Event Spotlight: Phocuswright Europe 2025

Recorded Live at Phocuswright Europe in Barcelona, this massive 5 hour special event spotlight episode features 19 interviews with the brightest minds in travel and tech who took the stage - and joined us for exclusive interviews that you don’t want to miss. Plus, we have a special bonus offer for all of our listeners to join us at Phocuswright in San Diego Nov 18-20 and be guaranteed to be feature in our next Event Spotlight.  We hope you enjoy these insight rich conversations and plan to join us in November.

If you prefer to jump right to the guest that matters most to you, we’ve got you covered. Below you’ll find timestamps for each speaker.

Highlights & Timestamps

• 5m41s - Enrique Espinel, COO, Civitatis
• 20m40s - Teesta Raha, Director of Global PR, Sojern
• 40m27s - Andy Headington, CEO, Adido
• 1hr56m - Andrea Lamparini, COO, WeRoad
• 1hr16m - Mark Ross-Smith, CEO of StatusMatch
• 1hr38m - Robert From, Chief Growth Officer, Rail Europe
• 1hr59m - Rita J Varga, Founder & CEO, RaizUp
• 2hr18m - Travis Pittman, CEO, TourRadar
• 2hr39m - Charlotte Lamp Davies, Founder & CEO, NED A Bright Approach
• 2hr56m - Marc Mekki, Inspire Limitless
• 3hr22m - Valentina & Matisse, Phocuswright Interns
• 3hr28m - James Lemon, Head of Travel & Leisure, Stripe
• 3hr43m - Aaron Gellhaus, Senior Director, BigCommerce & Ryan Spencer, Solutions Engineer, Feedonomics
• 3hr57m - Gillian Jones, Senior Business Development Manager, Condatis
• 4hr8m - Blaire McCoy and Kyle Killion, Co-founders, Traversing.AI
• 4hr21m - Alex Farmer, CCO, Nezasa
• 4hr40m - Adrian Villabruna, Co-founder, Videreo
• 4hr46m - Alex Trimis, CEO & Founder, Welcome Pickups
• 4hr57m - Shlomi Beer, Co-founder & CEO, ImpersonAlly

BONUS OFFER!  Use code TRAVELTRENDSPECIAL25 to unlock a $250 discount for your Phocuswright San Diego ticket and be guaranteed to be featured on our next Event Spotlight. Can't wait to see you all there!

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Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome to Focusrite Europe Barcelona
• 5:40 Civitatis: Dominating Spanish-Speaking Travel
• 22:10 Sojourn: Data-Driven Travel Marketing
• 40:19 Digital Marketing with Adido's Andy Heddington
• 1:00:46 WeRoad's Growth Journey with Andrea Lamparini
• 1:15:11 Mark Ross Smith on Loyalty Status
• 1:32:38 Rail Europe's Strategy with Robert Frum
• 1:45:43 RaiseUp: Championing Diversity with Rita Varga
• 2:01:56 Mark Mechie on AI and Human Experience
• 2:25:33 Inside the Focusrite Event Team
• 2:32:10 Stripe's Travel Strategy with James Lemon
• 2:46:29 Tour Radar's Social Commerce Revolution
• 3:04:58 Startups and Innovation Spotlight

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:03

Focusrite is so much more than just a conference. It's so much more than an exhibition ground. It's so much more than networking, and this really really allows the sheer scale of this allows for the conference to be and perform at its very, very best.

Speaker 2: 0:19

Hello everyone and welcome to a special event spotlight of Travel Trends. This is your host, dan Christian, and today's interviews were all recorded live in Barcelona at the Focusrite Europe Conference, june 2025. It was the very first time I had the privilege to attend Focusrite Europe. As many of our listeners know, I love the Focusrite USA Conference and this was the first time. Pete Jean Florence and the team invited Travel Trends to be part of the European event and we actually offered a incentive to all of our listeners, and many of you decided to join us and turned up for the opportunity to be interviewed, and I'm pleased to be able to share not only the amazing executives that we met, but also a number of our Travel Trends listeners that came to Barcelona to be a part of Focusrite Europe to benefit from all the networking and all the amazing sessions and then sit down and record with me. And I'm also very pleased to announce to all of our listeners that we are going to be able to recreate that magic in San Diego November 18th and 20th.

Speaker 2: 1:19

You can save $250 for any of our Travel Trends listeners on whatever the prevailing price is for a Focusrite ticket. Get them early and then apply that discount. The ticket itself is worth it, but if you can get the $250 discount and be assured to be featured on our podcast, that is the magical combination and I will make sure. If you purchase a ticket, send me an email, let me know you're going to be at the event and I will make sure that we schedule time to interview and I'm going to have the rest of the team there with me. I was on my own in Barcelona and it was very clear from the lineup of people that were keen to be interviewed and chat about the show. It was a really wonderful response. So thank you to all of you that made the effort to come up and let me know how much you've been enjoying the show. Cue to all of you that made the effort to come up and let me know how much you've been enjoying the show. And for all of you that wanted to sit down and be interviewed, like Andy Heddington from Adido that came over from the UK to be there for the very first time, you have Alex Reagan, you have Andrea Lamparini, who's the chief operating officer from WeRoad, who was there for the first time, and you'll hear from him on this recording as well.

Speaker 2: 2:22

But when it comes to San Diego. I just want everyone to know that you're going to be able to meet Melanie and Catherine from our team, so we're actually going to have a good amount of the Travel Trends crew representing at Focusrite San Diego, so we really hope that you plan to join us. For that, the discount code is TRAVELTRENDSPECIAL25. That's TRAVELTRENDSPECIAL25, which will give you $250 off a ticket to Focusrite. We also have that information on the homepage of our website at TravelTrendsPodcastcom. And, of course, like every episode, we always post clips and highlights on all our social channels, which is YouTube, linkedin and Instagram, so be sure to check those out for highlights from these conversations.

Speaker 2: 3:05

Now to give you a bit of an idea of who you're going to hear from over the course of this episode and keep in mind we have timestamped all of these because of the number of interviews we have to share with you we want to make sure that you can go in whatever order you prefer, first to last. Or you can jump from chapter to chapter, but you're going to hear from the chief growth officer at rail Europe, robert, from one of my favorite conversations. Or you can jump from chapter to chapter, but you're gonna hear from the Chief Growth Officer at Rail Europe, robert Frum one of my favorite conversations. We're actually gonna be kicking it off with Enrique Espinol, who's the Chief Operating Officer at Civitatis, one of the fastest growing OTAs Spanish speaking OTAs and a major partner of Travel Trends as well. You're gonna hear from Mark Ross Smith, who's the CEO and founder of Status Match, who's based in Malaysia. You're going to hear from Travis Pittman, a dear friend of ours for this show and our AI Summit, who's the CEO of Tour Radar. You're going to hear from James Lemon, who is the head of travel at Stripe. Mark Mechie, who gave a fantastic keynote and many of our listeners have heard him or know him from the Arrival Conference.

Speaker 2: 4:03

I had a chance to sit down with Mark Tista Raha from Sojourn is an amazing conversation and we had many female executives join us as well, which I think all of our listeners know is incredibly important to me, having been raised by a single mom, and there are so many amazing female executives in the industry. Charlotte Lamp Davies joins us again. She's an advisor with Focusrite. She runs A Bright Approach. We have Jillian Jones from Candatus Her colleague actually joined us from Focusrite last year in Phoenix and now we have a chance to speak to Jillian in Barcelona and we hope to see them again in San Diego later this year. We have Alex Trimis, who runs a company called Welcome Pickups. He's the CEO and founder. We actually have a few startups, like Shalami Beer, who runs Impersonally he's the founder and it's all about AI and security. That's a fascinating conversation. We bring back Rita Varga, who is the CEO of RaiseUp, for a very upbeat conversation. I always love speaking to Rita and I think you'll feel that energy come through when you hear her voice and what she's been up to. We also have Alex Farmer from Nazaza and a number of other executives that you will definitely benefit from hearing their insights about where the industry is and where it's headed and some of the valuable lessons that they learned from being at Focusrite Europe in 2025. So thank you again to Pete, to Jean Florence and the team at Focusrite for inviting us to be there for Barcelona. I loved that opportunity. I can't wait to see you guys all again in San Diego. Thanks again for joining us, and here we go with the Focusrite special event spotlight from Barcelona.

Speaker 2: 5:41

I now have the privilege to speak to the COO and co-founder of Civitatis.

Speaker 2: 5:47

He is Enrique Espinel and he is a really impressive individual and I just wanted to highlight too, there was a fantastic episode we had on Civitatis as part of season five with Civitatis and they've actually kindly come on as a title sponsor for season six of Travel Trends. So you're going to hear a lot more from Civitatis next season and that's one of the many reasons that it's great to finally sit down with Enrique, get a chance to meet him in person, as we have over the last couple of days. So, on that note, enrique, welcome to Travel Trends. Thank you so much, anne.

Speaker 2: 6:20

My pleasure and I know you guys have mentioned to me that a lot of your team listens to the podcast, and especially that episode that we had together, which is fantastic. So it always means that much more to me when I get a chance to interview someone that is familiar with the show and appreciates the content. But tell us all of our listeners about Civitatis, because I was saying to Enrique just before we started recording, I have become such a huge fan of the brand, not because of our partnership that's fantastic as well but the more I learn about Civitatis, the history of this business, the fact that there is nearly 800 or 850 million Spanish speakers globally and you guys are really dominating this space, growing in South America. But yeah, tell all of our listeners who aren't familiar with Civitatis a little bit of background on the business.

Speaker 3: 7:01

Yeah, Fiatelis was founded in 2008, so 16 years already. And well, we have always it's your baby.

Speaker 2: 7:08

Your baby is 16 years old. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 3: 7:10

Yeah, at the beginning it was founded by Alberto Gutierrez, who is the CEO, and at the beginning it was a travel guide business and, well, it was great, creating content that was good to see how to enjoy and monetizing through affiliation partnerships with other verticals in the travel industry. But well, he found that there was a great opportunity selling Spanish-speaking tours. So he started to do so in several different websites that he owned at that time. And well, this was something that was not covered in the industry.

Speaker 3: 7:44

Nobody was focusing on this and, as we all know, spanish is the second most spoken language in the world. Yes, more than 100 million people speak in spanish as a native language, 60 million only in the us. So you have to forget, it's not only spain or latin. Huge market, huge opportunity for us. We feel that we are still in the early days After all these years we have been working hard on the industry and, well, we believe that we are in the right direction. We are focusing really hard to keep adding value to our travelers, who really love us, who really love our brand, as you said, and well, happy.

Speaker 2: 8:23

Well, I guess that's one of the things that really stood out to me is that a focus clearly has been from the very beginning and it's core to your brand is the customer service and these incredible reviews that people have been writing so like, and that's you know.

Speaker 2: 8:35

I learned that over many years working for the travel corporation and stanley tolman, who I had the privilege to work with for a number of years, and he used to tell this really inspiring story about when he first created his first hotel and he only had two customers in the restaurant and he was feeling kind of sorry for himself and his dad came in and saw him standing upstairs not next to his customers and said to him you know why are you looking at the hotel across the street and how busy they are? And he said what you need to do is go next, go downstairs, stand next to those customers. Tomorrow you'll have four. You stand next to them, the next night you'll have eight. And that's how you'll grow your business. Don't focus on the competition. Focus on taking care of your customers.

Speaker 3: 9:13

That's exactly the case at Tittatis Always focusing on the customers. Well, this is not easy. It's easy to say, but when you are growing a marketplace, you don't have to forget that the key is focusing on the customer In our case, spanish-speaking customers and curating our portfolio of tools and activities is very hard. Sometimes you have to say no to very good operators, you have to stop working with others, so you have to be all the time improving what you are offering to them, and well, at the end of the day, this is why they are loyal to us. This is why there is a great word of mouth in our markets about our value that we add to them. And well, as you said, customer service as well is really good, and well, in fact, it's not rocket science, but we have to focus a lot on this.

Speaker 2: 10:04

Yeah, yeah, and tell us I think this is going to be fascinating more coming from you. I'm familiar with some of these stats in terms of how the business has grown, but tell all of our listeners where the business stands in 2025, 10 years after then, yourself getting involved and building up the marketplace. Tell us some of the stats about how many travelers you've now had on the platform.

Speaker 3: 10:22

Yeah, just in 2025, we're going to have about 15 million travelers doing one of our activities all over the world. Incredible we have 100,000 activities in 150 countries with this focus on Spanish language and well, mainly our customers came from Spain and Latam. As I said, Almost half Europe and half Latam.

Speaker 2: 10:49

That's great, and in some of the markets you're moving into I know you are adding more product and expanding into other markets, obviously still focused on Spanish speakers. One of the things about Civitadas that is also unique that the focus is not on aggregating extensive supply. It's actually trying to find the right recommendations. So, unlike Get your Guide, for example, who are focusing on bringing on so much inventory and you're looking at Rome and trying to figure out a tour and there's hundreds of options and how do you pick? Tell us a little bit about what makes Civitatis unique.

Speaker 3: 11:20

Yeah, exactly what you mean about curation is, of course, curation is a word that probably has lost a little bit its meaning, because, now every marketplace is curated.

Speaker 2: 11:29

Curated marketplace, but yours truly is a curated marketplace. We are truly curated.

Speaker 3: 11:34

We truly believe that less is more. That really helps the customers to simplify their customer journey. So we don't want the customers to guess what to do, what to select, how to enjoy the coliseum or any other key attraction or destination in the world. So we want to do this job for them and then it would be easier for them to book. So, focusing on language this angle is key, as we have already said. Spanish at the beginning.

Speaker 3: 12:00

You you have said that we are now focusing on other markets. You are right. Also, portuguese is very important for us because of Brazil, which is a continent itself, and also other languages in Europe as Italian, french and well, we are replicating the same business model, but at the end of the day, it's not only the language. Of course, this is one of our key parts of curation, but also not having the same tours repeated several times in the platform. So we try to have the really best available option, because, of course, sometimes we have availability constraints, so we also have options when the key top sellers are sold out, which is something which is happening in some destinations. So we are like this kind of concierge or co-pilot of, however you want to call it to our customers and they truly trust us. They feel safe when they book with us and they like it.

Speaker 2: 13:02

Yeah, that's amazing. It's such an impressive story and I think many of our listeners will be checking out Civitatiscom and learning more about your business, especially as you expand into other markets. The other thing I wanted to bring up, of course, is what brings you here to Focusrite. For you, of course, it is a train ride away from Madrid to Barcelona. There's a lot of Americans here. I've seen you in a number of meetings over the last couple of days. Obviously you've been super busy. I saw you hanging out with Travis from TourRadar. There's so many different opportunities for you here, but tell everyone, enrique, what brought you to the event this year and some of the highlights and benefits of being here.

Speaker 3: 13:38

I tried to select really well which events to go and this is one I always come Focus Ride events to go and this is one I always come focus right both in Europe and the US for me is the right place to be and well, I really like the community atmosphere that you'll find here. It's a very relaxed atmosphere with the right executives we meet with also peers in our industry. It's a great place and a great moment now before high season to spend time and to see how things are going. And, of course, conferences are also great. For me, it's like having meetings and attending conferences. Of course, there are many topics covered in the conference, also tourism activities.

Speaker 2: 14:23

I had a couple of great sessions, but I think it's the right place to be For sure, and as you mentioned, you've been attending some of the sessions which not I mean some people are here for the networking, and I've always loved the sessions themselves. I've always been a big driver for me is the education, the learning, seeing what other players are doing in the industry. What has stood out to you from the sessions you've been able to attend.

Speaker 3: 14:49

Well, ai is a hot topic or on fire. Everyone is talking about this. Everyone is talking about experimentation At the same time. I think nobody knows what really will happen in a few years, but what we all know is that everything will be different, or at least from now, and we want to be ready to listen to what others are doing on the space. Other things that I also found interesting is a few talks and a few people discussing about social commerce, which is also becoming more and more relevant in Europe, for example, in Asia. I've heard some speakers talking about this and it's really interesting. Of course, now in our case, we are also pushing a lot this part of the business, trying to learn how to make it more transactional, not only discovery. We want to be really relevant and to make all of this transactional as well.

Speaker 2: 15:45

But well, very interesting yeah, I know you guys are making a major push in this direction as well, and so tell us a little bit more about the plans with civitadas for 2025 and some of their, the overall business strategy for this year and your growth plans, but specifically with some of the things you're doing around AI. Yeah, well.

Speaker 3: 16:05

overall, the strategy is quite the same To keep growing, to keep building our brand and our awareness in our key markets, to keep building the category In fact, in LATAM we are almost creating the category, so I think we are in the right direction to keep adding value to our partners, not only B2C, we also have b2b partners, so mainly retail travel agencies, which is very relevant to us. So keep focusing on that. On the ai side, of course, we have both options. The efficiency side, I think, is quite obvious, but we are doing many things, both in tech, in customer customer service, in all the areas, and on the discovery side, trying to detect intent and to try to personalize more based on AI. Of course, we are experimenting as well. We are trying to understand this.

Speaker 3: 16:57

Ai is also helping a lot to us to boost this curation process I mentioned. So we want AI to do this heavy lifting of the curation process I mentioned. So we want AI to do this heavy lifting of the curation, but without losing our human touch, to not lose this cultural authenticity that we are always looking for. This language thing we already mentioned. And this analysis that we are all the time doing about past performance, pricing, etc. I think all of this we do in our curation processes can be done much better or much faster with AI and this is what we are doing, and I assume you're going to be back for Focusrite in San Diego.

Speaker 3: 17:36

Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 2: 17:37

Fantastic, I know. We got a chance to meet last year in Phoenix and get to know some of the team and then this year, of course, focusrite is moving to a new destination. I always loved when they went back and forth between Miami and LA and I always loved the Miami location. Both events were always great and then they started going to Phoenix and this year, rather than going back to the East Coast, they've actually decided to stay West Coast and found an amazing venue in San Diego. So I'm looking forward to that, that of know this conference of 600 people compared to 1500 people. Curious to know, since you've been to both and you're obviously like how would you contrast the two? This event, obviously you know 600 people it feels more intimate to me. How would you differentiate between the two conferences?

Speaker 3: 18:18

Well yeah, I think what you said. It's more intimate and but at the same time, it's different, because here we have more European executives and we are a Spanish company, so it's very good for us to be on both sides. As I said, america is a very relevant market to us as well, so it's not like a huge difference in terms of content. Both are really good in terms of networking. Some people are the same, but some other are more localized in based off of the geo, so both are great yeah, well, another benefit of course for you in san diego is clearly the latin america market, which is that's why I said america, I mean I meant latin america for sure, like because you have so many clients in Mexico, and then Colombia is obviously a rapidly growing destination and there's so much opportunity.

Speaker 2: 19:10

And I think it's one of the things that, as you then get into English language, the fact you've been able to curate experiences in those markets that now English language speakers would like to travel to, and they can see the reviews and they can see Civitada. So I think you've carved out a really interesting long-term business strategy to first dominate Spanish-speaking and then move into other markets because you've been able to curate this content. So obviously that's an exciting proposition for you, exactly.

Speaker 3: 19:37

In fact, we have, as I said, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and French as this first approach, but English is also one of our key languages and, of course, we are growing a lot because of this. I think they also appreciate this, especially in Latin, where we have a great number of selected operators and Europe, of course.

Speaker 2: 20:01

Yeah, it's so exciting. Well, I want to make sure all of our listeners can find out more information. Of course, I've mentioned the website. But if they want, it's so exciting, well, I want to make sure all of our listeners can find out more information. Of course, I've mentioned the website, but if they want to connect, with you, enrique, or the rest of the team.

Speaker 3: 20:13

What would be the best way to do so? Yeah, through the website, or I will be pleased to receive any messages through LinkedIn through email.

Speaker 2: 20:17

Yeah, you guys are pretty active on LinkedIn, so I definitely encourage guys to follow Civitatis on LinkedIn and obviously, by all means, connect with Enrique and, yeah, I'm looking forward to continue conversations with your team and being a big part of our next season. So thank you again for the partnership and I look forward to continue to work together.

Speaker 3: 20:35

Likewise, thank you so much for having me.

Speaker 2: 20:40

I now have the privilege to sit down with Tista Raja, who is the director of PR globally for a company that I greatly admire called Sojourn, and I've actually had one of our colleagues part of our AI summit last year, and when I saw Sojourn was here and Tista specifically, who I've not met yet until moments ago, I was thrilled to have this chance to sit down with you, because I'm so intrigued about Sojourn and what brings you to the conference. But first of all, welcome to Travel Trends.

Speaker 9: 21:04

Thank you so much for having me, Daniel.

Speaker 2: 21:10

For sure, Absolutely. Now you're based in London. Tell us a little bit about Sojourn so to make sure that all of our audience knows what Sojourn is, what you guys do and specifically, your role there.

Speaker 9: 21:16

Absolutely so. Sojourn is essentially the leading marketing platform built for hospitality, designed to essentially boost growth and profitability for the travel industry. We have a marketing platform which is a set of easy to use software and services that delivers traveler insight, which I know we're probably going to talk about at some point.

Speaker 2: 21:35

For sure. That's the main absolutely we're going to get. We'll get there very quickly, for sure.

Speaker 9: 21:40

Intelligent audiences and multi-channel activation, as we call it, and optimization, but all through the connected guest experience. Essentially, we have more than 10,000 travel marketers rely on our platform to make decisions. We were founded in 2007 in San Francisco and have offices all over the world.

Speaker 2: 22:00

Well, I'm very familiar with it, given my role at various travel brands, and we've utilized Sojourn, which is again one of the reasons I wanted to certainly have you on the podcast, because you guys have a very compelling understanding of what's traveler behavior, traveler intent, which is obviously why you have a travel advertising platform so you can actually identify the trends. All about data to help convert travelers, which is exactly what all of our listeners are very keen to do. So tell us, before we get into some of the trends right away what brings you to Focusrite Barcelona? Have you been to Focusrite Europe before or is this your first time?

Speaker 9: 22:34

Yeah, I have been to Focusrite Europe before I was here last year as well and found it highly beneficial with the nature of my job and also, you know, wearing the Sojourn hat. It's really interesting to learn about thought leadership from various different industry players. It's an aggregate of most of the travel tech companies here as well as sort of big hotels and destinations. So super relevant, super useful to be part of that forum and conversation and just learn from each other more than anything else. Part of that forum and conversation and just learn from each other more than anything else. We also do attend Focusrite in the States as well and have done for many years. So firmly believe in their conferences and their content.

