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?

Alphabet, Google’s owner, will never disappear from our lives as it has the power and wealth to “buy” the next internet sensation or solution, as it did with YouTube. But are we about to see a seismic shift away from Google’s 95% dominance over internet search?

For a generation, Google has held a monopoly over travel searches. However, this dominance comes at the cost of a relatively poor customer experience. Research reveals a staggering truth: the average customer is forced to visit 48 travel sites and invest a whopping 26 hours in research before finally booking a holiday. Imagine the frustration level out there!

Google’s search services are monetised through a “Cost per Click” (CPC) or CPA model. The more clicks it generates, the higher its profits. But have you ever noticed that the longer the search you type into Google, the less likely you are to find the result you want?

Google encourages shorter search terms and returns pages of links for customers to click on to research further to find the answers they need to take the “Action” they require, e.g. booking a holiday. These results are further distorted by “paid bias”, with advertisers bidding to be placed in the most prominent positions.

Commercialisation has become so bad that 28% of the UK population actively uses Adblockers, which, for Google searches, may indicate a desire to get the right answer quicker.

Large Language models (LLMs) are exploding in popularity as they appear to offer a much faster route to the “right” answer.

LLMs are trained on the entire knowledge of the internet and are much better positioned to interpret long and complex enquiries by focusing on the “intent” of the keywords used to reach a better understanding of the customer’s question.

They also allow a query to be “built” by considering what the user has said previously in the same query stream, allowing customers to refine their requirements based on the results returned at each stage.

This has allowed Neural Voice, one of my AI start-ups, to create a “Voice” overlay where customers can talk to an AI character, in a conversational format to discuss options for where they want to go on holiday next year (Dream Stage). Check it out; the sophistication of the tech, even at this early stage, will amaze you https://www.neural-voice.ai/

Links to Emily, our AI agent, can then be emailed out to previous bookers to qualify their requirements for their next holiday, with a summary and transcript automatically passed to the customer’s CRM to influence further marketing or for follow-up by a human agent.

LLMs and voice interaction promise to offer a much better customer experience, allowing them to find the information they need for “action” much faster. This could quickly erode Google search volumes while providing a new route to market for the travel business. However, the model is radically different, and the LLM’s commercial model will quickly evolve.

Here are a few things for travel businesses to start thinking about:

Commercial model.

Like most people, I am currently happy to pay my $20 monthly licence fee to use ChatGPT. However, this subscription revenue will quickly get eroded by competition from other LLMs, and inevitably, these models will seek to add transactional revenues.

However, adding bias to direct customers to partners paying higher advertising fees, in the same way, Google does, would be diametrically opposed to the ethos of providing the best answers without bias and would create a clunky endpoint.

I personally think LLMs will follow the Amazon model.

Amazon is, in effect, a massive “retail” search engine, where the customer chooses from a huge range of suppliers’ products but transacts with and pays Amazon. Travel comparison sites like Trivago have also evolved to transact this way as it increased conversions by removing friction created when customers clicked out to partner sites.

So, if LLM delivers an “end-to-end” booking service, what are the other knock-on impacts?

Will SEO and quality of content matter in the longer term?

Many travel businesses are rushing to use AI technology to create new SEO content, to drive them up the SEO rankings. However, although some LLMs integrate with Google content, most models are based on online data-rich sites like Wikipedia rather than individual website pages, making them inaccessible via traditional SEO optimisation.  Getting LLMs to prefer your travel products will be a key battle, but it’s very unclear how this will be done yet.

Secondly, if LLMs are transactional, they will likely use their content database and differentiate between suppliers based on price rather than content quality.

Creating and protecting travel “brands”.

The large airline-owned tour operations of Easyjet and Jet2 holidays have natural protection in that customers travel on branded flights and are serviced by branded ground staff delivering in-resort services.

However, OTAs like Love Holidays and On the Beach’s main role is to provide a wide range of products and a simple booking process. What is their added value if the LLMs replace this booking process?

Obviously, there is an opportunity for these brands to use LLM technology to become the next Amazon of travel, but this does seem like a big ask and although not all travel traffic will flow through LLMs, it does seem like these players could be long-term losers.

Google Search, like the Dinosaurs of yesteryear, may quickly become extinct, but what replaces it and how the travel industry integrates into this new search model is far from clear.

