with the tools, I quickly realised what a remarkable asset it was. Unlike RPA tools, which often fail whenever a webpage’s format changes, the new Jarvis tool utilises live website imagery and integrates information from multiple sources, achieving a nearly 98% success rate.

Airline XML fee wars.

Recently, I highlighted an ironic shift in the travel industry: Ryanair, by charging zero API fees, has unexpectedly become online travel agencies (OTAs) best friends after years of battling each other. Meanwhile, On the Beach (OTB) has intensified its war with EasyJet by offering a ‘Self-Book and Save’ option that allows a family of four to save £96. Through this scheme, post-booking OTB provides customers with a virtual credit card and a deep link, guiding them to book their flights directly on EasyJet’s site. Though somewhat cumbersome, many customers accept it as a way of saving such a large amount.

Google’s Jarvis tool could automate this process into a two-click procedure, removing 90% of the effort and potentially dooming API fees.

Comparison Engines.

Comparison engines such as Skyscanner and Icelolly direct traffic to supplier websites for booking completion. While this approach often maximises click-out revenue relative to acquisition costs, it significantly limits their ability to foster repeat bookings, as they lack visibility into customer data post-booking.

Leveraging Jarvis to complete bookings could soon encourage these platforms to adopt a model like Amazon’s, positioning themselves as the retailer. This would enable them to capitalise on cash flows while providing customers with a smoother, faster booking experience.

The pressure to implement this approach will intensify as AI-driven search engines, like www.Perplexity.ai (Try it), gain prominence, with customers increasingly valuing engines that provide direct ‘answers’ rather than a list of links. Naturally, these models will prefer connecting users to streamlined booking pathways that validate the best value. This suggests a comparison engine that allows customers to complete bookings directly on-site.

Homeworkers Co-pilots.

My AI-voice business, Neural Voice, is already working on Homeworker “Co-Pilot” tools to answer the phone and gather customer requirements out of hours or when they are busy with other tasks.

Research indicates that homeworkers spend 60% of their time on administrative tasks like booking flights online or entering bookings into back-office systems. By automating data loading via Chrome, we could reduce this workload by 75%, allowing homeworkers to focus more on providing a personalised booking experience for customers.

Although the same tools will make booking easier for customers, they will not replace the core function of travel homeworkers, which is providing expert human advice and guidance.

As I’ve often noted, it’s astonishing how slowly the travel industry has embraced the AI revolution. If you haven’t yet recruited a young AI-focused team, you may already be at risk of becoming a “Dinosaur” ready for extinction as the travel landscape rapidly evolves.

If artificial intelligence or AI scares you, you may want to stop reading now, as the implication of Elon Musk’s “Neuralink” project place is firmly in the “Frankenstein” horror genre.

Much discussion has been focused on the rapid development of AI and the road to artificial “General” intelligence, generally defined as when computers using AI become more intelligent than the entire human race combined. Many observers rightly worry about what role is left for the human race when AI superintelligence makes humans look dumb and irrelevant.  

The human brain is an extraordinary organic computer, with memories manifesting as electrical impulses between neurons. Our intelligence stems from consciousness, encompassing self-awareness and the ability to plan based on past experiences and future predictions. Individual memories, largely unshared collectively, drive our daily actions. Tragically, when we die, this unique intelligence and personal history typically vanish, which is massively wasteful.

AI systems, in contrast, learn collectively and preserve knowledge indefinitely. Envision a toddler mastering walking and instantly sharing this skill with all peers worldwide. This exemplifies how AI supercomputers function, explaining the exponential growth of AI technology.

Interestingly, humans are relatively slow communicators. Our brains Humans communicate, on average, at 1 bit per minute over a day, mainly via the spoken word or keystrokes.

Our brains process ideas and turn them into words to communicate them to other humans or computers via keystrokes. This forces a distillation of an idea to speak it, which is good. However, the effective transfer rate depends on how other humans interpret these words and can visualise the person’s intent. Not surprisingly, there is a lot of leakage and inefficiency here.

Humans can only communicate at 1% of the rate of computers, making us massively inefficient in their eyes. From their perspective, they must wait for an eternity to respond to their prompts for information or a response.

Through his well-funded Neuralink business, USA entrepreneur Elon Musk is focused on building a faster connection between computers and the human brain.