Speaker 2: 23:14

Yeah, I mean, I love Focusrite as well. This is my first European conference. I'm intrigued to hear that you've been here before, because I know one of the big developments for this year was this new facility that, from what I can tell, as everyone loves the hotel and loves the new venue. So tell us about this year specifically what have been some of the highlights so far of 2025?

Speaker 9: 23:35

Yeah, a couple of things for me. I think you know the word of the hour is AI. You've probably covered it to death at the moment, but I just think there have been a lot of interesting sessions about that and the practical usage of that. This morning, I attended a session with the head of innovation and digital from our core group, the hotel group, and she covered so much about their usage of AI in the digital space and what they're doing at a hotel level, so I found that really interesting, and the digital space and what they're doing at a hotel level, so I found that really interesting, you know.

Speaker 9: 24:09

The second point for me is we've been talking as an industry, about experiences, leading the way for travellers to make decisions, and that just seems to be highlighted again this year. I heard something I think they called it hyper, not just experiences, but like hyper-personalised, micro-exper experiences, where not only do you um, you can really engage with the traveler's feelings too, which I found really interesting as well. So those are a couple of topics that I found um really great and how does this compare to last year from your vantage point?

Speaker 2: 24:37

having had the experience of, unlike myself, this is all new and fresh for me, which is exciting in and of itself. But yeah, how does this year compare to previous years?

Speaker 9: 24:45

Yeah, you know, I think the one thing about Focusrite and Focuswire is that they're very much at the forefront of knowing what's happening in the industry. So I do think you know I'm coming into the sessions or going into sessions with topics that I want to know about and want to know about, so I think they're always very up to date. So it's really interesting from that perspective. So the biggest change I think from last year is it's just relevant and updated for now and the trends going forward. Secondly, on a lighter level, it's a much cooler hotel, great venue, so can't complain.

Speaker 2: 25:22

That's awesome. Now you're based in London. Sojourn is a global company. Obviously, you have the base in San Francisco, which is where the company was created. Tell us a little bit about the journey you're on now, and specifically Sojourn being here at the event. What are some of the focuses for Sojourn in 2025? I know I want to get into the trends that's definitely going to be my next question, but tell us a little bit more about the organization, what your priorities are at the moment, the types of clients you work with, all of those things that I think would be valuable for our listeners to know.

Speaker 9: 25:51

Yeah, you know, we have been leveraging and using AI and ML so machine learning and artificial intelligence for a very, very long time as a business, and so I think for us, it's just leaning into that more to keep learning how to activate data-driven strategies at scale. I think that is probably will continue to be a big focus. In terms of customers and who we work with, we probably work with most of the hotels, destinations and attractions, airlines around the world. So, yeah, we have great clients. You know we just made an announcement even in Asia Pacific with a partnership with the Ascot Hotel Group there. So, constantly evolving, constantly have news. Watch out. We have some more news coming next week. So, yeah, lots happening in the space and we have a big focus also on our hospitality sector specifically.

Speaker 2: 26:43

Well, it's really interesting because we work closely with Forbes Travel Guide.

Speaker 2: 26:46

We do a lot of focus on hospitality and obviously that's one of the biggest sectors within travel, so that totally makes sense.

Speaker 2: 26:51

The other thing I was going to say too, just as we start to look at the trends and what you're paying attention to, is that, in this sort of uncertain geopolitical environment that we're now in globally, because we've had such an incredible surge of booking activity since COVID, I mean this whole idea of revenge travel, which is a term I never liked, but nevertheless people have been, there's been a resurgence in travel and like record numbers 2023, 24, 25.

Speaker 2: 27:16

And finally, we're hitting choppy waters again where, all of a sudden, things like tariffs and just the perception of different countries, where, all of a sudden. So the reason that's really important is because we're all trying to figure out how we read the signals, to determine where we invest our dollars to get the best return, and so what we're seeing, even with travel trends, is that there's a huge interest in us covering the latest and I want to say the latest, I mean topical, timely trends, like monthly updates, not something that's like the trend for the year, and so I have to assume that you're seeing something quite similar. Is that more companies are looking to utilize Sojourn because you guys have such valuable data for hotels, attractions and destinations? Is that what you're seeing?

Speaker 9: 27:57

Absolutely, and you know that's probably we always get, we're on top of our trends. It's real time data and, to your point, you know things, whether it's politically, climatically, economically, will constantly change and we will constantly see things happening in this sphere. That's not going to stop, you know, and I think, just being aware of that real time data so that hotels, destinations can make informed decisions. Travelers can make informed decisions of where they go, what they do, how they shop when they travel and when I mean shop, I mean their travel-type shopping, not retail shopping. It's highly valuable to have that level of insight and knowledge. So, yes, 100% behind what you're saying.

Speaker 2: 28:47

So let's now jump into the key trends that you're focusing on. I'm sure our audience is really keen to understand them. So, yeah, take me through the main trends that you're focusing on at Sojourn and some of the things that would be really interesting for our audience.

Speaker 9: 28:59

Yeah, I had about three or four interesting ones I wanted to share with you. And speaking of monthly, as you said, monthly, you know it is Pride Month and I thought I'd bring up one specific travel trend from there. So, with LGBTQ plus travel, you know we're seeing long haul, solo and what we call emotionally timed travel quite relevant. So our data showed that overall, 45 percent of Pride-related travel spans long haul distances, with 58% of travelers booking solo and primarily for leisure purposes. Where I mentioned that emotional element is that searches for major European Pride cities like Athens, brussels and Rome spike specifically around Valentine's Day.

Speaker 9: 29:44

So, driving travel momentum around that time, so that's something which I thought was quite interesting.

Speaker 2: 29:50

So can I just ask a question on that? So as soon as you said emotionally driven travel, I was instantly going to ask you to explain that a bit further because I was intrigued by it. I'm not familiar with that concept. Then you connected it to Valentine's Day, but so many babies are born in like the end of the year, like you trace it back nine months to Valentine's Day, so it's like I'm a Valentine's Day baby.

Speaker 9: 30:12

So it's an emotional time of the year.

Speaker 12: 30:14

True that.

Speaker 2: 30:18

How do you describe, beyond a Valentine's like, when you emotionally driven travel? Because I think of like? There's a whole range of human emotions. Love is certainly one of them and I think we all want to be in that state, but clearly we, you know you want stress, like there's like. So yeah, tell me a little bit more of this emotional state travel, where it comes from and how marketers can apply this theory.

Speaker 9: 30:45

For me, specifically, the emotionally driven travel is associated with experiences, and experiences is everything you know, even being in Barcelona, and the experience you have the hotel, the experience you have the conference really defines your purchasing decisions and, more importantly, your loyalty and repurchase decisions. So I think, for me, anything to do with experiences. You know we saw um that the entire surge of travel around sort of um of concerts and events. And in fact it kind of brings me to my next point, which was, like Taylor Swift ruled the experiential travel space last year and we're seeing simultaneously in the UK specifically, or in Europe, concerts like Glastonbury, coldplay's World Tour, as well as the Italian Jubilee. Here is really showing a surge of booking to destinations which are holding these kind of iconic cultural events driven by experiences.

Speaker 2: 31:33

Yeah, I know the team at Skift has been all over this with this and they've even coined a term around this about, like live event travel and festivals. And certainly the Taylor Swift effect is very real and I'm going to say one more on this topic. Some friends and I were talking about when Taylor Swift gets pregnant. That is actually there's going to be a whole wave of babies All of a sudden. It's just like that. Someone else has predicted that as another major trend.

Speaker 2: 31:58

Once you got into football, all of a sudden, so many people were into football and it's amazing today just how um, culturally relevant these celebrities are and how they impact consumer behavior and like. So tell us a little bit more about that specific trend, because how do travel companies, which you know we have a lot of travel agents to listen to this and obviously it's a b2b podcast, so what I wanted to translate is like, how best to apply that? So are you encouraging your clients to better connect with when there is festivals and events? I see companies giving away free tickets. If there's a Taylor Swift concert, everyone's trying to cash in somehow trying to figure out, how do I capitalize on the Taylor Swift effect?

Speaker 2: 32:37

But tell us, as an overall kind of macro trend towards these live events and festivals, how would you recommend clients that you sojourn when you recognize that take advantage of that opportunity?

Speaker 9: 32:50

Yeah, and it would be back to that end to end journey of that traveler or customer.

Speaker 9: 32:55

So you need to be in that customer and traveler's head long before they've even made that decision.

Speaker 9: 33:02

So you know when they're making that purchasing decision of being in a certain city because of a certain concert, you need to be well aware of that. You need to get ahead of that. You need to tailor your email messaging, you need to tailor your sort of personalized messaging to them so that you have them hooked right from pre-travel to post-travel. And small things make a big difference. So, for example, if a mum and daughter have gone for a travel for a Taylor Swift concert to a certain location and have travelled, flown specifically for that, but, however, that hotel group is aware that that mum, you know, in another city perhaps, had shown interest to paddle boarding and so when they're in that city where the Taylor Swift concert's happening is then delivered a personalised email from that hotel to say hey, we know you're here and we also have travel board happening in the morning if you're interested. So really sort of making that journey super relevant, super personal, just to make the customer feel highly engaged with that brand.

Speaker 2: 34:01

No, that's great. These trends are fantastic. All right, let's get on to the third one.

Speaker 9: 34:04

Yeah, another one for me which I thought was really interesting, and not necessarily new is Europe's cool-cations. So we're really seeing that cooler European destinations such as Estonia, iceland and Norway are seeing a surge in travel through summer. So people are avoiding sort of Southern Europe I wouldn't say avoiding, but they're going to cooler destinations, which is interesting.

Speaker 2: 34:26

Yeah, well, it's cool for me because I'm from Canada, so that's how they identify. It's one of the always been the criticisms of traveling to Canada, especially if you come in the wrong time of the year. But we have glorious summers but very harsh winters, and this trend certainly it came up at Virtuoso. We've been at the Virtuoso conference a couple of times. They've highlighted Caucasians and we certainly talked about this in the podcast because so many travelers in that post-pandemic rush to get back to Europe. They were traveling to Italy and what happened was it was overcrowded and overheated.

Speaker 2: 34:55

People all of a sudden were like it was all of a sudden this push to go to Scandinavia, go to Japan, norway and so on Absolutely yeah. So I think that coolcation trend is going to be a long-term one, because climate change is real and not only is it we're seeing heat waves, but also more intense weather storms that are impacting people's holidays and vacations. So people are much more aware of this and trying to take that in mind. So coolcations that's a term I actually like and I think that'll be with us for a while. Is there any other major trends that you guys are focusing on?

Speaker 9: 35:32

Yeah, and you know you mentioned Canada and I feel like I'd be amiss not to mention a trend from there. You know we saw in February so a little bit outdated that Canadian travelers were rethinking their plans to travel to the US specifically and we saw a slight drop in US-bound flight bookings from Canada, but we did see a massive increase going to Mexico at least 25% increase. So they were redirecting their travel to Mexico. Perhaps you did the same, I don't know, but yeah, an interesting trend that came out through the summer basically.

Speaker 2: 36:08

Yeah, and what's interesting about that is that certainly I'm very aware of the Canadians not traveling to the US I mean family friends as a nation, given some of these geopolitical issues and concerns about the rhetoric of a 51st state, and Canadians have decided they're going to stay home this year or are going to explore their backyard or they're going to go to other destinations.

Speaker 2: 36:24

So it's certainly a staggering drop in Canadians. But the other thing that's really fascinating too, that came up when I was at the Adventure Travel Trade Association conference just a couple of weeks ago in Denver. Everyone was panicking the first night because the latest flight results were being reported and the Europeans to America was down like 30% and so and this is going into like peak travel for the US. So it certainly is a disconcerting time for a lot of US tour operators and one of the interesting things having you here and the conversations we've been having is there's a lot of American companies here and one of the reasons they're here is to find European allies and European partners and other ways they can grow their business, because they've realized that it's going to be challenged domestically for some time in the US. So that certainly is going to be another major trend. It's not a short term and that's tough for a lot of American businesses. Now tell everyone a little bit about Sojourn and how people can partner and work with you.

Speaker 9: 37:22

We work with customers in the travel space across sort of sizes, whether it's at the large scale level or the smaller scale level, across destinations, across hotels, across airlines and so on. So anyone can really reach out to us if they're looking for that sort of marketing platform. You know that easy to use software and services to connect to the guest and with that connected guest experience. So get in touch with us and we'd be more than happy to have a conversation and see where that goes.

Speaker 2: 37:55

When we think about small to medium-sized businesses. What would be an entry-level opportunity to work with you? Because I ask that? Because I think a lot of companies could really benefit from using a platform like Sojourn. Otherwise people might think it's out of reach.

Speaker 9: 38:12

Yeah, yeah, no, not necessarily the case.

Speaker 9: 38:12

I mean, we work with a range of SMB or small to medium business size hotels specifically around the world, whether it's in Southeast Asia or even in the States, like really spanning the globe. And especially when it comes to the one challenge which a lot of organizations face is payment models and how that works across currencies and so on, we've actually just implemented a new service which allows for that to seamlessly happen, so that there's less of a gap, because obviously with exchange rates, that's really varies when you're dealing with a small hotel in Thailand versus dealing with a small hotel in North America. So, yeah, you know, yeah, we do have that solution and that very tailored approach in place In terms of specific pricing. I think we'd have to have a conversation directly to understand that. But at the same time, we are in the process of working on a page that we can sort of generalize and put up on our website. But it's hard to do that when you work across so many different sectors and so many different types and sizes of customers.

Speaker 2: 39:08

For sure, and I like that you mentioned hotels, thailand, because all I can think right now is White Lotus, the White Lotus effect and what it did for Hawaii.

Speaker 9: 39:16

And what it's doing for Koh Samui at the moment.

Speaker 2: 39:18

Totally exactly, it's just like everyone wants to go to.

Speaker 2: 39:20

Thailand, and this is where reading those signals and understanding the consumer behavior and how do you otherwise intercept that traveler intent? So, yeah, no, I'm thrilled that we had a chance to meet here. Tista has been a fan and advocate for the podcast. She's been sharing some things on LinkedIn, so I want to say thank you for that and I certainly look forward to having more ways to collaborate together and either having Kurt another one of your team members back for our AI summit in October. But I just want to finish off by making sure that all of our listeners can find out more information about Sojourn, whether it's connecting with you or the team. So what would be the ways for everyone to be able to do that?

Speaker 9: 40:02

Yeah, either come find me on LinkedIn or you can go onto our website and we have a contact us page and that can direct you straight to our sales team, if that's what you're looking for, um. But either way, yes, definitely connect with us and um our to reach us. It's quite easy. Our customer form fills us are pretty straightforward and I work on the marketing team so I know that.

Speaker 2: 40:14

So, yes, oh, that's fantastic. Well, it's a real pleasure to meet you, tista. I wish you great luck at the conference over the next couple of days and I look forward to keeping in touch.

Speaker 9: 40:22

Likewise, thank you so much for having me.

Speaker 2: 40:27

This is a terrific opportunity to bring you a special individual that listened to our podcast and decided to come to this conference. So I have a chance to sit down now with Andy Heddington, who is the CEO of Adido.

Speaker 2: 40:40

Correct, that's right which is an amazing agency that works with companies like Globus and he actually was listening to the Globus episode. He does a ton of work in the digital marketing space and he's run this company for over 20 years, and he's very active in the travel space, so I'm thrilled to introduce him to you now. So, Andy, welcome to Travel Trends.

Speaker 14: 40:57

Thank you very, very much for having me, Dan, and an absolute pleasure to be here.

Speaker 2: 41:01

I'm thrilled that you'd made this journey all the way across. We kept in touch, of course, on email. We were keen to meet each other. You knew I was coming to the event. You kindly decided to make the journey. You're also here with one of your colleagues too, Is that right?

Speaker 14: 41:13

That's correct, Yep. We're here together trying to learn as much about all the different topics going on, find out the latest trends and meet as many great people as we can.

Speaker 2: 41:21

Yeah, I think it's a perfect opportunity for you. Brennan Bliss, who runs Propellic, an amazing agency, as well. He's here. He's been just doing a presentation here today. Obviously, I think there's going to be a ton of great opportunities for networking and learning, especially with the world that we're both in, which is the travel industry and digital marketing. So I'm thrilled that you're here, but let's tell everyone a little bit about your company and what you guys do.

Speaker 14: 41:43

So we are, I guess, a travel-specific digital marketing agency. We've been, as you say, around for 22 years now, which is a very long time in any sector, but predominantly helping travel brands in the UK to sell more holidays through search, but also helping them to improve their websites through better data or better conversions. So CRO is quite a big thing we're doing this year their websites through better data or better conversions. So CRO is quite a big thing we're doing this year and it's great. This sector, still in some ways not quite as advanced as it could be, gives us great opportunity. But also try to be very candid. With 20 years experience, we're not here to produce lots of hype for our clients. We actually try and do what really really works right now and also help them navigate the coming years, because who knows what's going to happen in the next two, three years? Right, it's why we're here.

Speaker 2: 42:27

Well, and you just mentioned a really important topic and I just want to highlight exactly what CRO means. Do you want to just give a bit of an overview of what that is and what you do for clients around that?

Speaker 14: 42:36

Yes, so conversion rate optimization is the CRO part Effectively looking at websites travel websites are for our clients, where we might send traffic from PPC or email. Looking at the landing pages, looking at the content, looking at the functionality and trying to find areas where things may not be very clear, may be very weak, may be confusing. To ultimately get more people through to a booking flow whether it's a phone call, whether it's a transaction, whether it's a form and get more from their marketing spend, because we know Google and the other powers that drive traffic are trying to get more money from us every year. How do we fight back against that? Let's try and make our websites just that tiny bit better so we don't have to give them any more money.

Speaker 2: 43:17

Yeah, that's just it. I mean, I think so many companies are used to spending a lot of money on paid media. Now they're addicted to it in many ways. And the cost, the dramatic increases that I'm sure you've seen as well. Whether it be Google or Meta, the cost per clicks are way up. A lot of these tour operators are competing against each other, bidding up on keywords, seeing crazy things like $10 clicks for River Cruise exactly, or more, which is crazy. I remember that was the case with mortgages. There were certain sectors where you could pay $20 for a click Hundreds.

Speaker 14: 43:45

Some of them, the really, really medical heavy ones in the US are hundreds of dollars per click Astounding.

Speaker 2: 43:52

That's crazy. When you're going to be able to generate a $20,000 profit or have a multimillion dollar mortgage, you can see, but travel I mean, the typical purchase for travel is anywhere between $2,000 to $5,000. Sure, there's luxury as well, but let's talk a little bit about the travel space and how you got into it. So obviously, we've mentioned that Globus is a client. Yes, tell us a little bit about how you guys ventured into travel space and what are some of the specific things you're doing for travel clients.

Speaker 14: 44:21

So, yeah, we've been around for 22 years as a company. We very nearly went bust about 10 years ago and there were four directors of the business. A few of them left, a few of the team left and when it came down to a smaller team needing direction, I decided that travel was the sector that we wanted to major in, because of the complexity of the booking process, the opportunity that I saw, but also because travel is just a fantastic sector. I've done lots of traveling around the world. I've actually been to Canada. I went to Vancouver for a week and a half, which was fantastic, so it was a sector I really enjoyed working in.

Speaker 14: 44:51

We had some clients at the time, we'd done some great work, we were nominated for a few awards and, as time went on, we shared our existing clients to now where almost every lead we get is a travel business trying to increase their revenue, get back to sometimes pre-COVID levels or just grow their profit, and this is where we are now. So we've been majoring in content, talking to lots of events, doing presentations. I do a quarterly research piece, which is produced every three months, to look at search trends on Google. What are the destinations that are hot, not literally, but which ones have really got the interest, and partnering up with lots of people, maybe like yourself in the future, to spread the word and, I guess, try and cut through some of the hype, because there is a lot of hype in marketing world, there's also a lot of hype in the travel world and bring it back to what's happening right now. How do I increase your sales the next 12 months rather than in three or five years time?

Speaker 2: 45:44

Yeah, well, let's talk about some of those marketing trends, because I think this is what many of our listeners are going to be will benefit from Individuals like you who have that specific expertise working across different clients, because that's something that I always found unique about the role that I had in the corporate space working across about 40 different travel brands is that whole term of cross-pollination, which is I don't really like that terminology, but it is a useful term because it does accurately represent what it is you're able to do by virtue of having exposure to different brands and the performance, so you can see something that worked and apply it and realize wait a second. So you've talked about conversion rate optimization. What are some of the other initiatives that you've been working on with clients here in 2025 that you're seeing success with?

Speaker 14: 46:27

I think, increasingly, google and Meta, to some degree, are becoming more and more AI driven. They have been for the last three or four years, fundamentally. So, how do you train these algorithms to deliver better results for you? A lot of the time and we talked about a session earlier on, actually it comes back to quality of data. So what good signals are you sending back to Google Meta that help them to understand, of the clicks and the traffic and the visitors they've sent to you, which ones perform the best?

Speaker 14: 46:55

So we're doing a lot of work with GA4. We've got a specialist who does full-time GA4 for persons and also looking at things like HubSpot or Salesforce or any of the booking platforms that clients use. How do we pull out data from that, feed it back to the machine so that we can improve our click-through rates, our bidding strategies or our campaigns? Because, again, unfortunately lots of travel businesses don't have very good data, they don't prioritize it and we say to our clients if you can get this stuff right, you've got a massive competitive advantage where you don't have to bid inefficient clicks anymore. You can train the algorithms and I think that's probably going to be a direction of travel for the next. Sorry excuse the pun the work that we do for the next six to 12 months, because increasingly this is not the only way, but a lot of established clients can really benefit, rather than setting new campaigns that they've already done five times already.

Speaker 2: 47:46

Yeah Well, you mentioned three really interesting things there. You mentioned booking platforms, which is obviously a big decision that companies have to make, and one of the reasons they come to conferences like this they want to see different res tech platforms. You also mentioned HubSpot, which, of course, is a CRM system. So companies are always looking to try and figure out how can they either introduce a CRM or optimize their CRM strategy. But the one I'm rewinding back to was GA4.