However, the more dependent your business is on Google search traffic today the faster you need to act.

Alphabet, Google’s owner, will never disappear from our lives as it has the power and wealth to “buy” the next internet sensation or solution, as it did with YouTube. But are we about to see a seismic shift away from Google’s 95% dominance over internet search?

For a generation, Google has held a monopoly over travel searches. However, this dominance comes at the cost of a relatively poor customer experience. Research reveals a staggering truth: the average customer is forced to visit 48 travel sites and invest a whopping 26 hours in research before finally booking a holiday. Imagine the frustration level out there!

Google’s search services are monetised through a “Cost per Click” (CPC) or CPA model. The more clicks it generates, the higher its profits. But have you ever noticed that the longer the search you type into Google, the less likely you are to find the result you want?

Google encourages shorter search terms and returns pages of links for customers to click on to research further to find the answers they need to take the “Action” they require, e.g. booking a holiday. These results are further distorted by “paid bias”, with advertisers bidding to be placed in the most prominent positions.

Commercialisation has become so bad that 28% of the UK population actively uses Adblockers, which, for Google searches, may indicate a desire to get the right answer quicker.

Large Language models (LLMs) are exploding in popularity as they appear to offer a much faster route to the “right” answer.

LLMs are trained on the entire knowledge of the internet and are much better positioned to interpret long and complex enquiries by focusing on the “intent” of the keywords used to reach a better understanding of the customer’s question.

They also allow a query to be “built” by considering what the user has said previously in the same query stream, allowing customers to refine their requirements based on the results returned at each stage.

This has allowed Neural Voice, one of my AI start-ups, to create a “Voice” overlay where customers can talk to an AI character, in a conversational format to discuss options for where they want to go on holiday next year (Dream Stage). Check it out; the sophistication of the tech, even at this early stage, will amaze you https://www.neural-voice.ai/

Links to Emily, our AI agent, can then be emailed out to previous bookers to qualify their requirements for their next holiday, with a summary and transcript automatically passed to the customer’s CRM to influence further marketing or for follow-up by a human agent.

LLMs and voice interaction promise to offer a much better customer experience, allowing them to find the information they need for “action” much faster. This could quickly erode Google search volumes while providing a new route to market for the travel business. However, the model is radically different, and the LLM’s commercial model will quickly evolve.

Here are a few things for travel businesses to start thinking about:

Commercial model.

Like most people, I am currently happy to pay my $20 monthly licence fee to use ChatGPT. However, this subscription revenue will quickly get eroded by competition from other LLMs, and inevitably, these models will seek to add transactional revenues.

However, adding bias to direct customers to partners paying higher advertising fees, in the same way, Google does, would be diametrically opposed to the ethos of providing the best answers without bias and would create a clunky endpoint.

I personally think LLMs will follow the Amazon model.

Amazon is, in effect, a massive “retail” search engine, where the customer chooses from a huge range of suppliers’ products but transacts with and pays Amazon. Travel comparison sites like Trivago have also evolved to transact this way as it increased conversions by removing friction created when customers clicked out to partner sites.

So, if LLM delivers an “end-to-end” booking service, what are the other knock-on impacts?

Will SEO and quality of content matter in the longer term?

Many travel businesses are rushing to use AI technology to create new SEO content, to drive them up the SEO rankings. However, although some LLMs integrate with Google content, most models are based on online data-rich sites like Wikipedia rather than individual website pages, making them inaccessible via traditional SEO optimisation.  Getting LLMs to prefer your travel products will be a key battle, but it’s very unclear how this will be done yet.

Secondly, if LLMs are transactional, they will likely use their content database and differentiate between suppliers based on price rather than content quality.

Creating and protecting travel “brands”.

The large airline-owned tour operations of Easyjet and Jet2 holidays have natural protection in that customers travel on branded flights and are serviced by branded ground staff delivering in-resort services.

However, OTAs like Love Holidays and On the Beach’s main role is to provide a wide range of products and a simple booking process. What is their added value if the LLMs replace this booking process?

Obviously, there is an opportunity for these brands to use LLM technology to become the next Amazon of travel, but this does seem like a big ask and although not all travel traffic will flow through LLMs, it does seem like these players could be long-term losers.