The company is developing implantable brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) to help those with paralysis and neurological conditions in the near term and enhancing human-AI interaction in the long term.

Neuralink’s core technology consists of ultra-thin probes inserted into the brain to detect neural signals and custom-designed electronics and software processes used to interpret brain signals. The company’s first device, the N1 Link, is a 1024-channel implant designed to be invisible once inserted and capable of wireless data transmission.

In recent interviews, Musk was clear that although the early focus was helping disabled quadriplegics and blind people overcome neural damage, this was just because the “Rewards” were significant enough to counterbalance the risk associated with this new procedure.

However, as the number of transplants grows and the risk diminishes, he expects these tools to become freely available, creating humans with superpowers.

For example, suppose Neural links can stimulate the brain to replicate regular visual sight. Why not also give the user the ability to have infrared or radar, as the computer providing the service supports these technologies?

Neuralink’s long-term vision is to enable direct brain-computer communication, potentially accelerating human-machine interaction tenfold by bypassing traditional input methods. This neural interface could theoretically provide instant access to vast online knowledge repositories, potentially revolutionising human creativity and cognitive capabilities.

This technology could theoretically enable the transfer of human memories and decision-making processes to digital systems, preserving individual cognition beyond death and potentially creating collective intelligence. Such advancements raise profound questions about the nature of consciousness, identity, and the future of humans as a race.

Whether such “Frankenstein” technologies will benefit humanity is yet to be seen, but the complete lack of regulation over AI Ethics should concern everyone.

AI development is currently dominated by companies with the largest “Compute” resources. However, the next frontier in advancing artificial general intelligence (AGI) will likely centre on access to high-quality training data. Elon Musk’s strategic investments in X (Twitter) and Tesla’s Optimus robot project potentially position him to acquire vast amounts of real-world data, which could prove crucial in realising his AI ambitions.

Where Musk is “Jekyll or Hyde,” his vast wealth allows him to steer humans’ future in the direction of his choice with little ethical oversight. Personally, I admire the guy, but just thinking through the logical conclusions to this technology scares the hell out of me.

Welcome to the future!

Based on Sam’s 2-hour interview with Lex Fridman

Interestingly, Sam regards ChatGPT 4 as just an announcement to the human race of what is coming and believes that history will define the start of the AI Revolution as when it allows thousands of scientific breakthroughs that benefit humans from cures to significant diseases or understanding whether and where alien life may exist in the universe.

So basically, we have not seen anything yet, and Open AI is attempting to release iteratively so that they don’t scare us to death with one massive lead forward we are not pre-prepared for.

The ultimate goal is AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), which, for newbies to the topic, is defined as when artificial intelligence encompasses the ability to understand, learn, and apply knowledge in a way that is not limited to a specific task or domain, or discipline”. In other words, machines are capable of independent thought.

The race between Elon Musk, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Open AI, to name a few, is clearly on, and the winner will yield massive power.

Altman stresses that there must be clear board frameworks to ensure that no one man can yield the full power of AGI, but openly admits that the recent failure of the Open AI board, misguided or not, to successfully remove him as CEO, shows that his own business is not yet structured correctly.

Personally, having listened to several of Alman’s interviews, I am glad he is leading the charge towards AGI. He is incredibly intelligent, reasonably humble, and appears to have a clear moral compass.

But hey, I liked Boris at first, so what do I know!

Surprisingly, Altman is against adding advertising revenue into Open AI’s income stream because it will add “bias” to the models and potentially distort the route to the “right answer” for the customer. He prefers that customers pay higher fees for ad-free, unbiased models, but he accepts that competition may force his hand.

The biggest restrictor of AI in the short term is “Computing Power,” and Altman flagged that AI needs to start getting smarter at allocating and charging for computing resources between simple questions and answers to complex mathematical formulas. Currently, Open AI charges a flat fee per response, ignoring the processing cost of creating the response.

Altman talks about “Compute” being the currency of the future and believes we need to power these computers via nuclear fission or fusion. He flagged that it is the “theoretical”  fear of Nuclear meltdowns like Chornobyl that has put humans off nuclear energy, when in reality, the death toll from the pollution from coal power stations has been much higher and that the future needs to be a clean nuclear if we are to avoid further Global warming.