Speaker 14: 48:11

Yeah, everyone's favorite topic, yeah well, that's just like.

Speaker 2: 48:14

So I wanted you to share some insights on that topic, because I certainly have a number of companies that I work closely with that are still not tracking goals effectively, really managing their Google Analytics account and data having a digital dashboard they make decisions off of. Everyone talks about being numbers focused and trying to make data. Thank you, that's the correct terminology.

Speaker 2: 48:35

So tell everyone a bit about GA4 and what it is you work on with clients, given this transition that was on again, off again with Google and then yeah, but explain GA4 and what it is you actually do for clients.

Speaker 14: 48:48

I mean I've been doing presentations for organizations in the UK like APTA on GA4 for a couple of years now. I say GA4 is not the same tool that you've been using 10 years previously. So this is an analytics tool, whereas GA and its previous guys or universal analytics some people refer to it is a marketing tool, and the fundamental difference between those two things is to get the best out of GA4, you have to think about your data architecture, your data structure and ultimately test it more, whereas out of the box, ua just used to give you lots of nice reports. So lots of people struggle with it because they go into GA4, where's the report I used to use? Or why doesn't this tell me this? Because it's not designed for that. It's designed for people to architect their data in a particular way and to do that requires planning, thinking, budget time, effort, which a lot of smaller, I would say travel companies don't really know or have the time or the planning to do.

Speaker 14: 49:41

So if you can get GA4 working correctly, that's where the benefit can be. You get robust data, you get good data, you get the data modelling, which now is very important in a post-cookie world. We still have cookies, but most websites lose 20 to 40% of their data when you put a cookie bar on it. So you need that modelling to help you to make better decisions in the first place. Sadly, even some multi-million pound businesses we've spoken to this year, they don't even have e-commerce tracking, when most of their priority bookings are through their website. They don't have their goals set up to understand how many phone calls they've had or how many form fills they've had at the basic level. So if you don't have that divisibility, I still don't understand how you decide where to spend more or not. But they're fudging it for now. But increasingly, as I say, data is the competitive advantage that I think more companies should be looking at and hopefully they will.

Speaker 2: 50:32

Yeah, well, it's interesting when you mentioned about goal tracking and clearly when you have a pixel fire at a certain stage, that you can track that activity, like a form fill, for example. But you mentioned phone numbers, which is another tricky thing for travel companies, because I mean, you look at a company like Tor Radar and Tor Radar is one of our sponsors and partners and Travis is here at this event. He's going to be on this highlight reel. 70% of their bookings occur offline and this is Not uncommon. No, not uncommon, you're absolutely right. So, but that phone number very few companies have dynamic phone numbers implemented to be able to track the source of that lead, so it's a different phone number if it's paid media and you can actually track the channel source.

Speaker 14: 51:12

Or the keywords, if you've got a really good one, yeah.

Speaker 2: 51:14

There you go, exactly.

Speaker 14: 51:15

Yeah, but the thing is it's very easy to spend another thousand pounds a month on Google ads rather than spend 200 pounds a month on the phone call system and unfortunately, Google's made it so easy to spend more money and we've bought into this whole, as you mentioned earlier on this psyche of Google Ads, Google Ads, Google Ads or Meta we don't look at our data. It's too complicated, it's too tricky. I don't understand it. Someone did it before, three years ago, and now it's a hard sell, I think, sadly, yeah.

Speaker 2: 51:45

And then the other one you mentioned, crm. Is that for our listeners that are trying to figure out their approach to a CRM strategy? I mean, clearly everyone knows about Salesforce, but Salesforce is expensive. Very expensive yeah, and very time-consuming.

Speaker 2: 51:59

HubSpot's getting that way, but yes, yeah, well, interesting, because I started off as kind of like the Salesforce killer. They've, all of a sudden, hubspot came along. But you're right, it's become. It's become more bloated as they've continued to expand. So, yeah, what would be your recommendation to small to medium sized travel companies in terms of going down the path of implementing a CRM system?

Speaker 14: 52:18

I think for a lot of companies sometimes the booking system is their CRM and it depends on the size you are. Ultimately, if you're looking at a CRM system, on top of that you need the person to be able to manage it. You need a good data in and out, and one of the things I worked with a company called Vermoose in the UK. I don't know if you've heard of them.

Speaker 2: 52:35

Of course I do, yeah.

Speaker 14: 52:36

We did a white paper together which is available on their website, but we basically advocate the fact that a lot of these systems try to do everything in one box and increasingly the forward-thinking companies are really realizing that a CRM needs a specialist platform. An email marketing platform needs to be specialist, the booking system needs a specialist and using APIs rather than AI, you can get the good data flowing through those different systems. And I think CRM is for a lot of companies. They have them not really using it as well as they could do and again, that comes down to having resource time, good data in, good data out.

Speaker 14: 53:12

If you want to get going on that, yeah, I mean, look at what your business challenges are. Is it retention? Are you struggling to get people to come back? Some travel companies I know go back to the google ads problem. They spend 90% of their money on acquisition and only 10% on retention, where, if you could flip that just a little bit the other way, you wouldn't have to spend so much money on acquiring new customers. So CRMs, I think, definitely help to solve some of that problem, but it's not for everyone, yeah.

Speaker 2: 53:36

Well, the other thing I wanted to ask you. You haven't mentioned this yet, but we have to talk about AI. I know, andy, you're going to be back for our AI Summit in October. One of the things I wanted to get your take on is from the clients from a digital marketing point of view, how are you seeing companies leveraging AI at the moment, and are any of the AI tools that you are implementing or working with clients on?

Speaker 14: 53:59

I mean going back a few years. The common thing for AI implementation was stick a chatbot on your website and I think there is a thing from investors or someone somewhere needed to show AI to the world. All of the talks, even including the one this morning, where I think the most benefits come is back office stuff allowing people who are customer facing to take away their admin, all of those processes you have internally about checking documents, checking tour plans. Can we train the AI to do that for us? Us and I think that's where I've seen a lot of the clients get really good success, where a lot of the investments going.

Speaker 14: 54:31

Um, there's a company called black tomato in the uk. They created an ai feelings engine on their website and if you've seen that, worth checking out. Uh, they sell the experience and so the you're going on their website to try and describe all the feelings you might want to have and the AI then tries to match the best tour. So I think a lot of the time it should be back-end office stuff. Sadly, I think a lot of it's still front-end and I think, not as good as user experience as it could be. That's my answer that helps.

Speaker 2: 55:05

Yeah, no, I mean, and this is where Brennan with Propellic I know the session he was doing was the AI overviews and the impact it's having on SEO. He literally started an SEO agency and is now in the process of transforming that to an AI-first agency, because AI is impacting search engine optimization to the point where people are less likely to go visit your website if they can see the information in the AI overview. So there's so many different unique opportunities emerging right now. And, given that you are a leading digital marketer and focus on the travel space, what are some of the other trends that you're paying attention to in this industry or within marketing going into 2026? Obviously, we've talked a bit about AI, but what are some of the other things that you're focused on or that you think companies should be aware of, or specific initiatives that you're undertaking that would be worth our listeners knowing?

Speaker 14: 55:48

about Going back to the AI thing. I actually listened to a podcast that Brennan did very recently talking about AI, and it was very, very fascinating. I think Google has an existential challenge, but it has a big, big challenge with chat, gpt, and so therefore it has to do a lot of AI stuff. First, a, it's very efficient, but also B, it's what users want. In quotes, the model that we've had traditionally and I've actually worked with a couple of travel companies who based their whole business model off volume of traffic, clicks to the website, conversion rate, average revenue and then profit that model is going to break, if it hasn't already broken already, because I think in one of the things that Brennan mentioned in his podcast with Kevin Indig, he said that traffic has gone down.

Speaker 14: 56:30

Ai overviews have reduced click-through rates by from 30% on the first position down to 15% in some instances, so the traffic you used to get is going to die quite quickly.

Speaker 14: 56:40

Some of it's probably irrelevant, some of it was noise, but if you're not in those AI overviews or not thinking about them, that's going to be a big challenge. And then the second one is then Google ads off the back of it, because Google has to monetize this for a $200 billion business. They have to make sure the clicks keep coming through and they keep generating money from them. So AI overviews and PPCs just started to be rollout. I think that's going to be a very, very pivotal thing to control that. Google is very good at spreading ads all over the place, making you pay for them and then try and pick up the pieces off the back of it. So both Google, which drives most of the traffic to all of our websites from a PPC and SEO perspective are things we're focusing very, very heavily on. Businesses need to be aware of, and we're publishing stuff every month around that because it changes so quickly.

Speaker 2: 57:25

Yeah, and we'll definitely pick up this topic further as we plan for the AI Summit and have Andy back. I also wanted just to bring us back to what brought us both here, which is the event being in Barcelona, and clearly it's our first time at this event. So I'm thrilled you decided to join and so far from my perspective. So I'm thrilled you decided to join and so far from my perspective, I mean when you're sitting here and having this conversation on day one. So I said to Andy, we need to have you back on day three so you can actually review, because right now you're projecting forward.

Speaker 2: 57:51

But what I'd like to ask you a couple of questions. One is initial impressions what are your thoughts so far from being here kind of midway through day one, in terms of the venue and some of the initial conversations you're having? So that'm going to put them both out to you. That's the first question I had. And then also, what are some of the things you are hoping to get? I know we talked a little bit about networking. What are some of the other? When you looked at the agenda and just planning out over the next couple of days, what are some of the things you're looking forward to getting out of being here for the conference.

Speaker 14: 58:25

Well, first of all, just the atmospherics and the venue are fantastic here.

Speaker 14: 58:27

So you know, that's number one good to take for Focusrite. Number two you know, I think Focusrite has very good heritage in the US and so coming to Europe is a good thing and good chance for me to meet companies from the other side of the pond. You know Canada and US, whatever you think of those places, but both fantastic in different ways. So, yeah, all the networking has been great. Everyone I've met so far has been great and I'm looking forward to a great three days. I'm sure that will happen. On the other side of things, the talks really good to talk already the first one I went to. There's really open conversation about AI, how we're using it, what the challenge is, some contentious discussions.

Speaker 2: 58:59

Was that with Christian Watts?

Speaker 14: 59:00

It was with christian oh good, as soon as you said it's contentious, I'm like it's got to be christian uh, well, I was prodding away a bit because, uh, I've got some views, but anyway, um, and really just yeah, finding out what the trends are across different sectors, because you know, travel, we put as a ai, is a bucket. Travel is a bucket, but niche tourism is very different to mass tourism, which is different to luxury, which is different to cruise. You know, all these different things have have sub, sub sub sectors, so just try to find out much about them and then bring that value back to my clients and find out as much as I can on their behalf to help them shortcut some of the things that are going to happen.

Speaker 2: 59:33

Yeah, that's fantastic. Well, I want to make sure we're going to have you back, andy, but I also want to make sure that, even as we're speaking right now, that our listeners can find out more about your organization, connect with your team. So what are the best ways to do so?

Speaker 14: 59:46

So I'm on LinkedIn quite a lot. I'm posting on there. I have a newsletter, we have a newsletter which you can sign up to through our website and, if you're a little bit patient, on the 3rd of January 2026, my book called Digital Marketing for Travel Brands will be released in the UK. So if you are interested to find out more about how to market your travel brand, next year will be the place where you can buy 80,000 words of my writing.

Speaker 2: 1:00:10

Congratulations. That's really exciting, thank you, and it will be available on Amazon, I'm sure.

Speaker 14: 1:00:14

It's already available on Waterstones in the UK, so you can pre-order if you are so inclined.

Speaker 2: 1:00:20

I've got to finish writing it first, so let's get that done. But just remind everyone the company, the spelling and the domain, so that everyone can also go to the website and any social channels that you might want to highlight too.

Speaker 14: 1:00:29

So yeah, we're on LinkedIn A-D-I-D-O. You can type in Adido Digital. You'll find our website and myself, andy Heddington, again very active on LinkedIn and again through our website.

Speaker 2: 1:00:41

That's fantastic, Andy. It's a real pleasure to sit down with you. I was really looking forward to this conversation. Likewise, I'm so glad we made it happen and I look forward to keeping in touch with you the next few days. We'll see you in person again, but we'll get lots of time together in the next couple of days. But thank you again.

Speaker 14: 1:00:52

Absolute pleasure.

Speaker 2: 1:00:56

Thanks a lot. Cheers, dan, this at a Focusrite conference, both in Europe or internationally, and he is a great friend of mine, a fantastic colleague that I have the privilege to work with. Just full disclosure I'm an advisor to the WeRoad team and I specifically get to work with Andrea Lamparini, who is the chief operating officer. Welcome, andrea, so great to have you with us. Thank you, dan. Thanks a lot, of course.

Speaker 2: 1:01:23

No, I'm so keen for you to be here at Focusrite Europe because, as I was telling Andrea, last night I was at a dinner and I was asked what is the fastest growing travel company?

Speaker 2: 1:01:33

And I was telling everyone about WeRoad, and a lot of our listeners have clearly heard about WeRoad. I love the brand, I love the business. It's such a fantastic team and you guys have grown from $10 million in sales to $100 million in just four years, and the thing that I keep coming back to is I'm convinced that it's going to be the fastest travel company to reach a billion dollars in sales, and so it's a really exciting business to be a part of and obviously you have such a key role to play in the business and its growth, and so I wanted you to join us, to be part of this special event spotlight, but I think the one thing that would be great to start off with Andrea is a little bit of background on WeRoad for all of our listeners that aren't familiar with the business. So tell us a little bit about WeRoad and then a bit about your role.

Speaker 16: 1:02:12

Yes, thanks, dan. So we are a community. We were born as a community of travelers. Now we are a community of people in their millennial age, so between 20 to 50 years old, we do small group experiences which, like, mainly are adventure travel. So multi-day weeks experiences all around the world, from from multi-days to just like a few hours, and we let people mostly strangers to meet in our experiences, get connected, share experiences like taste the local culture and then like build really like a long lasting relationship together. So people like become friends and people like feel part of a community.

Speaker 2: 1:03:00

Well and I think this is one of the things that couldn't be more timely to be focused on the multi-day tour category.

Speaker 2: 1:03:06

I know I'm a big advocate for this industry, especially right now, given the younger demographic feeling more disconnected, more isolated in the face of technology and social media, and what you just mentioned about strangers coming together and quickly becoming realizing they're part of a tribe. And you guys have had such an incredible success trajectory in Europe. And I just want to also highlight to all of our listeners Erica DeSanti, who's one of the co-founders of WeRoad, was on a dedicated episode of Travel Trends back in Season 4. So if you want to learn more about WeRoad, I definitely encourage you to listen to that episode. But tell us a little bit more about your role, andrea, because with the Chief Operating Officer role, andrea, because with the chief operating officer role, one of the areas that you're focused on is partnerships and trade in particular. I know Clarissa on your team is obviously working with a lot of trade partners now, so tell us a little bit about that and, ultimately, what brings you to Focusrite this year?

Speaker 16: 1:03:55

Yeah, so WeRode is mainly a direct-to-consumer brand, so we sell online our experiences, experiences. We over align our experiences, but then we understood that at the end, we need to be also closer to our audience, to our community, to the people that might, might choose our world for, uh, for their free time. And then we understood that at the end, we need to also be present and to trade them, which which can be also online or offline, and also leverage the experience of travel agencies or other tour operator network, especially understanding really the consumer need, the consumer purchasing behavior, into the free time experiences. So this is why we're approaching also this channel and really on a worldwide scale. So basically, we want to start working with them, with those partners worldwide, because at the end, our experiences are worldwide indeed.

Speaker 2: 1:04:56

Well, there's a huge demand for the product and I've certainly seen that in the marketing that Fabio, who's the CMO, has been doing with takeovers and subway stations in London and many other cities around Europe, and clearly there's great marketing that's driving interest in the brand and people are coming to you direct. But I think the one thing that is really exciting is the fact you're embracing trade partners, because that is such a substantial part of the travel industry and a key reason why many companies are here to network and realize new business distribution opportunities. So tell us a little bit more about what brings you to focus right europe. Obviously we collaborate together, so I know one of the drivers for sure was us getting time together in person. But what are some of the other things you're looking forward to being here at focus right barcelona?

Speaker 16: 1:05:38

so, um, I repeat that for sure, like it would be super nice also to to meet you and meet like all the people that you, you get connected, like remotely, and then having a chance also to get more deeper into the connection, because this is what we do, we are a community and we let the people be connected. And also, like I would like to find new partners. I would like to get like a better understanding into the trade world in general, because I'm not from that part and I would like to get the most and also building a really helpful partnership in that sense and in any other sense that can bring value into the world growth.

Speaker 2: 1:06:17

Yeah, what's interesting about that too is that Paulina from Flytographer is here, which is a Canadian company, an amazing success story. We've had Nicole Smith, the founder, on our podcast before and they're totally B2C and they've realized that they've been missing a big opportunity on B2B and it's one of the reasons that Paulina is here as well. And I spoke to her after her first day and she was delighted with the experience and all the meetings she had in the first day of the conference and she was like it's already paid back and, from speaking to some of the Focusrite team, I guess they're going to do some sponsorship for the next event in San Diego, which is really exciting. But for me, I find it so encouraging that there are all these opportunities for you to be here and I'm looking forward to, after the next couple of days of you having had the opportunity to meet and network with a lot of people, the business opportunities that will be realized for WeRoad. And one thing for sure is just actually creating more brand awareness for WeRoad Because, again, it just shocks me that so few people know this business that I've come to know so well in the last year and it gets so much press and publicity, but clearly there's so many other people that still need to know about WeRoad, so tell us a little bit.

Speaker 2: 1:07:18

On that note, I always call you Lampe that's your nickname, so I'm going to call you Lampe, that's your nickname. So I'm going to call you Lampe again. But it wasn't 10%. The growth plans for WeRoad tell us a little bit about what the next year looks like and where some obviously trade partners is one of that for sure. But what are some of the other initiatives and plans for growth at WeRoad? I mean, I know you've got a new app and so, yeah, tell us a little bit about some of the products and the plans for the business yeah, so we're mainly like our, so our main presence in terms of community is in Europe yet.

Speaker 16: 1:07:48

So we need to increase and be really like the greatest community of people into the millennial age that want to meet and gather and travel the world. So this is why our special plan is to scale in Europe even further, to scale in Europe even further and also looking outside of Europe and be more present into the consumer acquisition funnel and community building, also outside of Europe. Then, as I said, we started from multi-day trips and then we are also entering into the few-hour experiences. This is why we launched the we Meet app where you can find like experiences run by our partners, our travel coordinators everywhere and then also like allowing like our community to find experiences on the website that they can really like run and design, run by really vertical experts, expert people into different areas, such as active trips, food and wine, relaxing, well-being. So we started as an adventure travel brand and we are going into a free time of our community from our experience to still a lot of adventure trips into also a vertical experience related more to the passion of our community.

Speaker 2: 1:09:18

Well, I think that's one of the things that is unique about WeRoad that you really live the community aspect, the coordinators, how you actually create these trips, operate these trips, and it's one of the things that actually a lot of trade partners have been trying to understand and I know, even as coming up with our conversations, is that they're excited to be a part of it, but they're trying to wrap their head around what is their role in this world of community and how WeRoad has grown so well organically.

Speaker 2: 1:09:43

I know you do a lot of events, you do a lot of great offline marketing, you do a lot of great social media marketing as well, and so one of the things that I also wanted to highlight with uh we road is the fact that the product, even though you guys are based in europe, you take people all around the world, and so tell us a little bit about some of the new destinations that you're going to be opening up and offering to travelers in the next year yeah, so I'm sorry to to like, uh to your first sentence like this is why also, we might not be that known into the b2b area is because our, our like product, our touristy product, is not that common actually if you consider with like more like just day activities, but like really like, a consumer can really understand the beauty of the, of the, of the, of the product, thanks to our like thousands of reviews, of positive reviews.

Speaker 16: 1:10:38

but like it's a difficult product to run and build and this is why like also it's an opportunity for B2B partnering with us because we take care of the operational complexity but we guarantee a level of quality of the experience which is remarkable and our retention and the growing of the community is a key indicator of how good our experiences are and our viewers can tell for sure.

Speaker 16: 1:11:12

And the new destination we see a very big trend of the old-time areas. So Kyrgyzstan, afghanistan, uzbekistan, all that part of the world is getting a lot of traction from all of our like customers. So this is a really like a big trend. And also South America, like is getting more attention like this year comparing to the last years. And, as you said, in our trips there is no flight included because we want to leave totally the freedom to the consumer to decide the best way they want to reach the destination. Everything is happening in destination and the key part of our success is the travel coordinator, which are like our brand ambassador most powerful brand ambassador that can really make the experience unique and so great.

Speaker 2: 1:12:07

Well, one other thing I just want to highlight to our audience as well is that if people think of WeRoad and more of a youth travel brand, the reality actually is that WeRoad is focused on 25 to 45. And it's not 50 also oh okay.

Speaker 2: 1:12:19

Well, to your point, getting to the older demographic, as opposed to the student audience and I think that might be, some people may think like a brand like Contiki, where they have a lot of people that are 18, 19, 20, it's their first trip With re-roaders. It is a lot of established young professionals that are looking for more meaningful travel to connect with others, and so, you know, they are now in the workforce, they have the means to be able to take time off and be able to afford a holiday. But and the other thing too, to your point about 45, 50, is like it's. This style of travel is more of a psychographic, because the difference between a 45 and a 25 year old in terms of their desire for travel, they don't necessarily see themselves that different.

Speaker 2: 1:13:00

You know, and I can say that from my own experience, I'm in that mid-40s range and I don't feel that much different than I did in my 20s, and so I still want to travel and have fun and experience the local cultures and all the things that like. So my travel style or travel behavior has remained consistent. But, yeah, tell everyone, if you wouldn't mind, the ways that people can connect with you, reach out to you, to be able to partner with you Because, again, I think this is one of the fantastic opportunities of being at a focus right conference like this and, obviously, being on the travel trends podcast, as well as reaching out to the focus right audience, tell us some of the ways that travel partners can connect with you and work with you guys.

Speaker 16: 1:13:37

So you can find me like andrea lamperini, you can find me like on linkedin or on the focus right uh hub. Um, so just passing by, uh just saying hi, like anyway, like I'm, I'm here to to connect, to like all those uh like really like in this industry leaders and also like a really interesting people. So, just passing by, uh get in touch with me. Uh, we are open like we, we like to do things on a really easy way, so we like quick wins, so we are not too complex. We are super flexible, we are very keen to understand how to make it work. So we're not stopping by the complexity but really moving by the drive of growth.