Google Search, like the Dinosaurs of yesteryear, may quickly become extinct, but what replaces it and how the travel industry integrates into this new search model is far from clear.

However, the more dependent your business is on Google search traffic today the faster you need to act.

Ryanair’s recent shift in perspective, from being anti-OTA, a stance they often referred to as battling ‘Pirates,’ to now viewing OTAs as strategic distribution partners, has pleasantly surprised many in the travel industry.

Love Holidays deserves recognition for being the trailblazer in bringing Ryanair to the table. However, the initial deal, with variable booking fees of between £30-50 per couple, seemed steep and posed a potential price disadvantage against other OTAs, such as On the Beach (OTB), if they continued to ‘screen scrape’ and avoid these fees. Strategically, Love needed the deal to prove to potential new investors that they had long-term access to cheap flight seats departing the UK, which is the lifeblood of their business.

On the Beach then entered negotiations and would appear to have improved the terms of the deal.

On the Beach’s site boldly tells customers that their Ryanair flight prices now include pre-booked seats with Ryanair and, at the same time, having monitored Love’s Ryanair prices since January, in March, Ryanair’s extra fees on the Love site suddenly changed to a fixed £32.00 return per couple or £8.00 per flight sector to match those on the On the Beach site.

Connecting these two pieces of information, it is now clear that Ryanair is not charging an API fee but is making it compulsory for people booking holidays to pre-book their seats at a fixed cost of £8.00 per flight, which is probably the average pre-booked seat price across their network.

This compulsory addition seems odd for a business that prides itself on breaking down the price to create the cheapest possible lead price and then charging separately for extras, as it makes their prices appear less competitive. However, suppose you had not planned for a massive increase in third-party trade distribution. In that case, it is unlikely that your third-party APIs would be geared up for complexities such as allowing customers to choose and pre-book individual seats.

I would expect Ryanair to resolve this over the next few months, allowing them to return to supplying stripped-down prices with no booking fees that will dominate the OTA’s search results. This will boost volumes further and put pressure on EasyJet and Jet2.com to consider the size of their API fees.

EasyJet currently charges around £6.00 per sector or £24 per couple, while Jet2.com takes a much more tactical approach, charging zero fees on weaker selling routes.

As I said when the deal was announced, “On the Beach are no mugs,” but their Ryanair deal looks better by the day because it not only delivers a guaranteed supply of cheap seats but also puts pressure on other low-cost airlines to become more OTA-friendly.

The deal will also remove a massive element of back-office cost because OTB will no longer have to hide from Ryanair using virtual credit cards, roving IP addresses, and doing lots of manual work to notify customers of Ryanair schedule changes and cancellations. I’d estimate this cost saving will run into the millions and could lead to a substantial profit boost.

The “Ryanair War on OTA’s” is over, and the only question is, why did it take so long?  

Nobody outside of Ryanair’s inner circle will ever know, but ironically, the change of heart seems to have stemmed from Ryanair’s success in the Irish courts in declaring the “screen scraping” of their flights illegal. Although technically unenforceable in other source markets, this emboldened them to massively tighten up all their tools to stop OTA sales in November 2023, including the highly contentious extra facial recognition steps for “illegal” OTA customers.

This suddenly closed all their OTA distribution and forced Ryanair to announce to the city that this was impacting their load factors by 1-2% and reducing average flight prices. It does not take a genius to guess that the city might have asked, “What on earth are you doing?”

We will never know the answer, but the attitude reversal has been dramatic. Now that all parties see the benefits of working together, it’s hard to see why this would ever reverse for packaging OTAs’, but I am far less convinced Ryanair will embrace flight-focused OTAs as they have never liked direct pricing comparisons and will question their added value over customers booking on their own website.

For homeworkers and high street agents, dynamic packaging fell out of favour during COVID-19 because of the heavy administration burden caused by flight disruption. Many agents preferred to take lower margins but less hassle from selling third-party bonded agents. Still, it will be interesting to see what impact a trade-friendly Ryanair could have on reviving this market if, as expected, Ryanair look for further trade deals on the back of its early success with OTAs.

We may never like Ryanair, but a peaceful coexistence offers many upsides and will increase price competition for the benefit of all holidaymakers.

The War is over and long may it remain that way.