Sadly, Sam Altman also believes it’s likely that the controversy over AGI is likely to trigger his assassination by a gun-toting American reactionary, preventing him from seeing the benefits that AI can deliver to the human race.

Unfortunately, I think of all his prophecies, this is the most likely to be right.

Voice-activated search is set to explode, with companies like Neural Voice allowing users to talk to the knowledge of the Internet in a conversational way.

The business has created a wide range of AI characters to demonstrate its capabilities, ranging from lawyers to travel agents who advise on the best holiday destinations.

For example, travel companies can email AI Emily, a virtual travel agent, to previous bookers to find out where they want to go on their “Next Holiday.” Customers then have a conversation with AI Emily about their holiday needs. To achieve this, the system transcribes what they say into words and injects a question into a “Large Language Model” (LLM) to receive a response that turns back into human-sounding speech, all within 0.84 seconds.

Hence, AI Emily’s responses are as fast as a normal human’s but with unlimited knowledge about the world’s top holiday destinations. Emily can guide customers through a choice of destination, right down to individual hotels, while giving customers a full review of all nearby restaurants and bars.

Once Emily has done her job, the customers are emailed back a summarised transcript of their call. The customer’s requirements are also injected into the holiday company’s “Customer Response Marketing” (CRM) system to ensure all future advertising messages are based on their “Next Holiday” requirement and not random holiday offers aimed at getting them to visit the company’s website.

However, although this technology is ideal for most generations, it is likely to be rejected out of hand by the “Betamax” generation of 18–34-year-olds who hate voice interaction. Research shows that 70% will not even pick up the phone when their parents call. Even when they do listen to the message, they prefer to reply by text.

This generation was brought up in a communication world dominated by shorthand text and WhatsApp messaging. They prefer to search by typing into Google and regard parents using voice-activated search with disdain.

I have renamed this “Gen Z” age group the  “Betamax Generation” because, like the video format that battled for supremacy in the mid-80s with the alternative VHS format, the writing is already on the wall for the end of their toys.

Children who cannot yet read and write can use Voice activation to control TVs, open doors, and turn on lights, so there is no way they will revert to typing to search the Internet.

Similarly, the over 35’s brought up in phone conversations have no issue talking to a phone to drive a search query and will be the early adopters of the new Voice-based platforms.

This leaves the “Betamax Generation” out in the cold, with technology rapidly evolving to make their text-based environments redundant.

Interestingly, all business SEO strategies must evolve to allow for the much longer and more complex search terms used by AI search engines.

AI Engines like www.Perplexity.ai have already gathered 10 million plus users. They are likely to rapidly eat into Google’s 95% dominance of internet search as its results summarise everything you need to know whilst providing links to the originating articles so that users can validate their conclusions.

The future of search is voice-activated and AI-delivered. You must have the lights off if you’re not reading that writing on the wall.

As predicted, Ryanair has now made stage 2 of its API integrations for OTAs available. Instead of presenting a higher “Bundled” price, these integrations allow OTAs to display the lead “Basic” Ryanair price and charge upgrades for extras such as seat selection, speedy boarding, and hold luggage.

This instantly makes Ryanair prices via OTA’s appear cheaper, as they are now on a like-for-like basis with Easyjet and Jet2.com, increasing their market share with a minimal impact on revenue, as most customers will continue to choose these upgrades when offered.

Interestingly, on the Ryanair site, these options are bundled so that if you want speedy boarding, you must also select a seat; within OTAs, these are broken down as separate charges.

However, as usual, the highly commercial Ryanair has priced “hold luggage plus seat” at the same price via OTAs but offers a lower price on its site for combining the popular “Speeding Boarding” options with seat selection. This option is required if you’re on a short break and want to carry 10kg of hand luggage, which is why most Speedy boarding queues are longer than standard boarding.

I am sure that other Ryanair OTA partners, like On the Beach and Tui, will quickly follow suit in upgrading to this new API connection as soon as their technology backlog allows.

Ryanair’s offering OTAs price parity will pressure low-cost carrier competitors to follow suit. For example, Easyjet’s £6.00 per passenger per flight sector equates to £26.50 for the average 2.2-passenger booking, with Jet2.com yielding their charge based on route demand and partner volume.

However, the true cost of providing API connectivity is in pence rather than pounds. These fees were introduced to compensate for lost ancillary revenue and provide in-house tour operations a price advantage. However, they look increasingly unsustainable in a market with excess flight capacity.