Speaker 2: 1:14:24

Yeah, and I just wanted to highlight one last thing and it's probably one of the reasons that I love working with you and the team so much is that the team culture is very real, it's very genuine, it's very authentic. You guys all put in a lot of hours. When we're doing calls, sometimes it's like late in the day and there's no hesitation between any six people on the call about the time. Like our calls will go for two, two and a half hours, even when we schedule for an hour. And it's getting late in the day and for you guys, given time zone differences and I'm like always amazed the fact that it's just nobody flinches. You put in the time and the effort and you guys all really get along Like there's a genuinely warm team dynamic that I've certainly it doesn't exist in a lot of other organizations and I think that's a testament to the culture that's been built internally as well as you know, externally, with how you work with partners. To your point about we're easy to work with, we were like and that's certainly the case Like it's just like people.

Speaker 2: 1:15:15

So I have a big advocate and a big fan of WeRoad. I absolutely think it is the fastest growing travel company for all the right reasons, and I love the style of travel, I love the experiences that WeRoad offers. So I think it's really thrilling that we finally have a company out of Europe and Italy specifically leading the charge, because it's always otherwise been companies out of USA, canada and Australia. And here we are, like this and sending people to Europe, and here you are at the heart of Europe, capitalizing on a major trend within the European market, but also sending these travelers internationally. So I want to say congratulations and well done.

Speaker 16: 1:15:50

Thank you.

Speaker 2: 1:15:51

And I look forward to continuing our collaborations together and more people finding out about WeRoad.

Speaker 16: 1:15:55

Super, like a right to me, right to Dan. We are here to collaborate and connect. Thanks, awesome. Thanks very much. Thank you to connect.

Speaker 2: 1:16:08

Thanks, awesome, thanks very much, thank you. I now have the pleasure to speak to the CEO and co-founder of Loyalty Status, mark Ross Smith. He and I were having a great conversation yesterday. I know one of his colleagues, aaron, who's based in Toronto. We've talked about doing a loyalty episode together and my background is certainly in the loyalty space and we have not actually covered that yet in the travel trends and I was telling Mark about that yesterday. So I'm really thrilled to have him here because he's representing loyalty here in Barcelona. But, mark, tell us a little bit about your background and give all of our listeners a bit of an overview of loyalty status. What did you guys do?

Speaker 4: 1:16:41

So no pressure at all, representing the entire global loyalty on the first shot.

Speaker 2: 1:16:46

Someone's got to do it Better you. When people hear your story, they'll understand why You've got the place to yourself.

Speaker 4: 1:16:53

Yeah, no, we got a pretty cool setup. We started business about four and a half years ago Worst time ever, in the middle of a pandemic, to start a travel company.

Speaker 2: 1:17:02

Months after COVID. You did know better, because COVID started in March and you started the company in July. It's symbolical, yeah.

Speaker 4: 1:17:10

There's clearly no other business to start, it had to be this.

Speaker 2: 1:17:13

I want to start at rock bottom. No one's flying, no airlines, but maybe they're going to need points in the future. They're going to need their status. Well, it's interesting you tell this story because it actually worked out to be timely, because people like me ended up not being able to keep up our status and we're freaking out that we were going to lose our status. So, yeah, tell everyone the story of how it came to be, because the business really took off almost by virtue of the timing.

Speaker 4: 1:17:36

yeah, it worked out really well. Yeah, there's a couple of things going in our favor, aside from global travel not really happening. Uh, first thing is, in 2020, airlines were struggling for cash and so a lot what we're doing they're putting up their loyalty program as collateral to secure government loans, and that's when we started to see, well, hang on, these loyalty programs, some are worth more than the airline itself. Yeah, and this was like a real mind blow for everyone, like, wow, hang on, how come american airlines loyalty program is worth nearly 30 billion dollars. The airline is trading publicly at something like $12 billion. Like, this doesn't make sense.

Speaker 4: 1:18:09

So what happened is loyalty started to get a bit more of the spotlight and, you know, stakeholders in these brands were like how can we do more with loyalty? What else can we do? How can it make more cash? Because no one's really flying and we're kind of burning cash here. It's like, how do we make more? And so you know me and my co-founders, we've all run airline multi programs. So you know we've got I think you know we've got to save the world. Right, put our thinking caps on. How can we save the industry? Because if we save it, if it works for us, it'll work for industry, we'll have jobs in the future. Loosely the concept. And so we um fast forward a little bit to the end of 2020.

Speaker 4: 1:18:48

We um pitched this idea to frontier airlines about the world's most paid status match. So the idea is you pay a fee to apply for a status match and uh, and this was wildly successful. Wild, and because it was cashing the door for the airline. That's what they were looking for, right. So they got a bunch of great PR because airlines didn't have the best PR track at the time. So great PR, a bunch of cash in the door, and they effectively locked in a group of flies that were a bit sort of up in the air in their status. They had their status with another airline. They're not flying, they don't know when they're going to come back again, but suddenly they've got another one. They've got another one like, well, I could try these guys now, because I don't know if I'm going to keep my gold status over here anymore, and so that's really where things kick-started for us on this journey.

Speaker 2: 1:19:39

Well, and one thing just to highlight too is Mark was actually running the frequent flyer program or created it for Malaysia Airlines and actually ran it ran.

Speaker 2: 1:19:45

it didn't create it, ran it. You came in to run it and to take it to the next level. And you are based in Australia originally but you've been living in Kuala Lumpur for a number of years and so obviously that was kind of set you off on this course to really understand loyalty. And but interestingly you're not in the points and miles space and I want to highlight that specifically because I think that's what a lot of people identify with with loyalty, especially because so many other companies have gotten into this. I mean, every retailer now has their own loyalty program and, to your exact point, the airlines were amongst the first in this space and a lot of people didn't realize that the valuations of those programs were greater than the airlines themselves.

Speaker 2: 1:20:25

Because of all these member benefits and the spend that all of a sudden you have true loyalty amongst this audience and when you say you're going to be able to earn points or miles to keep up their status, all of a sudden more and more companies have gotten into the space. But tell everyone what is unique about the two brands you operate, because I know Erin did a rebrand when she came in as a CMO. We were having an interesting chat about that yesterday. So tell everyone about the two different businesses and how they now complement each other. Give us a bit more of the origin story, if you will, of the original concept and how it's grown.

Speaker 4: 1:21:00

Yeah, quickly on your little point there. Yeah, we already have two superpowers Points and miles massively effective. It's like the bedrock of the financial stuff. And then the other side is status. This is obviously where we play in the products that we sort of got, and this sells seats, basically where points and miles does less so Right.

Speaker 4: 1:21:20

So there's a couple of things we really focus on. One is if you're about to lose your status, right, or you've just lost it and you're like you're not feeling good, but then you get this email from the airline. It says hey, dan, click here, make it, pay 500 bucks, you can keep your gold status for another year. Like that's the. That's the stuff that we do. Yeah, you know, because if we know that, if people that drop in status it's something like 30 of these people have no intention to ever fly that or stay at the hotel again, because it's that disconnected feeling. It's the. You know what? I gave it my all and even though I didn't quite get there, you still dropped me down and I'm not feeling the love anymore. So I'll just fly whoever stay, wherever I want, cheapest flight, whatever. So keeping people in there. There's an old saying, you know, it's cheaper to keep a customer and retention than to acquire a new customer.

Speaker 4: 1:22:10

Absolutely it's the same thing again. It's like in reverse the people are paying to retain, so they're basically locking themselves in for another year as well. There's all sorts of amazing financial benefits for the loyalty, the airline, the hotel in that situation. So that's kind of one big thing that we do. We're kind of known for Status Match, which is high-value customer acquisition. Status Match has been for 40 years. People kind of understand it. You've got one airline, you want it with another, for whatever reason. We facilitate that. You pay a fee, right, yeah, so we kind of do that. That's really effective. F-a.

Speaker 2: 1:22:44

So we kind of do that.

Speaker 2: 1:22:45

That's really effective.

Speaker 2: 1:22:46

So statusmatchcom, and then of course, you have loyaltystatuscom.

Speaker 2: 1:22:51

So, starting the business, focus on statusmatch, which I totally get, because I was telling you that I was super elite with Air Canada and my life changed when all of a sudden, I was dropped down in status and even, like some of the messaging on your website, change jobs, relocate in cities about to be downgraded status and even, like some of the messaging on your website, change jobs, relocated cities about to be downgraded, like that, switch your loyalty status to a new airline or hotel so you can continue to join the perks of being a high value traveler and I. So that's that speaks to me and I think obviously it speaks to I think you were referring to this like top 5% of people that are kind of fit into that criteria that they make. They make major decisions based on maintaining their status. So tell us a little bit about how that business has grown. And then I'm keen to know about your expansion plans, given that you've kind of now you know I've done this rebrand and are obviously looking to expand beyond just status match.

Speaker 4: 1:23:40

Yeah. So when you've got, I'm sure a lot of listeners have status or have had status and it's pretty addictive. You know, once you've had, I'm sure a lot of listeners have a status or have had status and it's pretty addictive. Once you've had a taste of it, I can't fly and not go to the lounge. I'm not going to the gate, I'm not going to be in group 15 to board the aircraft. I need to be first on there. I need that overhead space. I need the champagne in the lounge. I need to check in at business class, even though I'm on the cheapest economy ticket of the day. I need these. There is no other way, right?

Speaker 2: 1:24:09

I'm confused. Even I get annoyed if they don't put the priority ticker on my bag, because I want to know that's going to come out first as well.

Speaker 4: 1:24:15

I do that when they're checking the bag in. I'll wait there until I see the priority tag go on. I'll just stand there waiting. I'll just stand there like waiting, like looking over. Hey, buddy, you missing something. It's just so everyone else can know that you're important, yeah.

Speaker 2: 1:24:28

Well, the thing is because I was, I traveled half the time for work, my wife and kids flying with me was a totally different experience when they flew on their own because they didn't have, and I've been conscientious to make sure my wife has the 50K and, like you, then have to try and spread the love to make sure that everyone experiences that, even if they're traveling independently or get the passes. Once you've traveled with someone that is super elite or even elite, the entire experience of navigating the airport is different. So you're absolutely right, you don't want life any other way.

Speaker 4: 1:24:57

Again, to your point 100%, you do whatever it takes. I think it's Air Canada that lets you. Is it the day pass that you can give to someone else? Yeah, whatever it takes to start, I think it's Air Canada that lets you. Is it the day pass that?

Speaker 7: 1:25:06

you can give to someone else.

Speaker 4: 1:25:06

Yeah, I really like that I like that a lot, because if your wife is flying without you, she doesn't have status. You can kind of give it to her so she gets the taste of what you get every single time. That's it. I love that because ultimately, there's a lot of people that fly for work. Yeah, road was really doing the back and forth, back and forth and it's you know the one. Maybe twice a year they do something with the family and that's really where loyalty has to shine totally, because it's it's it's a massive brand campaign for your wife, your husband, the kids, like whatever. This is why I fly and keep my status for that one time that we all get to go on the lounge and champagne and whatever. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2: 1:25:43

So now, loyalty status you've obviously got the status match, which is the core business, but you have things like get status status booster, status lift. Tell us a little bit about where you're headed now as an organization, as you've kind of gone down the path of loyalty status being the parent brand.

Speaker 4: 1:25:58

Yeah, so we could start a status match, did really well 24 airlines, two hotels, a retail travel, retail brand uh sort of been using that over the last uh, three or four years and uh, so you know, we've got all these, all this great traction, all this great momentum, and people love what we do and it's like what's the next thing, uh, and so everyone on our team we're all travelers, I think. I think I think almost everyone in our company, or everyone, has status with an airline. It's like it's in the contract, right, you must keep. It's a good idea, I might put that in. But uh, you know, it's like what's next? Like if I can solve my problems that me as a traveler I'm solving it for millions of other people as well. And so the next logical thing was like how do I keep my status a little bit at times or have to make it a little bit easier? So we've got something called a status booster, which is, you know, you pay a fee, it can be a one-time, it can be a subscription with some airlines, and it gives you, like, the double qualifying miles, the double tier miles, the double status credits when you fly for a very short, short, short period of time. So the idea is that you pay a fee, so short period of time. So the idea is it that encourage you pay a fee so the airlines make money. That's how we make money as well, uh, and then you. You're then booking flights you may not have otherwise booked. So this is incremental revenue to the brand, which is exactly what they're looking for. You're a status holder.

Speaker 4: 1:27:16

Most people that have status tend to spend a little more on flights, and they're not in the cheapest fares. They're in a high yield, uh, like economy, fair, premium economy or business class, because they understand the value of it. Right, and airlines know this as well. And so how do we encourage people? How do we align the loyalty objectives with the airline or hotel objectives, which is to sell seats, sell the room, sell the suites? How do we? How do we do that? And so this product we've got is absolutely fabulous in this. It's it's got amazing traction with the brand of all that too. So so it's coming back to.

Speaker 4: 1:27:50

My point is about if we solve it for us, we solve for everyone else. If I solve your problem, you know there's another 10 million other people, 10 million other dans out there doing crazy status runs and who knows what, right, yeah and yeah, and you know what. These people typically have good jobs or an employer that's got more liberal travel policies. They've got a bit more money somewhere, and so the stuff they want to buy.

Speaker 4: 1:28:14

And if you're you know what, you know what LN website, if you've got status, look at what the LN is trying to sell you. It's trying to sell you a seat selection fee, which you get for free anyway. It's trying to sell you a seat selection fee, which you get for free anyway. Trying to sell you extra baggage which you never use, because you always get 100 kilos or whatever it is and you never use it right. Or an insurance product you're getting that from somewhere else. There's nothing to buy, and so that's where we come in. We're trying to create this new ancillary revenue stream through loyalty, through stuff that you actually love and want to buy. You don't need to buy a seat, but you know you might buy. Like I want bonus status qualifying miles on my next flight. I want, you know, these other things that the propensity to buy is very, very high, just because of the type of clientele that engage with status products.

Speaker 2: 1:28:59

Yeah, and it's interesting because you mentioned obviously there being the two sides the status and then the points and miles. I was just genuinely curious. I know we briefly chatted about this, but when we look at that space there's companies like Pointscom that power a lot of the programs for companies like American Airlines. They were recently acquired by Plusgrade. Plusgrade was like the airline upgrade Literally they were a one-trick horse that's turned into this incredible loyalty company globally based in Montreal, and obviously you know Ken Harris as well, the founder, and so I think most people don't have a lot of people use loyalty programs but they're not as familiar with just how massive this industry is. So my one other question to you, mark, was whether or not you're going to go into the miles and point space at some point.

Speaker 4: 1:29:47

We're not really looking at it, the status we see so much to the blue sky opportunity there. We're only really just getting started in this space. We've got a couple of things going. They run really really strong traction. People love it and, to your point, your plus grade points. They do a fabulous job at what they do. They really dominate. They bring tremendous value to the industry, just like we see ourselves bring a lot of value, and I think you know this is. I talk about how airlines like you don't build your own aircraft. If you're an airline, you go to Boeing or Airbus. Like there's always a couple of dominating forces in the industry Like you want to sell your miles. You go to points If you want to do status.

Speaker 2: 1:30:27

There you go exactly. Sounds like a great future partnership opportunity. So the other thing I want to come back to is what brings you here to Focusrite Barcelona. Obviously, you are representing the good fight on behalf of the loyalty industry here at the conference. But, yeah, what are some of the things, Mark, that brought you here to the conference, and we're obviously having this conversation on day two kind of midway through what have been some of the highlights and benefits of being here so far.

Speaker 4: 1:30:51

Yeah, I mean, there's a really diverse crowd of people here that typically wouldn't go to some other events, so it's sort of reaching people that are a little bit trickier to reach sometimes and they're all in one place, which makes it cheaper and easier just to see people. We also work pitching as one of the top travel tech startups here as well, so we're on stage showcasing some of the incredible results that we've been achieving over the years, and so it's really just great to be here and connect and meet with new people. And I mean, really there's one reason I'm here and that's to see you.

Speaker 2: 1:31:20

Yeah, well, we were connected. Aaron sent a note to be like you guys are going to be together. You have to meet, and we did yesterday. We totally got on so well and you really obviously made me laugh as well.

Speaker 2: 1:31:37

But you were sharing a bit more of, like, your personal journey and your story, which is really, as I've come to understand, and, aaron, I've now met one of the luckiest men that I'll probably ever meet in my life. You just seem to have a series of things that happen to you where, like, life just works out and which clearly, you're on this now incredible success trajectory with Status Match. So I'm thrilled for you and obviously, yeah, it's a delight to meet you, but I'm clearly there's a ton of other benefits. I hope, certainly hope, mark, that this is going to be one of the things that produces the best return of being here, turn of being here, that we actually got to record this live and people listening to this will uh, we'll be reaching out to you and the team. But, yeah, what are some of the other things that you've seen so far?

Speaker 4: 1:32:08

or even planning over the course of today and tomorrow to be able to leave here thinking like, yes, focus, right, europe was a success and I'll plan to be back yeah, I like to get deep, really deep, into some of the topics that are really just high level, some other events, so it was deep sessions on AI personalization, which I really liked. Some of the insights that came out of I think it was TripAdvisor. Yes, some super interesting stuff there.

Speaker 2: 1:32:34

That was a great session to open up today. Actually, I really enjoyed that Both Matt Goldberg, the CEO of TripAdvisor, and Papine, who is the new president of Viator. Sorry, you were saying what were some of the standouts for you about that.

Speaker 4: 1:32:46

Yeah, no, I just like hearing the insights. I'll tell you what I like. If I can read something on the company's website about what they do and they say the same thing at an event, it's not well going to the event. So when they're sharing real insights that you can't read on their about page, that's what I really like. That's what I resonate with, like, ah cool, that's why I came here to see, like, what's happening. What do you see day to day? Like what the real trends like yeah, you know we did this and here's the outcome. And like and you hear this, you go, you know I can learn from that. Yeah, you know, you don't.

Speaker 2: 1:33:17

You don't get this from the corporate about us page you know for sure, and it's interesting you mentioned that, because I just the thing I would say about that session it was very, very much real talk, real speak and sometimes you do have conferences where certain leaders, especially of publicly traded companies, can't say much. They can't, you know, say anything forward guidance related, so they have to be very mindful from a PR point of view and so you don't get a meaningful conversation sometimes with the leaders of publicly traded companies at a major conference where their comments can be taken out of context. But yeah, anyway, I found that refreshing as well and I've certainly this conference has been much more intimate is one way to put it as far as like the interactions that are occurring here and that's certainly come up as a theme. But the other thing, you mentioned trends, and obviously that is the big focus of our podcast.

Speaker 2: 1:34:01

It's really what our listeners want to know and they want to get to and they want to hear from people like yourself, mark, as to what you're paying attention to as we sit here in 2025, and obviously status matches your business, but you're a travel industry guy. You've got your finger on the pulse of this space. What are some of the things you're paying attention to in our industry, whether it's a prediction for the next year, or what are the key trends that you're focusing on, and even keep it specifically about loyalty. That might be interesting to our audience again. That's where I think we haven't dived deep enough into this topic. So, yeah, what, what, what are the things that are motivating you every day and what are you paying attention to?

Speaker 4: 1:34:35

yeah, my blinkers really are on to loyalty and, more specifically, the status side of it. It's just more focusing on all the time and what I'm interested in. To be frank, if I look at the last five or six years in loyalty and use that as a basis to try and project the next five or six years to see sort of where it's going, what are the trends? It's not that much incremental but really creative. I think there is so many easy wins on tweaking stuff. Yeah, yeah, so like we're effectively building new stuff and tweaking around status. Yeah, Stuff around credit cards, stuff around the earn and burn, stuff around the opportunities that you know the younger travelers want. Yeah, Because they're just interested in different stuff. I think there's a bunch of things that very small not small like it's called easy wins yeah, the easy wins that can be had. I don't think there's going to be monumental shifts, Like AI is not going to take over, you know, and there's going to be a Skynet running loyalty or anything I don't see this kind of thing happening.

Speaker 4: 1:35:40

I see some application for these things, but like, fundamentally happening, I see some application for these things, uh, but like fundamentally travel naughty, it's. You know where we started, like 40 years ago, 45 years ago. So it's, it's, it's been around a long time and it works because it taps into the human emotion. Right, yeah, it's stuff. It's like you feel good when this thing happens or you redeem your, your miles and you get you know the business class flight you were never gonna buy for your once in a lifetime trip to take your wife to. You get, you know, the business class flight you were never going to buy for your once-in-a-lifetime trip to take your wife to paris.

Speaker 4: 1:36:07

You know this is this kind of stuff this is built in our dna like this is not really going anywhere. You know, we're still going to want the same things and so so I'm super optimistic about the, the uh, the sort of future of loyalty and where and where it's going, because I feel, feel it's all about bringing more emotional experiences to our lives, because that's really what it's about, right.

Speaker 2: 1:36:29

Yeah, and I was going to make one comment in connection here that I find fascinating when you vote. Noah Harari is one of my favorite authors, who wrote Sapiens, and he's a historian. He talks about the fact that he talks a lot about AI, and one of the critiques that someone had said is that how is a historian talking about technology in the future? And, as he highlighted, it's really the study of change over time. That's how you look at history and obviously you can project forward.

Speaker 2: 1:36:50

But specifically when you look at humans and our species, our certain behaviors, so it starts with how humans operate, and status is critical to all aspects of the way our society is formed and developed, to all aspects of the way our society is formed and developed, and there's no. If you start paring back whether it's the car that you buy, the neighborhood you live in, the school your kids go to, the style of dress like everything is about status and that's where we are very tribal and we are like we literally everything is. But interestingly for me, when it comes to status, it's actually it's not about what it says to other people that I have my super elite on my bag. It's what it means for me as the traveler and all the benefits. Sure, some people will be like, oh, like, look at your status, but that's actually not why I do it, maybe subconsciously. You could probably argue that there's probably some perceived social benefit to having that status, but more importantly to me, it is the fact that I get all these amazing benefits.

Speaker 2: 1:37:43

So what I'm to you and I think that's very exciting for your company and your business is that even in the face of technological change, at the end of the day, we're still dealing with humans and status is such an important thing. So I'm very excited for your future. I'm bullish on the category you're in and I definitely think we need to do more on this space. So let's find a way to do that. But also let's make sure that all of our listeners can learn more about Status Match and Loyalty Status. I mentioned the website, but tell us who they should connect with. They should connect with you or Aaron or the team to learn more information and to partner with you.

Speaker 4: 1:38:14

Yeah, I mean hit me up on LinkedIn, Mark Swift. I'm pretty active on there, you know I was any business inquiries, hit up Aaron or myself. Aaron at statusmatchcom.

Speaker 2: 1:38:24

Yeah, Aaron at statusmatchcom Aaron Murray, and it's Aaron at we should make her famous.

Speaker 4: 1:38:28

She gets like a thousand connections today. That'd make a day.

Speaker 2: 1:38:31

Let's blow off our LinkedIn profile. All right, you'll get a free Travel Trends t-shirt if you connect with Aaron. Wow, there you go.

Speaker 4: 1:38:39

I'll get my 8,000 Russian bots on it right now.

Speaker 2: 1:38:42

Awesome Well it's a real pleasure to meet you here, Mark, and I look forward to keeping in touch and good luck with the conference, and I wish you and the team every success for the year ahead.

Speaker 4: 1:38:51

Appreciate it Dan Thank you.

Speaker 2: 1:38:55

I now have the opportunity to speak to a colleague from Rail Europe and many of our listeners know we had Bjorn Bender, the CEO of Rail Europe, on our podcast in season five and it was one of our most popular episodes. And Bjorn is here at the event, but also his chief growth officer, robert Frum, and I saw Robert was here and was like we have to speak on this podcast because people have now taken an interest in rail, people know about Rail Europe, but of course, this is our Focusrite Barcelona spotlight episode, so we're going to have people that are going to be familiar with Rail Europe, for sure from this event, but also our global listeners. So I really wanted to have Robert join us. So welcome to Travel Trends, robert.

Speaker 10: 1:39:33

Thank you, Daniel. It's an honor and a pleasure.

Speaker 2: 1:39:35

Yeah, no, it's a real. I love train travel myself and actually my family. We're headed over to Europe in a couple of weeks time for our big summer family holiday and the most exciting thing we're looking forward to is the high speed trains. And we've booked on Rail Europe, you'll be pleased to know Very good. I was like adamant, my wife's looking at options. I was like no, I've spoken to the team, I trust them. I like I understand the service. So yes, but tell us a little bit about your role, robert.

Speaker 10: 1:40:11

And your role, robert, and as a chief growth officer, I know you've been in the role for about a year. Tell us a little bit about your role at Rail Europe? Sure, so in simple terms, the idea is, my job is to make sure that Rail Europe grows as fast as possible in the right direction, and that really happens through a couple of different levers. So I have the main focus on our consumer business, but I also look at marketing, pr, comms and data across the company. So these are all ways of how we can better understand our customers, build and support do the right products, the right marketing programs, the right activations, the right supply, and then connect with them in the right products, the right marketing programs, the right activations, the right supply, and then connect with them in the right ways at the right time. So this is the job. And then supporting all of our 25,000 partners and agencies across the world.

Speaker 2: 1:40:57

Yeah, exactly, you have a massive portfolio to manage and I know from having had that conversation with Bjorn that you are B2B and B2C and there's a lot of complexity to rail in Europe managing multiple partners. You have a strong technology and marketing background. I know you're at Google for a decade and so now that you are at Rail Europe you've had a year in. This is your very first Focusrite conference. I know Bjorn's been coming for the last few years, so tell us a little bit what brought you to the conference this year.

Speaker 10: 1:41:25

Look, I think uh for especially for a conference like focus right, it's really about uh kind of finding inspiration, new connections, new people, new perspectives on everything that is going on. I mean, we we're so focused in the everyday on kind of execution, um like just running, running, running after, after the opportunities and being being like super focused, then taking a step back and thinking a bit further into the future, looking at what's going on with competitors, with potential partners. This is super inspiring. It gives you energy to go back into the grind, I guess.

Speaker 2: 1:41:55

Yeah, for sure, and I know we're sitting here on the second day, at the end of the second day. There's really just one more half day tomorrow. I'd love to hear about some of the sessions you've attended or some of the highlights from the event so far.

Speaker 10: 1:42:08

Yeah, so there's a couple ones. I guess this theme of new ways of serving customers, like this piece, seems to be coming up in different ways. We talk a lot about AI, of course, but also like how kind of discovery, how booking, how buying, how that is changing. So that's one topic that I think it's been really interesting to kind of take a look at. I think the second, like one of the highlights, I guess, for me so far I was listening to one of the early sessions with the CEO of TripAdvisor and the president of Viator and I think this idea of how everyone is figuring out in this new distribution customer engagement ecosystem, what is really the role of companies, the brands and the services under those portfolios and how to get the right trip activity accommodation in front of the right person, the fact that no one actually knows how everything's going to shake out this to me is super exciting what's really interesting.

Speaker 2: 1:43:07

You mentioned that because we've had a few guests today say that that was a big highlight and I was able to attend that session. It's one of the few that I have been able to because I knew matt and I wanted to meet papine and they said a number of people were commenting how refreshing it was to hear that conversation. So it's interesting to hear know you and your role at chief gross officer at rail Europe, getting a benefit from hearing from trip advisor and Viator. But in terms of the event itself, obviously there's startups here. There's, you know, there's the, the, the thought leadership sessions. What are some of the things that you are hoping to put into practice as a result of of being here?

Speaker 2: 1:43:41

Clearly, partnerships has been a big one, but there were certain things for you. I know AI every session's had an AI theme, right, so I'm sure there's lots on the AI topic that has been coming up. But yeah, what are some of the? I guess the final takeaways, if you will, that you'll look to kind of embrace as an organization from what's come out of Focusrite.

Speaker 10: 1:43:59

All right. So I guess I would say that there are two big things. I'm not going to touch the AI piece again, I think that's not. I don't have anything super interesting to add on that one, but there are two others that are super relevant for us.

Speaker 10: 1:44:20

So the first one is you know, I've had the chance to meet several of our distributor partners, so travel agents, tour operators that we're already working with, some new ones who are just coming live with us as well and like getting firsthand feedback on, like how are their customers, or the customer of our customers, how are they looking for rail, like the drive and push for routes, for new fares for sleeper train, like overnight sleeper trains and so on and so forth, like just getting this feedback and kind of bringing that back like this is one big part for me.

Speaker 10: 1:44:47

The second one is when it comes to like the business model of rail and train travel overall. Everyone knows it's, you know ground transportation. Overall it's a low margin business and you need to figure out clever ways of kind of monetizing the value that you're creating for users. So here I've had a fantastic chance to talk to a bunch of companies with really complimentary offers to what we're doing and together, by joining forces with them, we can create much better services for our customers and, ultimately, better monetization opportunities for us and our travel agent partners as well.

Speaker 2: 1:45:24

Yeah, well, it's interesting to get your perspective. This is where you know this whole ecosystem. There's all these different players in the travel space and even you actually highlighting being a low margin but obviously high volume, and so when we look at the, we look at European rail revenue. I mean it's like $100 billion business compared to River Cruise, which is actually about a $2 to $3 billion business and so but the key, of course, is trying to find a way to be able to monetize that figure, what your margins are and like.

Speaker 2: 1:45:51

So let's, let's get a bit more into the conversation about rail and the trends that you're seeing. You know, when I was speaking to bjorn, I was very keen to understand some of the top selling routes around europe. One of the things that sort of that definitely has happened since my conversation with him that I'm keen to get your take on is that European travel, especially for summer 2025 and even for us this year, is up. Usa is down in a very significant way for a number of geopolitical reasons that I think everyone understands, but when we think about Europe, you now have to deal with the capacity, the constraints, and so it's exciting that you're getting more business, but obviously it's another complexity to manage. So tell us a little bit about the trends you're seeing in European rail for summer 2025 and some of the other key trends that you're paying attention to.

Speaker 10: 1:46:36

All right. So there's a couple of things that are standing out. The first one is like we see an acceleration now of cross-border journeys on rail. So now, on our consumer side, more than 60% of the trips are now multi-country. So this idea of, like the best way to experience more of Europe is increasingly by rail. The other thing that I think is quite interesting I mean we have the evergreens, like the major cities of you know, the beautiful major cities of Europe that are. You know, they're always there on the top of our routes, but increasingly we're seeing like, more hidden gems popping up. So we see that first main route, let's say London, Paris on a Eurostar, but then the continuation from there to lesser known places. I think people are getting a little bit maybe fed up of being elbow to elbow in super crowded places, even though they might be iconic, and just looking for something fresh, something interesting, something new. So this is something that we're seeing more of as well.

Speaker 2: 1:47:38

Very interesting. Hidden gems was actually a big topic when I was speaking at the ITB conference and I was asking Bjorn a little bit about that. So highlight, if you wouldn't mind, some of the hidden gems in Europe that travelers. This is where both B2B and B2C as I was explaining to Robert, our audience is largely B2B, but many of those B2B listeners are also avid travelers or they're servicing customers that might be interested in knowing what are some of the hidden gems in Europe. So, if you wouldn't mind sharing, here we are and going into summer 2025, and certainly the travelers are looking for those hidden gems, Even our family. Last week, as we were making our plans for our European trip and doing the high-speed rail from Madrid down to Malaga, we were trying to figure out well, how are we going to be able to see everything that we want to see? I would love if you wouldn't mind sharing a few hidden gems.

Speaker 10: 1:48:25

So, yeah, I think the great things about hidden gems right is that they're a little bit hidden and when it comes to where we see new places popping up, it's not that some place suddenly becomes super cool, it's more that people are kind of discovering these places a little bit, even on their own. Of course we're working with our partners to kind of surface this more and more as well. But what I would encourage you to do, just go into raileuropecom. You can look at some of our new itineraries and travel plans there. I'm sure you'll find the hidden gem.

Speaker 2: 1:48:54

That's perfect for you and your family. We're going to keep looking, that's for sure, and make the most of this trip, definitely. And the opportunities to travel through rail in Europe are so plentiful. And that's the thing, even when we've been looking at different places like, let's just jump on the train, it's like it's the default position in Europe, which is not familiar to North Americans, because otherwise we're going to drive or we're going to get on a plane. It's like usually those are the two options. The train is a distant third.

Speaker 10: 1:49:23

For sure. I mean there's a big educational piece around this. I think increasingly what we're seeing when we kind of pull our customers from overseas market is that like it's not entirely unfamiliar that the quality of rail in Europe is quite high, but still the gap between this idea of train and then how do I plan my trip in, you know, country X to country Y. I think it's more about nudging on inspiration and making it a bit more accessible, but it's certainly. I mean we're seeing some nice increase here as well.

Speaker 2: 1:49:54

Well, I'm certainly familiar with the brand and have been for a number of years, ever since we did our Eurorail trip, and so one of the things I want to make sure that our listeners understand, especially given your role as a chief growth officer working across B2B and B2C what are sort of the? If you wouldn't mind just giving us a bit of an overview of your marketing strategy, just a few highlights of how you approach marketing this brand, and especially when you're trying to balance the interests of B2B and B2C, because obviously both are important and, as you well know, b2c drives B2B. So if you're doing marketing, they'll book with partners just as easily as they'll come direct to your website. So tell us a little bit about the marketing strategy of Rail Europe. All right, fantastic.

Speaker 10: 1:50:34

So there are a couple of key themes that are really at the core of how we approach marketing at Rail Europe, and the first keyword is collaboration.

Speaker 10: 1:50:47

So we work extensively with our network of partners, with DMOs, tourism organizations in different countries, to kind of inspire, educate and activate.

Speaker 10: 1:50:58

So we work, of course, with Travel Engine hopefully many of you are listening to this as well but also to just make everyone better informed about how, why and when, like how to make the most out of RHEL. So this is a big part of what we do globally and we've been doing this for a long time. The second part, I think, for us is it's really around how do we activate users at the right time. Where we are really really quite good is at closing the loop, so going from the planning stage to then closing and actually buying that trip. And our approach here is kind of one part of the traditional performance marketing book, and this is really what the guys from Viator and TripAdvisor were talking about at the stage this morning as well. But then having this transition into being more assistive, more useful, more present on LLM surfaces and whatnot. So I think it's a one-two punch of really working extensively in activating and collaborating in the ecosystem and then serving customers really well in their planning and buying fashion.

Speaker 2: 1:52:07

One of the things I wanted to ask you as well, just in terms of the marketing strategy. We had Travis Pittman, the CEO of TourRadar, as part of this podcast and he was talking about their social first strategy and all their efforts to connect with creators and specifically focus on video content, and so I'm curious just when you're looking at making sure that your marketing strategy connects with the next generation of customers, especially that next generation that is likely going to be coming across from Australia or the US and doing rail trips. How important are things like TikTok and social media? How do you see that space?

Speaker 10: 1:52:46

It's vital, it's non-negotiable for us as well, I think, for a couple of different reasons.

Speaker 10: 1:52:52

First of all, you need to be where customers are, and we know how media behavior and shifts are happening. We know in what surfaces, what platforms, where people are when they are getting inspired, where they're doing some of their planning, looking for options and so on. So we simply need to be there, and this we've been doing for a long time, working with influencers to also again like inform, educate and inspire customers as well, like this is something that we've been doing for years and years. So for us, the question there is more about how do we effectively scale that up in a meaningful way, and maybe the final part on this one is now, with the way we see zero-click behavior across search engines, like AI mode on Google and chat GP to perplexity and so on, kind of being more influential on the customer journey. The best way to actually be there and show there is simply to be famous. It's to have a fantastic brand, and that really happens through PR, through influencers, through just doing the right things over and over again over years and decades.

Speaker 2: 1:54:00

Yeah, no, that's well said, and I think the other thing I want to just ask you about is the partnerships, given how important that is to the business as well. And again, this is, like you know, in roles that I've had in the past, and you know it's such an important global role that you have for Rail Europe to work with all these different partners and be here. How do you engage partners, how do you do marketing activity and how do you expand your distribution side as well? As this is where it's the complexity of modern day marketers. You've got to go everything from managing an instagram reel and a tiktok campaign to being able to go into a boardroom and, you know, present to um, to key partners. So tell us a little bit about the partner side of the business and how you manage that yeah, yeah, and I've done a bit of both like that.

Speaker 10: 1:54:39

We're just saying from the extremes, but.

Speaker 10: 1:54:41

But I, so our partners come in in different shapes and sizes right, and with some it's about just being super well connected into their needs and then connecting our marketing, product and tech teams to really build the right offer, the right setup, the right API, the right experience on our rail portal, for example.

Speaker 10: 1:55:04

But increasingly it's not just about working with partner X, it's really about who else do we bring into the room? So we will work with a carrier towards a specific market. We'll work together with DMO and we'll sit down and think about how do we? Because we all have a unique part to play in this. Like our partners in the markets, they're ultimately taking care of their customers, they're serving them, they know them best. Then we have a DMO who's fantastic at animating and bringing to life, like all the fantastic locations and experiences that are there in Europe, and our job is then to be the glue between these two and kind of make it accessible, useful, simple and just simply work. So it's increasingly our building this ecosystem where everyone can win and we can kind of grow the overall rail market in Europe together.

Speaker 2: 1:55:54

Yeah, and the reason that I asked that question is that obviously one, it's the challenge to manage your role, but more importantly, I think it's the key to success is being channel agnostic or omni-channel, those two things omni-channel with marketing and channel agnostic when it comes to where the business is going to come from, because really it's not a zero-sum game. You want business from all different sources.

Speaker 10: 1:56:14

That's a perfect way to summarize it. At the end of the day, what this market overall needs is that we have hundreds, you know we have hundreds of millions of overnight and travelers into Europe, like from outside, overseas and within Europe. For many, many of these people, many will take a train already today. It's fine Like we'll try to serve them or, you know, competitors and partners will serve them. This is good, but there are so many of these journeys that would either benefit significantly, or even train might be even necessary for these journeys to be successful.

Speaker 10: 1:56:49

Here we need to figure out what is the best way to get that rail ticket as part of that person's journey. It could be through raileuropecom I'm happy to do it on our own website but oftentimes they will go to a travel agent because this is how they solve for trip planning complexity. Or they will go to a tour operator because they want to have these packages and some security from there. Or they will go to a large OTA. They will go to one of our partners and they will book there. At the end of the day, I don't really care today about what service they use, as long as we can make their travels great.

Speaker 2: 1:57:21

Yeah, very well said. Just to finish up, one thing I also wanted to get your read on is where Rail Europe is headed over the next six to 12 months. So I'd love to hear some of the other initiatives that you have underway, whether it be marketing, distribution. What are some of the how the brand is going to continue to evolve? So tell us some of the things. I know we've talked on AI. Of course that has to be a part of it, and we talked to Bjorn about that. We've talked about that. So obviously that's a key piece. But, yeah, tell us what are some of the things we should be looking for expecting from Rail Europe over the next year.

Speaker 10: 1:57:50

Okay. So I guess the first thing is for us is Rail, rail, rail. So it's about deepening our offer, making sure we're doing a fantastic job of bringing the supply to all of our partners. This is priority number one. Then, I think number two to me is we've been working quite a lot actually these past three, four months on our company strategy, on our product strategy, how we're thinking about our focus and what type of trips and travelers we want to be serving.

Speaker 10: 1:58:22

So we have a pretty exciting roadmap of features, functionalities and ideas that my product colleagues would kill me if I give too much up in advance. But it's really about how can we better serve the customer. The one thing we hear loud and clear planning and buying, not train even, but travel into Europe. It's somewhat broken, like you have a million different options to choose from, so you're going to end up feeling overwhelmed, a little bit exhausted, feeling like I'm making substandard choices for what I do Like simplifying this complexity in the right ways. This is probably what I'm most excited about that we're working on with the teams.

Speaker 2: 1:59:03

No, it's great to hear. I mean, obviously I'm thrilled that we got a chance to meet and have this conversation. I want to make sure that our listeners can find out more information about Rail Europe and obviously connect with you too, robert, if there might be partnership opportunities or marketing opportunities. So where would you suggest people reach?

Speaker 10: 1:59:18

out. So raileuropecom to find out more, and just find me on LinkedIn, robert Fromm, and let's connect there and we'll continue the discussion Fantastic.

Speaker 2: 1:59:28

Thanks so much for joining us, Robert. Look forward to keeping in touch.

Speaker 10: 1:59:31

Fantastic. Thanks so much, Daniel.

Speaker 2: 1:59:35

I now have the pleasure to speak to the CEO of RaiseUp, rita J Varga. Now, rita and I have had the opportunity to collaborate on a number of different projects over the years. Travel Tech Nation, you were a part of. You brought me in to speak at one of the events, and the really cool thing is we've not met in person yet. We've seen each other so many times online and so five minutes ago, rita and I just gave each other a big hug and finally met in person. It's a delight to finally meet you, and I'm thrilled that you're going to be on the Travel Trends podcast. Thanks so much for joining us.

Speaker 19: 2:00:03

Yeah, thank you so much for having me. And I think the real connections happen when you are exactly the same online as offline and then just the conversation goes as if you know anything happened just in other circumstances. So, yeah, thank you so much for having me.

Speaker 2: 2:00:19

So, rita, it's so great to finally meet you in person. Tell everyone about Raise Up and what you do.

Speaker 19: 2:00:24

Yeah, so Raise Up was born as Women in Hospitality and Travel Tech, as a non-profit organization in 2019. And six years onwards, we are still on one side a non-profit organization for diversity and inclusion within the travel industry, but we also run a consultancy, working with businesses towards more diversity on the top through trainings, through recruitment, and I'm also a big advocate for a diverse ecosystem within the travel technology space. So we support a number of startups within our lovely industry.

Speaker 2: 2:01:00

And you also work with women's-only organizations too, right? Tell us a bit about that.

Speaker 19: 2:01:04

I love to support female businesses. I think that's part of the diverse ecosystem. There are a number of challenges that women face in the workplace in general and then when it comes to getting access to different, not only funding but just opportunities in terms of partnerships, business opportunities in terms of branding and positioning. There are so many common challenges that we know and support and want to untackle and make it easier the journey for other female founders yeah, that's great.

Speaker 2: 2:01:40

I see the the terrific work that you do and I commend you for it because it's in the in the travel industry. I mean it is a theme. What's really interesting is like it should be a female dominated industry. A lot of the executives are men. That is changing. Most of the decisions around travel are made by women especially, 80 percent of travel decisions are made by women.

Speaker 2: 2:01:59

And one of our partners who's here, a flightographer, nicole Smith great example of a female founder. And even the fact that it came from a problem of a mom not being in the photos with her family and always looking like it's a single dad with two kids, and so it was a problem that only a mother would understand. And then now she's up and most of the women making these decisions and booking these packages are women. But tell everyone a bit more about what brings you to the event this year. And also, one thing I want to highlight too is that Rita speaks seven languages, and that's just astounding. I mean, when you come to Europe, you're Hungarian originally and you divide your time between three different cities yeah, is that right?

Speaker 19: 2:02:46

Yeah, so our base because I have three kids myself as well and they have to go to school somewhere is close to Budapest. But for the past 12 years I built a business in Berlin and then our nonprofit angle is based here in Barcelona, so I actually made sure I'm around the three cities all the time and get some time in every single place as well. B, B, B.

Speaker 2: 2:03:04

And how old are your kids now? Do you mind me asking?

Speaker 19: 2:03:06

Oh, two, three and seven Wow.

Speaker 2: 2:03:09

And I ask just because it's like you're at that. You know that's the tough stage. We've got young kids to be traveling, to be working as hard as you do. It is that much more impressive.

Speaker 19: 2:03:19

So credit to you but I've been pregnant a lot during focus right conferences, to be honest well, at least that's not the case this year.

Speaker 2: 2:03:27

No, no, no, we get to have a drink this year now tell us yeah, this year, 2025, the europe conference is the first one for me, but you've been before pregnant multiple times. Tell us what, besides not being pregnant this time? What else are you looking forward to being at this event?