Overall flight capacity from the UK is forecast to remain at 98% of 2019 levels in 2024, primarily due to weaker demand for business travel post-COVID-19’s mass adoption of video conferencing as a feasible alternative to face-to-face meetings and a reduction in demand for city breaks.

Low-cost carriers have instead shifted large amounts of capacity onto leisure routes. Exactly how much capacity has been added is hard to estimate, but with bonded ATOL carryings having increased by 5.32M or 20% since 2019 to 31.6m in 2024, the overall increase will likely be more than 10m seats.

This extra capacity is already dragging down average load factors and forcing low-cost carriers to either drop flight prices or offer substantial discounts off package holidays where they can dump excess seats opaquely.

So, it looks like a tough summer ahead for low-cost carriers but a bumper year for OTAs and in-house low-cost tour operators. I have always impolitely described OTAs as “parasites living off the misery of others” with distressed outbound seats from one airline combinable with other airlines’ seats, often providing market-leading flight prices.

The OTA’s ongoing threat, however, is that the airlines use their tour operations as the route to dispose of excess seats, giving them a significant price advantage and driving massive growth.

That is why, in my opinion, the latest market is still likely to be painted “Orange”, with Easyjet Holidays growing dramatically as it provides an alternative seat filler for its parent airline.

Recent Phocus Wire research showed that the top 4 global travel brands spent an astounding $16.8 billion in 2023 on sales and marketing, up 20% from 2022. An estimated 70% of this, or $11.8, was handed over to Google in the form of search advertising.

The Monopolies and Mergers Commission would swiftly initiate an investigation if a merger proposal arose among major low-cost carriers or if an acquisition attempt was made on an Online Travel Agency (OTA) such as On the Beach or Love Holidays. However, they ignore entirely Google’s dominant market position, which holds 93.5% of the UK’s online search market share.

How can one business be allowed such a dominant position, with virtually total control over how UK customers access online holidays? Particularly when Google does not even pay a fair level of UK tax, siphoning off its UK profits to a lower-tax Southern Ireland office.

However, a quick review of the table below highlights how Airbnb is bucking this trend.

Airbnb is proud that it spends relatively little on Google marketing and drives 90% of traffic on a non-paid basis directly to its website.

It helps that they have such a clearly defined product proposition and loyal repeat booking customer base, but they also focus heavily on creative social media and PR stunts, such as collaborating with Martell to turn a Malibu mansion into the “Malibu Barbie Dream House” listing on Airbnb. This alone generated millions of site visits.

Airbnb is also investing heavily in influencer marketing, providing tools to its owners to carry out their own marketing, and driving app usage by ensuring that all communication with the host goes through this channel.

In the UK, On the Beach (OTB) still spends 51% of its revenues on marketing, but unlike direct competitors Love Holidays, it is spending increasing amounts on “Above the Line” on TV and Radio to create brand awareness and drive more direct traffic. The benefits of this brand building may take years to develop, and Love Holidays has rapidly caught OTB in terms of turnover and exceeding its profit performance in 2022.

Love Holidays’ recent accounts to October 31st, 2022, showed a turnover of £ 1.35 billion, just behind OTB £1.44 billion but with an impressive EBITDA of £36.3m. Clearly, their excellent technology is driving conversion and customer retention levels that allow them to pay high Google acquisition costs and scale rapidly, making Google an effective traffic source.

If you’re not one of the major players, reliance on Google is probably a deferred death sentence waiting to happen. So, what alternatives are emerging?

1. Perplexity Search. Playing with this tool by visiting www.perplexity.ai/ will demonstrate how quickly it delivers “answers” and should move you away from Google search. Although the tool has 10 million uses across Asia, India, and the USA and is valued at $520m, it’s relatively new to the UK, having only launched in August 2022.

Why would the customer continue to spend 24 hours researching and clicking on 50 Google links when they can get an answer in an instant from Perplexity or ChatGPT? As my recent blog outlined, Open AI’s CEO Sam Altman is opposed to advertising, which he believes will add “bias” to results. He prefers to offer a premium subscription model, and this is indeed the model Perplexity operates.