Speaker 19: 2:03:42

Yeah, so I've been and they tell me I'm a unique person. I've been young leader at Focus Right for two years consecutively, before I actually disqualified as a young leader, but it's always you think you know before I actually disqualified as a young leader, but it's always you think you know the industry and then you come to a place like this and then it's just like I'm Jon Snow I know nothing, because there are so many innovations, there are so many niche challenges that are getting solved through new technology, through new solutions coming up in the space, and I think Focusrite is the place where you learn about these things and kind of look into the future. But on the other hand, I've been working with Focusrite on and off as an external part, supporting different initiatives, hosting workshops. On the DEI angle, this year we are going to co-host with Walter Busta, who is the SVP of marketing a startup networking launch.

Speaker 19: 2:04:40

So there is always a good piece for myself in terms of business, in terms of supporting our community, but, of course, looking at the innovation piece right, For sure, that's fantastic.

Speaker 2: 2:04:54

And this year, are you doing any sessions or hosting any sessions? This year? For sure, that's fantastic. And this year are you doing any sessions or?

Speaker 19: 2:04:58

hosting any sessions this year? Yeah, so we are actually going to host a networking launch for startup founders in the space, so that's particularly female founders, but female founders are very much invited to these events and to participate and be part of the conversation. But when we talk about diversity, I think we have to look on the big scope that some of the customers. They look at providers that are XYZ old and have financial XYZ behind them and I think a good piece of the startups that are coming out right now they solve niche challenges, but these niche challenges can be actually big for the end customer.

Speaker 2: 2:05:43

For sure.

Speaker 19: 2:05:44

And that's why the advocacy needs to be done that there are new solutions that are exactly going to solve that has been your biggest pain for the past 10 years, and maybe you didn't even know about that.

Speaker 2: 2:05:56

Now this year's event is in a new venue, which I I'm understanding. For a number of people, this is a big upgrade yeah and it's beautiful, but, um, what are some of the things this year that, when you looked at the agenda and the overall plans for this year, that brought you back to the event? Obviously, you know a lot of people there's, there's many reasons for you to be here, but was there other things that stood out about this year's agenda, speakers or the sessions that were planned?

Speaker 19: 2:06:21

Yeah, I mean, I'm always a huge fan of, again, practical things and everyone is talking about AI, but different ways to A build your use case for the usage of AI and what are actually the technologies that are out there to cover those needs, and kind of looking at the whole process. And then, of course, there is the sustainability piece, where you look into different angles in terms of over-tourism. I'm also a huge fan of looking from a sustainability angle of destination revenue management, so selecting different groups of travelers to your destinations to avoid over tourism but at the same time, your destination is actually making more revenue at the end of the day.

Speaker 2: 2:07:14

So that's a nice piece for me to connect yeah, explain that a little bit more, because I think that would be really interesting for our global audience. Um, the destination revenue management exactly how does that apply and how do you? Um, how do you help organizations increase that?

Speaker 19: 2:07:29

yeah, so, um, in general, last year we had a focus right had um the president of barcelona tourism here who was talking about. You know, there are all these cruise ships that offload that whole bunch of people who are there in the city, crowding the city, walking around, but actually not spending any money. Right so they are coming out, but they have their lunch on their cruise ship.

Speaker 19: 2:07:55

That's it, you know you buy a toy or something like a glass of red or something like that, but you don't actually spend money you're not really supporting the community yeah, and and you are not purposeful at the end of the day.

Speaker 19: 2:08:09

You are with the curiosity of like, okay, let's check off seven destinations in 12 days or something like that, but there is there is no large bigger purpose to that. So he was talking about come to barcelona for xyz reason, but then stay for, for the culture, stay for everything that barcelona has to offer besides being, you know, on the checklist, yes, and things like that. So we we spoke a lot about in the sustainability breakout room the same thing happening in Scotland or in Bhutan, where they actually managed to if you're not spending a certain amount of money in the country, then you are not eligible to stay.

Speaker 11: 2:08:51

Right.

Speaker 19: 2:08:52

But you know, the two things connect Sustainability. You avoid overtourism at the end of the day. But you also have the right to select and if you let someone in, what is the level that you are allowing? To stay with you Well it's really interesting.

Speaker 2: 2:09:11

I had a guide this morning with context travel to go and explore one of the markets and one of the questions I had for the guide was actually understanding this question of over-tourism, because I think a lot of international travelers have seen that some of the images from Barcelona, the water guns and how tourists have been treated. What he wanted to clarify to me is it's more of an anti-Airbnb or anti-short-term rental than it is anti-tourism, because this city relies so much on tourism, but it's the concern that these short-term rentals are driving up the cost of housing for locals.

Speaker 19: 2:09:42

That's been a pain for the past 20 years, to be honest.

Speaker 2: 2:09:45

Tell us about some of the things that you're paying attention to. What's happening in European travel?

Speaker 19: 2:09:55

Well, it's basically setting up purposeful travel, whatever you need to get out of the destination. I work quite a lot with hotels as well, and hotel technologies and I think things that are like I'm planning, trip planning and activities and experiences. These are the things that AI can help you with and you get an itinerary based on your personal needs and your focus group and the purpose of your travel, and this is something that I think is going to grow, also, because a lot of the hotel brands that I see around they don't really offer branded recommendations on that. So, I think some sort of destination guide, tailored experiences in the hotel industry, that you have the access to information the way you haven't had the chance to, because until now, you Google things, now you chat, gpt things, and that's changing massively the way you haven't had the chance to because until now you google things.

Speaker 19: 2:10:58

Yeah, now you chat, gpt things sure and that's changing massively the way we look at travel.

Speaker 19: 2:11:03

We research travel and then we spend our experience because, um, you don't want to come to barcelona and take a hotel and take the first restaurant next to you just because, because it's next to it, you can have like the worst food. You know, we all have the experience when you are like I went to Geneva, genova, sorry, in Italy, yeah, and I had the worst pizza of my life. You know, it was like one of those that you took out from the freezer and it was half frozen, and then, like, you're going to italy for a pizza, right, you have to have a pizza when you're in italy and then it was just the worst thing. And I think that's what, like, ai can help you with with, with giving um, personalized recommendations and and this is not only for europe, I I think it's global, given the number of searches that chat, gpt processes on a daily basis but it's massively changing how we actually approach travel and giving prompts about what we are expecting from a journey.

Speaker 2: 2:12:08

Yeah, well, the key word there is personalized travel, because that's what AI certainly has the opportunity to better customize based on what it knows about you. Sure, Google's been doing that for years with.

Speaker 19: 2:12:20

I turned off my memory, by the way. Ah, smart lady, very smart lady.

Speaker 2: 2:12:26

Tell us a little bit more about Rise Up, where you guys are headed as an organization and some of the exciting projects that you have on the go.

Speaker 19: 2:12:33

Yeah, so we are working with a number of event organizations such as Focusrite, but we are also hosting our own programs.

Speaker 19: 2:12:45

We host a program for revenue and commercial leaders within the hotel technology space because, again, AI is coming, there is a lot more changing and we are looking to educate but also kind of approaching a growth mindset with leadership in the hotel space but also bringing in new technology solutions that people can be curious about.

Speaker 19: 2:13:09

So we launched a program called Revenue Leadership Program where C-level leaders can join and sort of build a learning community and learning about new things as well. As we started as an organization advocating for diversity and inclusion, and one way to actually effectively do it is via recruitment Right. So we tapped into the recruitment space, making sure that in a growing economy as well as a changing economy, there is a right angle to approach talent, how the roles are shifting, how you actually go and market. So there is a big piece in employment branding approach new generations, because they obviously expect different things than you know our generation and different generations on the market. So there is a recruitment piece that is happening as working with startups that we see that have a major purpose as well as great niche solutions on the market, so that's why I'm quite biased. I love a solution called Obvlo that builds experiences and activities, itineraries for destinations and hotels, Giving personalized recommendations Via AI.

Speaker 2: 2:14:39

Very interesting Say the name of that.

Speaker 19: 2:14:42

Obvlo Obviously local.

Speaker 2: 2:14:46

Clever naming.

Speaker 19: 2:14:48

That's a startup, for example, that we are supporting, but there are a number of startups that are looking into nurturing and sort of looking into Go-to-market plans, investment plans. How do I build my brand, how do I build my partnership strategy? Because one good thing about Focusrite as well if you are looking into new partnerships, both technically speaking as well as commercially speaking, this is the right place. You just set up a meeting with someone they accept. There you have the conversation which normally, maybe you would have to lobby for for six months.

Speaker 2: 2:15:24

Right, very true, yeah. And the other thing I wanted to highlight for all of our listeners too. I know you partner with a number of organizations. You've shared some examples. I know a number of colleagues that have worked with you and have thoroughly enjoyed working with you. I see you doing some fantastic collaborations, so tell all of our listeners how they can partner with you and where best to follow up and connect with you and the team.

Speaker 19: 2:15:46

Well, if you want to know me, go to my LinkedIn Rita J Varga. Don't forget the J. The J is very important in this piece.

Speaker 2: 2:15:53

Don't forget the J the.

Speaker 19: 2:15:56

J is very important in this piece. But yeah, beriseupcom, and then you can find out about all our initiatives. We are hosting a couple of bigger events, offline as well as online, and just drop me a line, I'm very, very accessible.

Speaker 2: 2:16:12

That's fantastic. One last question for you to leave our audience with, given that we're here in 2025 and we'll be back again in Europe in 2026. I'm certain of it.

Speaker 9: 2:16:23

Congratulations.

Speaker 2: 2:16:24

No, thank you, and we've got a great partnership. I'll be in San Diego later this year, so we're continuing to deepen our partnership and explore new opportunities to work together, and they're going to get involved in our AI summit and so we're going to do some virtual events together. So, similar to you, it's a great company to partner with. But what I was going to ask you, as we sit here now and you think about what the world and what the travel industry will look like a year from now, what would be one thing that you're paying attention to?

Speaker 19: 2:16:53

I think I've already said that as well. More personalization it starts with what data to collect from your travelers and translating it into actionable items. Whether that's translated to technology or simply service, it kind of goes into the same. But I think personalization and the way we collect data to be able to provide personalized experiences, that's where we need further development and that's where the industry is going to.

Speaker 2: 2:17:30

I'm going to give you a 99% chance of success with that.

Speaker 19: 2:17:33

Thank you that was a safe one right.

Speaker 2: 2:17:34

Yeah you played it very safe, rita, I'm impressed You're you are. Thank you, that was a safe one, right? Yeah, you played it very safe, rita I'm impressed. You are a senior statesman and you know this industry well, and so it's a great pleasure to finally meet you in person. I'm so glad we made time for this.

Speaker 19: 2:17:49

Likewise. Thank you so much. That was spontaneous.

Speaker 2: 2:17:53

Yeah, it was wonderful and I look forward to keeping in touch and I'm sure many of our listeners will reach out to you. But yeah, thanks for being such a great supporter and being on our show and I look forward to continued collaborations together.

Speaker 19: 2:18:01

Yeah, thank you Likewise.

Speaker 2: 2:18:08

Thank you, dan. Our next guest requires no introduction, but I'm going to give him one anyway because he's a dear friend and a valued colleague of mine over the last decade. It is Travis Pittman, the CEO and founder of Tour Radar Now Travis and I. The reason I wanted to give some context to this conversation is because we're at Focusrite Europe.

Speaker 2: 2:18:26

It's my very first time at Focusrite Europe and I would always see Travis every year at Focusrite in the US and I would always look forward to seeing him because him and I were the two people fighting the good fight to get multi-day tour recognized and on stage, and so we were always back to back trying to raise recognition and we finally I eventually got on stage, you eventually got on stage. You're presenting here today, finally, the category that I remember. Speaking to one of your investors in that moment, they said we have conviction on the category. And here we are, travis, sitting here together. I'm running this podcast, you're running tour radar and uh, we're still pals and um, but so much has happened over that time, so I'm thrilled that you're such a great partner of ours and and such a great friend.

Speaker 18: 2:19:06

So welcome back to Travel Trends thank you, dan and uh, thanks for the kind words and and obviously, yeah, fighting the, the good fight for multi-day or organized adventure, as we try to call it. So, yeah, today it's been an eye-opener to see that there's a lot more awareness of our category now, so we, slowly but surely, we're getting there.

Speaker 2: 2:19:25

Well, and you are a pioneer in this space, so let's just make sure that we don't. With our global audience, I don't want to leave anyone behind. Travis has been on our podcast. He's been on our podcast twice. He's been in event episodes we did we recorded in Toronto. He's going to be a part of season six. He's going to be a part of our AI summit. So he's known to many of our listeners, but this also goes out to the entire Focusrite community. So I just want to make sure that we don't leave anyone behind. Travis, if you wouldn't mind just giving everyone an overview of TourRadar and how long you've been at it. That's why I say you're a true pioneer in this space, because you are ahead of your time and finally it's getting the recognition it deserves. Give a bit of an overview of TourRadar.

Speaker 18: 2:20:01

Yeah, thanks, dan. So we're 15 years in, so definitely not straight out of the starting blocks, but we focus on multi-day tours, so it's the part of the industry that kind of got forgotten about and everyone said, oh, no one does those things anymore, do they? They don't follow an umbrella around, but clearly there's a $200 billion segment that needed to be digitized, and that's very much what TourRadar has been doing, since DayDot is really driving forward with partners like TTC and G-Adventures and Intrepid and working with them on their APIs, and now we work with 2,500 tour operators globally, dmcs, we have 30,000 travel agents in our B2B platform and, yeah, we've got some exciting launches that I'm actually doing here at the show as well.

Speaker 2: 2:20:47

So, that's cool. I definitely want to ask you what brings you here this year, because obviously that's a big theme of us doing this event spotlight. But just before we do, you just highlighted a couple important things that I think that I want to just underscore, which is the size of the global multi-day tour or organized adventure, and again, it's like what's the nomenclature for this category? The reality is is that organizations you just highlighted, you know, 10, 15 years ago they were 50, $100 million companies. Now many of them are $500 million, a billion dollar companies, intrepid being one great example of that.

Speaker 2: 2:21:22

You mentioned GE as well. We think about Collette and Globus and all of these brands. These are all billion dollar businesses today. And then you also have to your point about 2,500 tour operators. You have all of these smaller players like One Life Adventures and like that, you know, came out of nowhere and all of a sudden have 10,000, 20,000 passengers and they're becoming meaningful businesses. So it is a very exciting time to be in this space. So tell us I know you've got so many different initiatives on the go and different launches but tell us what specifically brought you to Focusrite Europe.

Speaker 18: 2:21:48

Yeah, so perfect timing. We've been working in the background for a while. We built out our mobile app about nine months ago and people said, look, people won't book a $3,000, $5,000 experience on mobile. We prove it does. So. About 15% of our bookings are now transacting through the mobile app and we saw a massive gap in social discovery. So think of a multi-day tour. How can you look at one picture and book a $3,000 eight-day experience? How can you really do that? And so what we actually have done is gone full circle. I don't know if you remember the bug-bitten days.

Speaker 2: 2:22:22

Yeah, of course I do, so that's what TourRadar evolved out of.

Speaker 18: 2:22:26

It was all about photos, videos, community and reviews and we've come full circle. So we've now spent 15 years building this commerce platform. Now we're plugging in social. So we are launching tour radar moments uh, tomorrow. Uh, live to the world. And it is essentially our social commerce play, connecting the social inspiration with the bookability in the app. So any customer, any traveler, can upload a video, a reel, and it's attached directly to an individual tour. So one click, one tap, you're actually booking that product. So you can see a serengeti video, you go, wow, that's amazing, click it and you book it straight away. So that's something no one else has done and, being an experiential product, we have the advantage over, say, accommodation or whatever it is, where you're not going to take a picture of your hotel room in paris, but you're actually going to want to share your bucket list adventure that you've done in Africa, and then you want to share it on Tour Radar Moments, but also on TikTok and Instagram, and that's where we're trying to work in between all the different social networks.

Speaker 2: 2:23:26

Very cool.

Speaker 2: 2:23:27

Well, as you know, travis, I love the team, I love the business and one of the things I just wanted to call out is that a lot of Tour Radar staff listen to our podcast and it connects to the point you were just making, which is that there was an episode of our podcast in season four about social is the new SEO and I had understood from the team that it became required listening and it's actually one of the things that we're going to focus on in season six.

Speaker 2: 2:23:48

We're going to bring Travis and Azaz onto the show to talk about this social first strategy. So tell everyone, if you wouldn't mind, just a brief little highlight of that with the learnings from the podcast, because we're going to really dive into that in season six. So we'll bring a lot of people on the journey for that conversation. But just to kind of, I guess, whet everyone's appetite for to learn more about the social first. Tell everyone a little bit of that connectivity, because I was thrilled to hear that and obviously conrad runs at hotels as a very successful business, but you're obviously to take that idea and shift it in a different direction for adventure travel. Clearly now it's proving to be very successful for your business, which I'm thrilled about.

Speaker 18: 2:24:24

Yeah, for sure we talk about it all next time, but the core elements is we need to be video, we need to be social, we need to be working with creators, guides, travelers, tour operators to get this content and share it.

Speaker 18: 2:24:38

And so we have seen that, working with creators that are what you call micro sorry influencers where 5,000, 10,000 followers is the sweet spot of where you actually get them leaning into you because they want exposure to your network. And then, obviously, you know, working with the bigger ones is good, but they're more expensive and there's a lot more of these people who want to actually almost have a bit of a side hustle, and that's what we've seen. There's some companies like Fora Travel. They're doing the side hustle advisor thing, and we're tapping into a similar psyche where ambassadors can join TourRadar or apply and then they can earn money on the side, either through affiliate links or booking travel or creating content, and we're going to be dropping something in about three or four weeks, which is pretty exciting for creators. So it's on the back of the app as well.

Speaker 2: 2:25:25

That's fantastic. I know Travel Massive and Stage 22 recently did a study about the creator economy and it revealed a lot of these insights, which is, the vast majority of them don't earn a full living wage off of these. They hold full-time jobs and they love traveling so much that they want to work with partners and it's meaningful to them the additional revenue that they generate from it. But it's literally like 80% of the creators are doing it as a side hustle and it's those micro or nano influencers that are actually driving a huge volume of the business. That's really exciting, travis.

Speaker 2: 2:25:54

The other thing I wanted to highlight too, too, was your talk that you did today, because here's a really cool thing and again, that's why I wanted to start the introduction the way I did, because you know, it used to be the case that we couldn't get on stage Even when I was at the Travel Corporation trying to represent Trafalgar and Contiki and all those brands, and I knew the size of the business and I couldn't understand why more people didn't want to hear our story or be able to talk about this category.

Speaker 2: 2:26:19

And all of a sudden now you are a featured speaker at multiple Focusrite conferences. You're on a panel today and I'd said to Travis just before we started recording, there was two people standing outside of the room that had come out after the session Paulina from Flytographer and Alex from Zoftify just to be specific about who they were that don't actually know, travis and said to me that was the best session I've attended today. That was so interesting and I was like wait a second. Oh, that's the moment, travis, and you came out of the room and I was like it was so cool that being at an event like this, these are people that were just impacted by the session. You just ran the fact that you're on stage talking about this category and other people are going wow, and they don't even know you, and I'm just like that's my buddy, travis, and so here we are.

Speaker 18: 2:26:56

It wasn't just me there was a panel of people. But no, glad to hear that it was informative and we had a pretty good chat yeah.

Speaker 2: 2:27:04

You had Sarah from Viator, sarah Dines from Viator.

Speaker 18: 2:27:08

Mariano from Civitatis yeah, and Angus from Hollybob Right and myself yeah, bob right and myself yeah. So tell everyone a little bit about what you guys talked about. That had people coming out raving about it. It was we.

Speaker 18: 2:27:28

We went, you know, I think, on a on a journey, but uh, it started out talking a bit about the state of how each of us see the current, I guess, changes that we're all experiencing from different perspectives. So everyone from their own perspective spoke about it and I think we're all facing different challenges. But what I tried to sort of highlight and then there was actually a vc in there who who asked a question about it customer acquisition is everything like. So we know that in travel, that is the for the b2c consumer side.

Speaker 18: 2:27:51

How do you acquire customers efficiently and scalably is the challenge, and and we know Google is changing so much, like you know, we felt that over the last 12 to 18 months with SEO, we were so reliant on it and it's hurt us, but it's forced us now to pivot to find other you know channels of acquisition, and so there was a good chat there about what people are doing. Is it B2B, is it B2C, is it paid search? I mean Viator sort of said well, we're at a scale that we're spending a lot but it works. And I think it's true Like if you have the money and you've got the machine you've built over years and years at scale, it probably does work.

Speaker 2: 2:28:28

Well, it's interesting you mentioned something there, obviously, and I want to just dive into this SEO and AI and where we're, the current challenges that we're facing in the travel industry. There's a book called who moved my cheese? Yeah, and.

Speaker 2: 2:28:40

I've seen it's, it's um, it's like, it's like all of like 80 pages, right, yeah, it's iconic and if, for those of you who haven't read the book, just go to Wikipedia and in 30 seconds you'll get the gist of it, but the part of it and I've seen sales teams get get trained on this and teams get get trained on this and it very much applies to the situation of seo, which is that you know the.

Speaker 2: 2:29:00

The premise of the book, of course, is that as soon as the cheese is moved, there's the mice that otherwise go back every day thinking the cheese is going to be there, and then there's the mice that set out to try and find where the cheese is going to be, and ultimately, those are the ones that survive and thrive, and the ones that keep going back will ultimately, um, not survive and so you don't need to go to wikipedia but your point it's it's very relevant to the situation with seo, because a lot of people are just trying to get it back and it's just like they think like they've done something wrong, I need to win back seo, but the reality is that search volume isn't there the same way that it was, because ai is changing and I know you know bre Brendan from Propellec is a great partner of ours.

Speaker 2: 2:29:38

He did a session just before yours today.

Speaker 18: 2:29:40

That was great.

Speaker 2: 2:29:41

About AI overviews, and the reality is that the people are not visiting websites because they're getting the AI overviews instead. So one of the areas I know you're really focused on now is AI, and one of the developments for you was around chatbots and the importance of getting conversions with chatbots. So tell us a little bit about your journey with AI, because I know it's going to be a big topic for us at our AI Summit later this year.

Speaker 18: 2:30:03

Yeah, it's been super interesting and I think it's just about getting started with it and when you try also to do it all yourself, as in try to access some of the tools and then try and build all this stuff yourself. There's so many good products out there now that you can leverage, and so we decided to go with a vendor to actually help us on that front, and that accelerated, I guess, the time to market. And so now when we launched, we were 50% of the interactions from a customer on the website were being handled by the bot, and so we're like, okay, great, that's a first try, we're actually at 80% now. Interactions from a customer on the website were being handled by the bot, and so we're like, okay, great, that's a first try, we're actually at 80% now. The difference is so we now track people who interact with the chatbot and then go on to convert to a booking, versus those who get to a human. So who we do pass to a human, who get to a human, so who we do pass to a human.

Speaker 18: 2:31:00

There is about a 10% 15% difference in terms of but it's handling 80% of the volume, so it means that we can actually have the people who were potentially on those chats on more revenue-generating things, so making calls or dealing with other upsells or whatever it might be. So, yeah, it definitely has been a journey, and we talked about data and stuff in the AI session this morning. It's really about setting the guardrails first, getting those guardrails right so that it can't go off and do stupid things like yeah, canada did, I think, where they got sued or whatever else, but then giving it room and the data to be able to generatively create the stuff that maybe will get us to 85% or maybe 88%. And that's the journey we're kind of on. Now is how do we take that next step?

Speaker 2: 2:31:46

Yeah Well, in that exact example there, canada which I've just happened to be familiar with, of course, being based in Toronto, and it's come up as an example this is where, sometimes, when AI doesn't work and in that example, where it gave a price that was far lower and Air Canada tried to say we can't honor that price, and then the customer was like, well, ai offered it to me and ultimately you have to honor that price. It doesn't matter if the company offered it to the customer and they had to honor it. I know some people it's freaked them out about using chatbots in case they go wrong. The reality is, obviously they can go incredibly right and provide great efficiency for your business and great gains, and you've certainly seen that. Tell us a little bit more about your roadmap with AI at Tor Radar and some of the things you're going to be looking to highlight at our AI Summit at the end of October.

Speaker 18: 2:32:32

Yeah, so there's a ton of stuff we're doing around content which is nothing exciting or revolutionary, but it's interesting to be combining your stuff that's hidden away in your database, basically, and combining that with your content that you have on your website or in your itineraries or in your brochures or whatever it might be, and then trying to add a bit of a personalization feel to it. So your example for us is that we get the tour operator itineraries, which are really long but pretty hard to read at times.

Speaker 18: 2:33:09

We actually then know all the booking data around every listing. We know that 50% are Australians or 30% are% are 25 years old, and so we start to sprinkle in information like that to try and help people go am I a like-minded person who's going to book this? That's where video comes in even more as well. The more they interact with these reels that we've got, the more we'll understand what they're liking and we connect all that together, and so right now, the first version of moments that we launched today is literally there's no, there's no smartness in the algorithm put it that way but likes, comments and more machine learning type stuff is coming, and so we've got all the. You know the tiktok algorithm is, you know open source, so you can actually understand what that is.

Speaker 18: 2:33:53

So we're really looking at how do we start to bring that ai component into what we're surfacing on the front end, because right now I talked about here, there's not much innovation on the front end for ai. Right, it's all kind of below the surface, which I think is great, but at some point it's got to try and come to the surface and we're getting closer and closer. Um, but yeah, I mean we're looking at everything from mcp servers, like we're getting closer and closer. But yeah, I mean, we're looking at everything from MCP servers, like we're looking, how do we not be disintermediated? And we had a good conversation this morning about you know some Kenyan basket weaver that you want to find on ChatGPT. And then my point is well, how the hell do you book that thing?

Speaker 2: 2:34:32

Right.

Speaker 18: 2:34:33

They're not connected, they have no real-time availability, they have no booking engine yeah and that's really what we're trying to provide to all the partners.

Speaker 18: 2:34:41

We work with their own mcp server or that. We're the payment rail, so we're the one who is feeding into these llms so that the agentics uh, the agents can actually be using those rails to make these bookings. So there's different models, different plays, and so there's a lot of exciting stuff, and I'm really enjoying combining the mobile, the social and the AI side and how we can bring it all to life.

Speaker 2: 2:35:03

Well, the area that I'm specifically bullish on for you, and then where I think you have a moat to use that term that startups often use in terms of how they protect themselves against competition or being disrupted in this instance of new distribution channels is the fact that you have 2,500 partners and you have all of this access to inventory.

Speaker 2: 2:35:21

You work with B2B partners, so you're well positioned in this world of agentic AI, where you want an agent to be able to actually act on your behalf to go and get you the tour that you want. Why wouldn't that agentic AI go to tour radar and be able to bring that back for you? And that this is where OTAs like to use. The Expedia's and the they're they're on, they are all on the move to make sure that they're working with LLMs to, and optimize towards them. So I'm sure that is obviously got to be a big focus for you and the team is what used to be trying to work with search engines and make sure that you get crawled and indexed properly, and now you, what used to be trying to work with search engines and make sure that you get crawled and indexed properly, now you need to make sure that you are well optimized for every LLM out there that's going to be using your website, even if it's not a consumer anymore. It's an AI model that is trying to get the information on behalf of its user.

Speaker 18: 2:36:10

Exactly, and I think the opportunity whether we get there by October when we have the summit is how do you put these tools a little bit more at the fingertips of SME like tour operators, who just don't have the resource, who don't have the technical capability, but they want to be able to access this? And so we've got tens of millions of messages that have been passed in the TourRadar platform between tour operator and customer and our agent. You know, team, that's all now feeding the llms and that's what we're creating faqs for every tour, everything. Where's the meeting point? You know what's? Do you get an internal flight in brazil from here to here, like?

Speaker 18: 2:36:49

so all of that, it's there yeah we've just got to surface that now yeah.

Speaker 2: 2:36:53

So I'm going to make a bold projection whether we'll get to it October. I'm going to say we're going to get AGI by October 2020. Jeez, that's a big year. People are saying five years, 10 years, two or three. I'm going to call it right now. It's October 28th and 29th. It's going to happen in Toronto at our event.

Speaker 18: 2:37:09

Travis is going to be there. There'll be an AGI there. Yeah, in some form or another. Yeah, in some form or another yeah.

Speaker 2: 2:37:16

Last thing I want to ask you, given that, well, actually, one thing I want to say and one thing I want to ask you, travis. So the thing I want to say to all of our listeners is that Travis and his team kindly came on as a platinum sponsor for our AI Summit. So it's truly in partnership between Travel Trends and Tour Radar that we're bringing this event together. So, everywhere you see AI Summit, you see Tour Radar and you guys, travis is going to fly across. We're looking to actually host it in a studio for the speakers that are going to be there. It's going to be a landmark event. So obviously, I wanted just to recognize that. Thank you again for the partnership.

Speaker 18: 2:37:46

First of all, I mean we wouldn't just sponsor if we didn't think you're doing awesome stuff. So yeah, like we saw the first one, how successful that was and obviously it's been great to see Dan. Yeah, you evolve and, as we said, dan 2.0. It's been awesome to see and I'm very happy to be supporting it.

Speaker 2: 2:38:05

Thank you very much that means a lot and what Travis is also referring to there. I'll just highlight it since my corporate days, when I used to come to events like this and I'd be wearing a jacket with my little badge, it's finally coming to the point where Travis and Christian can say you were different. Before there was a corporate Dan, and then there's this Dan 2.0. Anyway, this feels like it's the real authentic me, so thank you for that. But the thing I wanted to leave everyone off with because I know you've got to run for a meeting, just in terms of the Focusrite, I know you're here for the launch, you're here for your session. Any other specific things that you're looking forward to, any other highlights coming out of Focusrite Europe 2025?

Speaker 18: 2:38:46

I mean the theme of the new agents. There has been a couple of conversations around it. I think it's still a little bit too surface level. I really want to see and understand use cases of what people are doing in this front. Uh, and because it's just, it's like this whole vibe coding stuff like so you can create demos and prototypes, but things that are at production level that you can put into millions of visitors or tens of millions of visitors and it works. We're not there at all in so many cases, and I think that's what I'm looking for is also chatting to people who have got anything that's at that scale.

Speaker 18: 2:39:22

I think that's the you know. Looking forward to that.

Speaker 2: 2:39:24

For sure, Travis, thanks again for our partnership and thanks for being such a great colleague and friend over so many years. I look forward to many more collaborations. We'll be speaking again soon, but thanks again.

Speaker 18: 2:39:34

Yeah, thanks a lot, dan. We speaking again, sue, but thanks again.

Speaker 2: 2:39:38

Yeah, thanks a lot, dan, appreciate it. My next guest is someone that I was so keen to rejoin us. It is Charlotte Lamp Davies, and many of you remember her. From the very first Focusrite Spotlight that we did last year she joined us. For that she's been a great friend and colleague. She brought me to ITB earlier this year. Anyway, I can say so many wonderful things about Charlotte, but I'm just thrilled to have her back on the podcast.

Speaker 1: 2:40:00

Thank you, my dear.

Speaker 2: 2:40:00

It's wonderful to be back of course, a number of people were saying last night and this is where your reputation is, everything in this industry and you know that and we were actually in a car and it was really nice there were six of us driving to an event and someone actually said do you guys know Charlotte Lamp Davies and I just sat quiet as the conversation unfolded and they're like, oh my God, she is so lovely and I was like, what does she do? And everyone's like, oh, she helps with CEOs and she helps advise companies. She's like she's amazing. And it was just wonderful to hear people like speaking about you and so, yeah, so know that those are the things that people say in other taxis heading to other events and I just so, yeah, I think so highly of Charlotte and she's done so much in this industry.

Speaker 2: 2:40:41

But I wanted to specifically talk about the event. So, charlotte, tell us a little bit about the plans to bring the event to this new venue this year and some of the things you were involved in in terms of planning, which is now we're midway through the event, which has clearly been an incredible success. But tell us a little bit about the backstory of how we got here.

Speaker 1: 2:40:59

Well, first of all, thank you for that very glorious introduction one more time. I'm sure much is being said about me and it might not always be good, but it is indeed nice to get that feedback, of course. But all that said and done, I have to disappoint you. I can't really take much credit for the planning of this particular event, but I have worked with the Focusrite team over a number of years, particularly as, obviously, this event itself has really grown very substantially since we kicked off the European event some 10 years ago first in Dublin.

Speaker 1: 2:41:35

Yes, so far there's been three events in Dublin, four in Amsterdam and this will be our third here in Barcelona, and, as I said, we have seen continuous growth and it's an event that now is completely sort of standalone away from the major US event in November.

Speaker 2: 2:41:51

Well, tell me more about that, because actually this is really interesting for me to understand too, because it's my first event Focusrite Europe, as you know and our listeners have been hearing in these interviews, but I didn't realize. I knew it was in Dublin before, but tell us a little bit why you brought the event to Barcelona three years ago.

Speaker 1: 2:42:05

Well, I think again the Focusrite team, not necessarily with me, advising them we realized that the kind of moving the event around Europe made sense, both in terms of actually enticing a continuous new audience to come along and we know that locally in Europe sometimes people will join if it's a local event, which, should we say, a bit of a global flavor, right? So you know, we had the Irish supporting us for three years, the Dutch supporting us and now the Spanish, and of course, in between there's everybody else in Europe who knows what they will get from attending a Focusrite conference and who would be here wherever, whatever destination was chosen by the team.

Speaker 2: 2:42:46

Truly, and it seems like a perfect place. Ireland is obviously a big tech hub, but certainly Spain has really taken that position, especially when it comes to travel technology. There's quite a few that are based even in Palma and Mallorca, for example, and, as you know, in Madrid. Civitadas is here. There's so much travel technology in Spain, a lot of innovation here. It's still an affordable place to actually establish a business.

Speaker 2: 2:43:08

They're very welcoming to international businesses and a number of people that I've met that have just moved here or in the process of moving here from South America, and so it seems like an exciting time to be in Spain and Barcelona. Everyone I've spoken to that I've told them here. They're so incredibly envious. I love Barcelona, so for many reasons it seems like a perfect place to be and obviously the new venue is extraordinary. It's like and I haven't experienced from what was before, but I know that was a big step I spoke to Pete and he was telling me a couple weeks ago and I saw him for coffee in denver just you know the commitment to investing in the venue, in the hotel, and everyone's saying how amazing it is.

Speaker 1: 2:43:46

So that obviously is another big change yeah, I mean, this is a, this is a true focus, right venue, I would say because, focus right is so much more than just a conference.

Speaker 1: 2:43:54

It's so much more than an exhibition ground. It's so much more than networking, and this really, really allowed. The sheer scale of this allows for the conference to be and perform at its very, very best. There are quiet corners where you can sit and discuss your next funding round, you know, with the VCs. There's the big center stage, there's the smaller stages. We have all the round tables that are happening sort of in rooms, separate rooms that are kind of just. We have access to so many nooks and crannies here, as I think the British say that. You know, it's just wonderful that you can both find privacy when you need that for certain conversations. And then there's the big networking opportunities during lunch and dinner and so on and so forth.

Speaker 2: 2:44:33

Yeah, and the space that we're in the exhibitor space is really at the heart of where all the meeting rooms are, so everyone is connecting through here and you're forced to interact and bump into people, although you can, as you said, have private meetings, but the focus is certainly on connecting everyone and it seems to me that it's a much more intimate setting. I love Focusrite USA and will continue. That is by far my favorite industry conference, but when I think about this now in Europe, this is 600 people versus 1500 plus. It's all C-level executives and exciting startups, and so it's a really amazing group of people that come to this event. But it feels more intimate and you feel like you have more time to connect with people and have really interesting conversations. But tell us a little bit about the sessions, because obviously I've been focused on recording these conversations, which I love, but there's been so many amazing sessions I also would have loved to attend. What have you attended?

Speaker 1: 2:45:23

What have been some of the interesting speakers, sessions and takeaways for you. Well, I have. Like you, I will also have to watch a lot afterwards because, you know, as you know, the networking part of it and the meeting part of the conference is, of course, very, very key, and it is. There was a. We were at a show of hands yesterday when Pete and Mitra Mitra Sorrells from Focuswire the editor of Focuswire when she opened up the show, you know, we were asked you know, what are you predominantly here for? And all the hands went up around the networking. Having said that, the content, of course, is put together over the course of six months at least and it's absolutely the very, very best in the industry. And you know, from the TripAdvisors to the Bookingcom to the yeah, even Nizaza this year was back on stage, you know. So it's kind of all sorts of companies from the entire industry that are represented at the stage.

Speaker 1: 2:46:11

And I think, again, the focus, of course, is very much around AI, although somebody has literally just said, if somebody says AI one more time, I'm going to leave the conference. But you know, I mean not to such an extent that this is just. Ai is absolutely in almost every single conversation at the moment, and I think it was I think it was Cara from Cara Whitehill who actually said let's maybe try and see when we move the conversation from AI in planning to AI in doing, and I really like that. That's a really, really great comment. So it's difficult for me to single out one big thing. There was a great interview with the CEOs of Viator and TripAdvisor this morning as well, and then, of course, we've had the launch stage, you know, where new innovators and innovations are being presented at stage and being judged. It's pretty hardcore, but it's also extremely gratifying to hear your presentation being judged straight away after coming off stage.

Speaker 2: 2:47:07

For sure. You hit a few highlights there and it's interesting. You mentioned the TripAdvisor Viator session earlier today, which has been mentioned today on the interviews that I've done, because I attended that session and I was because I was meeting Papine afterwards, who's the new president of Viator, and Matt Goldberg, of course, is the CEO of TripAdvisor, and the two of them were on stage together, which I think is the first time, yeah, and so it was really great to see the two of them, the dynamic and the way the conversation flowed. So I agree, and the compliment that one of our other guests gave was that it felt like a really genuine conversation, that they were actually being very honest and open, and they found it quite refreshing that they were actually saying things that were meaningful.

Speaker 2: 2:47:45

A lot of times, when you're the head of a public traded company, it can be more challenging, and so that was a great highlight. The startups, for sure, but you mentioned Kara Whitehill from Thayer Ventures and she is extraordinary and she's been on our podcast and actually I was speaking to Chris Hemeter, who heads up Thayer Ventures, earlier today, and I was speaking to him because there's a plug and play event happening at the same time and I said to him I'm surprised you're not there. And he's like I'm always at Focusrite. Focusrite is my priority.

Speaker 1: 2:48:10

Yeah, yeah, he is certainly always to be found here, and I think I don't know if you were lucky enough to be at the breakfast meeting between Chris and Rod Koffberg. You know, founder, of course of Viator.

Speaker 2: 2:48:22

Yes, that was the opening session with like the coffee with Rod.

Speaker 1: 2:48:25

It was absolutely phenomenal, it really really was, and just that we all in one room had access to one another and lots and lots of ideas and lots of comments and lots of opinions were being bantered around. And I mean those guys, they really are incredibly supportive not just of the Focusrite event but of the industry as a whole, and it's just phenomenal to have people like that in your midst and also knowing that you can go to them.

Speaker 2: 2:48:50

Totally To exactly your point. They're the ones that opened the conference. They didn't then disappear on a private jet and they have been around this desk 10 times over the last two days and I've, like, I've had great conversations with both of them, but they've also made themselves accessible. So rod is wandering around talking to startups and chris is obviously that's his space but the two of them have. Having seen them on that stage, you would think they wouldn't be accessible, and at Focusrite Europe they very much are.

Speaker 1: 2:49:18

Indeed, and they both, you know they both do it as they preach and I think you know one of the things you'll hear them always say is look after your relationships, look after your relationships and keep doing that, because you know what goes around, as we know the old saying comes around, and you know we're all very, very dependent on one another and help people Remember who you meet on your way up and all of that because you never know when it's the other way around.

Speaker 1: 2:49:42

So I think they really live by that and they are very, as you say, very happy to give their time.

Speaker 2: 2:49:47

Yeah, and now clearly, there's been so many highlights and benefits. So, being here, we've mentioned a number or you've highlighted several what is your understanding of the plans going into next year at this point? How does this actually work, because we're going to. Obviously, many people are here. I've been asking them if we're going to come back and they're absolutely committed to coming back. When does it get officially announced about the location for next year in the venue, or is that coming up?

Speaker 1: 2:50:10

Well, I can't spill that many beans and some I don't even know to spill. But I think we can probably safely say that we think it's going to be another year in Barcelona.

Speaker 2: 2:50:22

Very exciting. I'd be thrilled if that's the case, but we'll wait and share with our listeners once we absolutely know for sure. I know it's interesting. Some conferences announce it at the very end, like ATTA it's going to be. Other conferences wait till later. So everyone's got their own strategy and approach. I know negotiations need to be had and decisions need to be made, but it would be fantastic if it's back again In terms of working with Focusrite, obviously your role as an advisor.

Speaker 2: 2:50:46

What do we think about Focusrite going into San Diego, Because obviously we'll see each other again later this year and that is the big event for Focusrite globally. What are some of the other things about Focusrite that our listeners should be paying attention to? Obviously, you mentioned Mitra from Focuswire she's a great industry executive and doing fantastic interviews here her and Morgan. What are some of the other things? And I'm asking you because I've asked Pete, I've asked Florence and it's kind of nice to hear from your perspective, because you're kind of like one foot in and one foot out, right, You've got one foot in to support Focus, right, but you also have a bright approach. You work with multiple different clients, like the strip boutique Fernando, who adores you as well, and this is where you're just getting in such a great reputation. But what I'd like to know for all of our listeners, when they think about Focus right, what are some of the other things they should be paying attention to, about getting involved and ensuring that they benefit from being connected to this great organization?

Speaker 1: 2:51:40

But I think one of the last words there was the word connection and connecting and I think my role as much as I connect for the sake of myself, my role has really over the years developed into being one of a very supportive one for the Focusrite team where I ensure that anybody who might be new to the show has a I help at least as many as I can have the very best possible experience and maybe give them a little bit of my experience from over the years of how best to navigate the show, what to do when you are here and maybe also sort of the follow-up strategy from the show, because of course, a lot of people that are here are maybe here under the radar a little bit.

Speaker 1: 2:52:24

As much as we have access to a lot of people, there are some people that are here in a slightly more private capacity and for somebody like me who may or may not know these people, it's important that when I hook up with, should we say, new people to the show that they understand that you will get access to everyone you know you just got to be part of this. You will become part of the club, of the group, and the networking and the connecting here is, to my mind, it's done nowhere as easy as it is at this event, because we are all together for three days. So you know you will. Patience is a virtue, but you will get to meet the people you need to meet.

Speaker 2: 2:53:05

I can almost guarantee it so I think connecting and connecting the industry and people within the industry that is what focus, right hands down, does better than any other events organizer in our sector and I think what's terrific of what you're saying there is that and I've experienced this firsthand now because we encourage a lot of our listeners to come to Focusrite Europe we had quite a number of our listeners and people that work in the industry decide to come to Focusrite Europe, which I was genuinely thrilled about. I know Pete and Jean and the Focusrite team that we work closely with were also thrilled, but, as Jean said, it's really working and we work closely with. We're all so thrilled but, as Jean said, it's really working and I was like, yeah, it's really working. People listen to this show and they make decisions based on that. And Paulina from Flytographer, alex from Zoff to Fly we had WeRoad, I saw.

Speaker 1: 2:53:47

Yeah, weroad is here, Exactly yes, WeRoad is here.

Speaker 2: 2:53:50

That's Andrea Lamparini that people would have heard from this podcast. A guy have heard from this podcast, a guy named alan headington who runs a digital agency based in the uk. Listen to the podcast. He brought a couple of team members. He's been on this, so it's just wonderful again that sense of community. I love this organization and you bring other people in and all of them I've spoken to, even after day one. We're so glad they came like they made enough connections already to justify the cost and the time and the effort to be here.

Speaker 1: 2:54:15

So all the ROI is really multilayered, if I could.

Speaker 1: 2:54:19

If I could explain it like that it's not just about necessarily signing up your next client or your next partner. It's actually, it's it's the learning you know that you get from being with this, this tremendous crowd so many different people representing so many different types of companies and skill sets, are being represented as well. So if you come with a very open mind and you are in and out of sessions and in and out of meetings and you join also some of the more intimate should we say opportunities that the show always presents, such as the round tables or the breakout sessions, where you really, in a much smaller environment, can learn and dig in and have a voice. It's not just people on center stage who have a voice here. You very much have a voice if you want to take it.