However, history has shown us that although new online tools initially shun advertising during their user growth period, it always creeps in. In the meantime, travel SEO plays like little-known www.cheekytrip.com/ , is ranking well and harvesting lots of free traffic.

2. Database Marketing. Most users now ignore millions of emails, with opening rates and click-throughs for travel emails falling rapidly. However, new AI technology offers a potential solution for re-invigorating this approach.

Customers can now be emailed a link to an AI Travel Agent such as Emily www.neural-voice.ai/characters/emily/, who can have a conversation informed by their previous travels to establish their requirements for this year’s trip. The conversation is automatically transcribed, summarised, and posted into the business CRM to contextualise future advertising or for the lead to be followed up with online booking links or a call from a human agent to close the sale.

3. Influencers. If you are not an Instagram user, you will not comprehend the power that influencers can yield over the “Dream Stage” of a holiday. This medium is compelling for tourist boards and upmarket hotels and is increasingly becoming a proven traffic generator. Recruiting your own team of influencers or working with influence aggregators like Trending Travel www.trendingtravel.co.uk/ should be considered.

4. Homeworkers. This is the ultimate low-cost route to market, with localised marketing via sports clubs and businesses supported by targeted social media activity controlled by the homeworker who understands their local market dynamics. However, companies like Travel Solutions Network www.travelsolutionsnetwork.co.uk/ are now offering business access to “Virtual Call centres staffed by commission-only homeworkers, to offer high converting “Human agents” to complement their online booking path. Research has shown that showing that a business is “Contactable” in the case issues emerge increases “online conversion”, making the phone bookings 100% incremental, even after booking route substitution.

As Love Holidays has proven, Google search as a customer acquisition route can still work if you have great technology that converts these leads. However, for the rest of us, it’s probably time to focus on exploring some of the new routes to market listed.

As a child, I often kept score at the Darts Board for the adults, which considerably sharpened my mental arithmetic and may have led to my early career as an accountant. However, the advent of hand-held calculators and spreadsheets made these skills semi-redundant so that I would now avoid the darts chalkboard like the plague.

Does this make me less intelligent?

Today, we have numerous examples of where technology has killed the use of elements of our brain, ranging from day-to-day Navigation (Who doesn’t use their phone) to the ability to follow a set of instructions without a supporting YouTube “How to video”.

Again, does this make us less intelligent or more productive because we have co-pilots that make us more efficient?

The advent of the internet has had a massively positive impact on our efficiency and day-to-day lives, but it has also made us lazier.

Why bother walking around high-street shops when you can pop online, read reviews, choose items, have them delivered, and send them back if they don’t suit you?

In the same way, why not use previous online baskets to repeat supermarket orders delivered to your doorstep?

However, the critical question is, what are people doing with the extra time created?

The good news is that many use it to get fitter by riding bikes, going on long hikes, or enjoying team sports; however, just as many use it to spend more time on social media, gaming, or watching on-demand TV often making them unfit “couch potatoes”.

In a recent interview, Sam Altman, CEO of Open AI, said that ChatGPT should be viewed as announcing what is coming rather than the start of the AI Revolution.  He believes the start will occur within the next ten years, when AI enables scientists to produce 1,000s of new cures for human diseases, considerably lengthening life expectancy.

Science has long proven that Humans use only a fraction of their brains, which gives me hope that AI will be a co-pilot that will make many humans much more intelligent and able to make significant scientific breakthroughs that will benefit us all.

The race for AGI or “Artificial General Intelligence” concerns me more. AGI is when artificial intelligence encompasses the ability to understand, learn, and apply knowledge in a way that is not limited to a specific task, domain, or discipline”. In other words, machines are capable of independent thought.

Sorry, but why would a computer that is smarter than a human need a human as a Co-pilot?

If AI and robotics replace relatively dull human labour in factories and call centres, it might not be such a bad thing, but AGI will replace lawyers, accountants and doctors, the realm of our most intelligent humans.

The significant danger is that 80% of humans will have less work stimulating their brains and multiple tools to make their daily lives easier. Therefore, their intelligence is likely to decline and not increase.

Conversely, the 20% of humans who increase their intelligence will likely become a “Super Wealthy Elite”, creating even bigger gaps between rich and poor increases, causing social unrest.

How we manage the implementation of AI and AGI will ultimately determine the future of the human race, and the debate needs to start now.

What do you think?