Speaker 2: 2:55:05

Yeah, yeah, very well said, charlotte. And, on that note, because you have such a great voice to the industry, both with the organizations you work with, including ITB and Focusrite, and you manage it all seemingly so effortlessly, like that's why it's always a joy to see you and you're just kind of a pleasure to be around, but you're also very smart and very switched on and obviously help a lot of different organizations. So I want to make sure that our listeners know how to connect with you, those people that are now meeting you for the first time, which I can't believe that there would be, but there clearly is Plenty.

Speaker 1: 2:55:38

Yeah, plenty of people exactly.

Speaker 2: 2:55:38

Thank God, so I know you have the brighter brooch. Why don't you just leave everyone with how best to connect with you, charlotte, and follow up with you for future collaboration opportunities?

Speaker 1: 2:55:47

I'm very happy for anyone to just find me on LinkedIn. It's probably the easiest place and it is, of course, charlotte Lab Davies A Bright Approach and I yet again thank you so so much for having me. It's an absolute pleasure. Very few people know the industry and can speak as passionately about the industry as you, and it's an absolute pleasure to see you again and be here. Thank you.

Speaker 2: 2:56:10

That's very kind, charlotte. Thank you so much. I look forward to catching up with you over the next couple of days, getting a bit more time together and then seeing you again in a few months' time. So thanks again for being here and I look forward to keeping in touch over the course of the year.

Speaker 1: 2:56:21

My pleasure, thank you.

Speaker 2: 2:56:27

I now have the chance to speak to someone who's become a real legend in the travel industry and someone that has spoken at so many conferences to rave reviews, and I'm speaking about Mark Mechie. He's a name that many of our listeners might be familiar with, especially if you've gone to an arrival conference. He did this extraordinary AI keynote in Berlin a couple of years ago that everyone was talking about. He came back and did a follow-up performance in Orlando and I had the chance to catch up with him there. Mark is a really extraordinary figure in the industry. He's an advisor, keynote speaker. He does a lot of work in the Middle East, so he's really kind of ahead of the curve with understanding what's happening in that market and it's a real joy to get time with him here at Focusrite Barcelona and welcome him to the Travel Trends podcast. Great to have you on here, mark. Great to be here, dan. Thank you so much, for sure, and I didn't realize until we were catching up here that you're actually based in Barcelona and your family is based here.

Speaker 6: 2:57:18

Yeah, the family is here mostly for lifestyle reasons. I don't really have any business relations with Spain in any shape or form. It's purely a lifestyle decision which, as soon as you walk out, you realize what I mean. But yeah, the majority of my work is in the Middle East and so I have another base there, and I spent at least half my time there actually.

Speaker 2: 2:57:36

Oh, that's amazing. Tell everyone a little bit about your backstory. I know you're from Belgium, but you had a company and sold it and then you kind of transitioned into a thought leader, a public speaker and all these amazing things that I've come to know you as. But just tell everyone a little bit about your background and how you ended up in the place you are now.

Speaker 6: 2:57:53

Yeah, I'm Belgian originally. I always tell people it's not my fault. Could?

Speaker 2: 2:57:55

have been worse.

Speaker 6: 2:57:56

Um, and you know, I left for china when I was at the ripe old age of 24, looking for adventure, and and boy did I find it. I sort of rotated into china, not knowing what to expect at all. Just an adventure, uh. And then I found a country that was in the middle of the greatest transformation in recent human history, and so I rode that wave. I built a company. I built two companies, but one was a tour operator, one of the first foreign-owned ones and then I started building in a tech component, and then later on, about 11 years ago now, I got an offer to sell it and I took the offer.

Speaker 6: 2:58:28

I was happy with it, and then I didn't know what to do with myself. So I rotated gradually into what I do now, which is sort of evangelizing. Gradually, into what I do now, which is sort of evangelizing, if I can use that word, about technology, but human-centered technology, like how do we make the human experience better through technology? Because I believe very strongly that that's doable. We can reconcile those two things, and so, of course, ai is now, you know, a big part of that conversation.

Speaker 2: 2:58:51

For sure, and it's interesting that you had your big breakthrough in the travel industry, but I also know that that's only part of the area that you work in today. You're kind of across different sectors and I know that you are always focused on innovation and technology, and so clearly, one of the big topics that everyone wants you to speak about is AI. They want Mark Mechie, tell us about AI, and that's why you've been brought into a number of conferences on that topic and you've absolutely nailed it. So let's give everyone a bit of an overview of what actually happened in Berlin. And for those people that are close to Arrival, that's Arrival with one R and Bruce and Douglas and the team there that I have the greatest respect for. I'm a big fan of Arrival, and so this particular video is available on their website, but I think it's only for members. But tell everyone about your presentation. What happened, what magical things happened there.

Speaker 6: 2:59:40

Well, I mean, that was sort of the first major keynote for the travel industry specifically.

Speaker 6: 2:59:45

I've done many for other industries before that and certainly after that, but that one was close to my heart because it was related to an industry that I'm passionate about still, even if I don't live it day to day, and the keynote was about.

Speaker 6: 2:59:58

The first part was about warning people about something that actually is happening in front of our eyes, which is the disappearance of the old search paradigm blue links on Google, all that stuff. We see that shifting away. That was the first part, but it's the second part that really sort of lit the room on fire, which was me just basically showing a workflow and by workflow I talk about this a lot I mean leveraging not one tool very efficiently, but stringing together the best parts of multiple tools to achieve something that you otherwise would not be able to achieve in weeks or months or at all. And so I built effectively to relate to the audience there, I built you know, know, hypothetically built a tourism activities business in the span of four hours right now. I built characters and a website and an ai talking version of alan turing. It was all related to alan turing and all of that so, and that really sort of connected because people saw the, the raw power of that right.

Speaker 2: 3:00:55

So that was essentially what it was about. Well, it's clever that you picked Alan Turing, of course, who's kind of the godfather of AI, if we want to trace it all the way back.

Speaker 2: 3:01:01

And there's a fascinating history there World War II and his unfortunate demise Like it's just like it's a tragic ending to his life for someone that was responsible for breaking the Enigma code Absolutely yeah, but also inspiring so many people to go down this path of AI. So I thought that was interesting, clever, historical and also it clearly connected with the audience, because the idea of creating touring tours and the idea that and bringing him back to life and being able to and I think that just had incredible wow factor and clearly it did. And this is where you know there's a gentleman that's going to be joining our AI Summit. His name is JP Deschanaux and he's the closest that I can think of that I've come across since your talk, where I was in Quebec City earlier this year. He did a presentation for 30 minutes, a workshop to show the audience how you could use Gen AI tools. And this is a guy that is a lawyer by training, doesn't have a technical background, has tourism businesses and has started to apply this for himself and just decided to create a session to highlight how, in 30 minutes, you can create a brand, launch a website, a marketing campaign and actually create essentially a full-blown business in 30 minutes and it had such a huge wow factor and similar to the experience of you being in Berlin and then following up in Orlando.

Speaker 2: 3:02:16

There's just like highlighting to everyone the power of these tools so that they're not intimidated by them, because one of the things you certainly see in your, you know, key to having conversation innovation. A lot of people do like to bury their head in the sand or they find any reason not to accept the change. They hear one bad example and they point that as why they shouldn't move in that direction, or just you know, there's an inertia there and I think one of the things that was really clever about what you did is you just highlighted all the potential and all the opportunity and it unlocked people's imaginations. So is that something that you it seems to me like you love doing and it comes naturally to you. So tell me a bit more about you, mark, and how you you know the journey you're currently on and how you you know the journey you're currently on, and even actually how you came up with that in the first place and how you prepare for these kind of keynotes.

Speaker 6: 3:03:00

Sure, I mean, you know, as paradoxical as it may seem on the surface and I don't think it is my interest is in people. Right, my interest is in a few things in people and, additionally, in the most important asset that every person has, and it's not money. I go around the room very often now in sessions I do in the Middle East, and I have ministers and government level people and top corporates and all that. And the first question I always ask you know, if there's one asset I could give to you or give back to you that's most important to you in life, what would it be? And you know, without fault, it's always time, and that's sort of the perspective that I use to approach this question about AI.

Speaker 6: 3:03:45

I don't care about AI.

Speaker 6: 3:03:47

What I care about is and that's what the Alan Turing thing was about all the demos that I do what I care about is the outcome and how quickly I've been able to get to the outcome, even more than the outcome itself.

Speaker 6: 3:03:58

Like for me, the Alan Turing demo've been able to get to the outcome even more than the outcome itself.

Speaker 6: 3:03:59

Like, for me, the Alan Turing demo whatever you want to call it was not about showing the magic of AI tools, but really the magic of me saving in that instance. In that case, probably you know three, 400 hours of my life, that that that should be the wild factor, not that alan turing is talking on screen, which is cool, but the fact that I got all of that done while saving three, four hundred hours of my life, which previously would have taken to do what I showed off there. Yeah, and so that's for me that the razor, if you want that we should use to drive the conversation about ai, because you know if the way I get people interested in AI when they're skeptical or they go like I'm scared or whatever, is I always approach it the same way. I said if I can give you back five hours of your week consistently every week, would you listen to me and sit with me for a few hours? The answer is unequivocally yes, for sure, all the time I'm interested.

Speaker 2: 3:04:55

You had me at that.

Speaker 6: 3:04:56

Yeah, exactly, but everyone is right Because, deep down, everyone's major asset in life is time, not money. Money matters, we all know, but time is your asset and that's the one thing that AI, if you start using it, will give you back.

Speaker 4: 3:05:12

Yeah, that's it.

Speaker 2: 3:05:13

That's a great way to frame it, for sure no-transcript.

Speaker 6: 3:05:38

For example, I'm doing a project with Dubai Economy and Tourism where we, you know, the topic is usually innovation and future readiness, but obviously AI plays a big role in that as well. And maybe surprisingly again and somewhat paradoxically, half my time in these workshops and advisory sessions. And all that is not talking about technology, but it's talking about culture, because what you realize very quickly in this game, that is that none of the big shifts happen without culture change inside the organization. Right, so it's a mindset, mind shift dilemma more than a technological dilemma, although it's that as well, and so a lot of the workshops are not me talking about. Like here's how chat gpt works.

Speaker 6: 3:06:21

Here's what a neural net is. Who cares? Nobody gives a damn. Right is what can it do for me? What can save you time? How do you consistently get it to save you time? By changing the culture of the organization, how it thinks about doing new things, yeah right, how to approach new ways of thinking. So everything boils down really to mindset. That's what the AI dilemma and the change that we need to sort of promulgate and talk about is really about. It's about mindset.

Speaker 2: 3:06:49

Yeah, and to bring us back to where we are now, and this is where you are certainly leading the way in engaging and having these conversations as we look at where we are at focus right europe. I know you had a session earlier today. Unfortunately I wasn't able to attend given, obviously, my priority recording podcast, but I would. I would have loved to have been there and I know a few of my colleagues were um. Tell me a little bit about what brought you here this year and the talk you gave today yeah, so I was.

Speaker 6: 3:07:16

I was invited to to, uh, come and speak again, have a little little session, a little sparring session, with mitra from focus right, because she attended one of my keynotes at one of the arrival events. So that's how we connected. She actually moderated the session for me on ai at arrival in orlando, I think two years ago or something, I can't remember, um. So she invited me back to have the conversation and it was a sort of very rapid fire session 25 minutes and she had a few core questions that she'd picked up from my LinkedIn posts and articles that I write about, various aspects of this, one being mindset, the other one being the one that I love to talk about, is the adoption paradox that people are not really aware of. The one that I love to talk about is the adoption paradox that people are not really aware of, right, and so, very briefly, what am I talking about?

Speaker 6: 3:08:00

The adoption paradox is, until now, mostly in the last 50 years, since the advent of digital tech, the adoption has always been from the center Government labs, military labs, coming up with inventions the laser pointer, microwave, gps, the internet itself. Spreading to large companies that can afford it, perfecting it, spreading to smaller companies, smes, finally making its way to the consumer right at the end. With AI we've seen the complete disruption of that because chat GPT came out, jumps immediately to the outside circle. I see it as concentric circles mass adoption by consumers way before it trickles into the inner sanctum of large companies. That's a complete paradox in the adoption that we need to talk about, because it means that a lot of the learning and experimentation is actually happening outside of organizations.

Speaker 2: 3:08:50

That's a really big one Well.

Speaker 2: 3:08:52

I'll give you an exact example of that for our audience I think it'll be interesting which is JP Deschanaux to bring him up again because this just highlights the point you just made One of the things that he implemented in his organization because they have a lot of summer workers that come in like they hire about four to 500 people, and he wanted to make his entire recruitment process much more efficient and reduce the time that one of his team was spending. He worked out that she was spending what? 800 hours and he's been able to use AI to set up automation to reduce it down to 200 hours, to use your example of saving time. And it wasn't about saving costs. It was like what else can that person do instead of this that's so time-consuming and make it a better experience for people applying for the roles. And he literally used makecom and Gmail and Chat, chat, gpt to create this automation flow.

Speaker 2: 3:09:38

And I've talked to a number of my acceleration team clients and they their reaction is we want that and the interesting thing is that like, like, where would you go for that? Right now, there's not an enterprise organization that is out there knocking on doors, unlike that early stage of the internet when everyone was selling websites. You know everyone needed a website, so you'd find a web design agency and all this was this big proliferation of them. You kind of knew where to go and I would say, right now, people don't know where to go. They're hearing these things that are happening and they're like I want that and it's just like, well, where do you go? For that is a and is there an ai web development company that I need to like? Like who's offering these turnkey solutions? I?

Speaker 2: 3:10:13

This is going to change a lot for sure in the next 12 to 18 months. So many companies are springing. Everything's an AI-first company. Now, right, but to make the point is like there still is. It is the. What you just said is quite profound, which is like it's from the outside coming in, as opposed to the traditional way of working. So tell me more about what you think this means, mark in the next year, for all these companies and organizations in the travel space trying to wrap their head around AI in particular, how should they be thinking about this? How should they be approaching this to make sure that they're not one of the ones that's left behind?

Speaker 6: 3:10:48

Yeah, I think one of the things that everyone needs to acknowledge whether it's on the employee side or the employer side the companies is that this is not a work technology shift. This is a life shift. So this is embedding itself in all aspects of life in a way that supersedes anything that we do at work alone, and so that's again where that adoption paradox is really profound, because you see people on the outside having a better understanding of AI than anyone inside the company. So what I think companies should do to make sure they don't get left behind is to, in effect and I know this is very abstract, but in effect, cease to be a company. Nobody questions this Like I'm going to set up a company, this is what a company is. We know blah blah. A company is a company. We have hierarchy.

Speaker 6: 3:11:38

Questions this Like I'm going to set up a company, this is what a company is? We know blah blah. A company is a company. We have hierarchy, we have leaders and all that. And so you have to start thinking more in terms of building this ecosystem where, particularly, the flow of information is arranged differently, because right now, in hierarchical, what we call a company, the experimentation that you know, bob and Jane are doing very bad at creative naming here, the experimentation that Bob and Jane are doing at the bottom of the so-called rank, you know at home, with their chat, gpt and fixing this and doing menus and doing financial planning.

Speaker 6: 3:12:14

None of that learning, which is the actual experimental-driven learning that AI thrives on, none of that is trickling back into the organization, so it's a sort of osmosis that's not happening. That needs to happen for company leaders to be able to say we never even considered that, because the big problem is the unknown unknowns. They don't know what they don't know, and it turns out those people on the periphery are the ones doing the experimentation. To close that thought, I am convinced because I see it happen in companies that I work with that there are people on the periphery or lower down the ranks who have the key to some new workflow that might save you 5% of time across the entire organization. Now put that in revenue terms or in savings terms. It is transformation. So that's how we need to start thinking about. Make sure the flow of information in your organization is reconfigured so that those learnings on what I call the periphery are flowing back into the community. That's what you need to do.

Speaker 2: 3:13:21

Yeah, it's really interesting because, obviously, that idea of you have to disrupt yourself or be prepared to literally re-evaluate your business in the face of this new technology now and some industry leaders I'll use the example of Toby from Shopify, because he's now challenged all of his employees to rethink their role in the face of AI and how they're going to use AI as much as possible to automate and enhance their role and everyone needs to be completely reevaluating their role within the organization, which is highly unsettling for any employee. Humans, by and large, are creatures of habit and don't often like change, and this is major disruptive change and even the idea that this is going to have dramatic ramifications. It almost feels like a lot of people are just like, but when Like show me it's like. When's it going to end? It's already happening, but it's not necessarily it's.

Speaker 2: 3:14:16

Most people haven't realized yet, but all of our lives are starting to be changed by this technology and our travel experiences will be as well. And that's what I wanted to ask you too, because one of the big focuses for our AI Summit later this year is real valuable use cases not just people talking about AI, but actually showing how companies are leveraging this technology to totally transform, rethink their businesses, launch new ventures, and I want to help similar to the way you approach these keynotes is just to expand people's mind and thinking so with that in mind, I would love if you wouldn't mind sharing some of the examples you see in travel today of companies that are leveraging AI in really useful, innovative ways, because I think far too many people just think, oh, it's a chatbot or like. They point to certain examples, but what are some of the more compelling ways that you're seeing travel companies embrace AI?

Speaker 6: 3:15:07

I wish I could give you a long list of those where I see that, but one of the issues and I brought that up in the session today as well is that the travel industry for better and for worse for both is, in that sense, fairly conservative. I think there is a tendency in the travel industry to almost retreat behind the old creed that we're a people business first, not to be traipsed on by technology, and we all know that that doesn't really work. Now what are we starting to see? I think a lot of the actual change that the traveler doesn't necessarily immediately get confronted with on the front end is the AI integration in the back end, and we shouldn't neglect that right, I know that's not sexy stuff to talk about in keynotes and all that, but just the way that companies handle their data processing right. So the volume of data that comes in, for example, one of the ones that I think where companies are doing in travel is starting to do a better job is depersonalization. The travel industry has, since I started my business in China 26 years ago, whatever it was have been talking about. You know travel is personal. Sorry, bs, most of the time it is not personal. You are just a number and you'll be treated as such. And maybe we have a few plasters like a few loyalty programs that pretend they know you, but it's nonsense, it's not really personal. And I think where I see a shift is in some of the companies and also travel organizations that help companies think, like in middle east. I'm seeing this in thinking about how do we leverage all this back-end data to design something that is truly personal, real deep personalization and also on the front end. I think that's where companies are starting to make a difference. Now there is the whole thing in the travel industry that's been around also for 20 years.

Speaker 6: 3:16:54

Whether there's any merit in trip planners, ai trip planners. Yeah, I think the answer is yes and no. No in the sense that many people would probably agree with me when I say the planning part is part of the fun, right, so that's one of the reasons it keeps failing. But the personalization part? I think that's the biggest untapped potential and I'm starting to see some people beginning to understand that distinction. You don't want to remove the fun part of the planning, but you want to double down on the personalization that happens alongside and after the planning. That's where AI can really boost. You know travel.

Speaker 2: 3:17:29

Yeah, well, as you mentioned the travel planners, because yesterday in the startup competition there was a company that went into the whole startup, the travel planning and they're an AI focused company. But Rod Cusper from Viator, the founder he's actually closing out our season five of our podcast. He's known and I joke about this in my interview with him that he's kind of the Simon Cowell of the judges, because he says it like it is and sometimes it's well. Most often it's refreshing, it's honest and it's like it's what they need to hear. But sometimes it is like it's hard to swallow and everyone was talking about the fact he took someone down pretty hard. I guess maybe some reaction harshly yesterday, but maybe that's exactly what they needed to, you know, to rethink their business, and so I think that's where he adds a lot of value.

Speaker 2: 3:18:13

But anyway, your point about here we are 2025, someone's talking about trip planners, where he adds a lot of value. But anyway, your point about here we are 2025, someone's talking about trip planners. They've been talking about trip planners for 10 years. It's a graveyard of trip planners that have come along, and I think that was his main point was like what are you going to do? That's really that different than what's been done before to really break through, and clearly that answer didn't come across.

Speaker 6: 3:18:30

Yeah, and the other thing you know is people and this is my issue with industry in general, but also within the travel industry, with AI, everyone's thinking about optimization. You know everyone's just applying a linear human mindset to it, and it's understandable. You say let's take the things that we already have to some extent, because we've had trip planners where you could drag and drop things. Now it's just AI powered, so it's just an iteration of something that's been going on for a long time and where we know the uptake hasn't been amazing. And my sort of creed that I live by is telling people, don't optimize that which shouldn't exist. Forget this mindset of optimization and instead ask the question does this process need to exist at all? Can we rip up the playbook and do something completely new?

Speaker 14: 3:19:20

Yeah.

Speaker 6: 3:19:21

Like why do you need to build an AI trip planner? It's not as sophisticated or state-of-the-art as you think it is just because it's got AI in it. You've got to completely rethink what travel even means. I think that's the big question to ask what does it mean to think about travel? What does it mean to get people to dream? Maybe you need an app that runs on a Roku screen that immerses people and they don't need a trip planner. Maybe you need to not build a trip planner. Maybe you need to build an AI enablement tool for conventional travel agents face-to-face, that facilitates that discussion Like think broader. It's not a tech deficit. We have in many industries, not just in travel, an imagination deficit. That's the problem.

Speaker 2: 3:20:09

Yeah, so one of the things I just want to highlight, too, to your point, is that one of the things that's held a lot of companies back on the travel side is the cost of marketing and like creating video productions, for example. People buying high-end trips. The reality is they're buying them off of brochure images that have existed for 20 years and now they're just on the website. One of the things that a lot of companies have been trying to plan for is better video content and now that we live in this age of gen ai and some of the tools that I've seen with companies like Gannai, they can create videos at a very low production cost that are as good or better than the actual real life experience. The only concern is, obviously it's not the real world, but nevertheless you can at least give someone a much more accurate idea of what the trip experience is going to be.

Speaker 2: 3:20:52

They showed me an example of a campaign they had run for Australia for a tourism board, and I swear to God I could not believe. I'm not seeing Australia, having lived there, like it looked so true to life. But this is where the technology is now available and companies are going to start embracing it for all these different ways, but there's so much more we could chat about and obviously I want to have you back for our AI Summit. I want to also acknowledge Bruce Rosard for bringing you into Arrival in the first place and introducing us, and you know he's obviously a big fan of yours, as am I.

Speaker 6: 3:21:19

He's a big shout out to Bruce. Absolutely yeah.

Speaker 2: 3:21:22

He's a big fan of our podcast. He's always listening in and sending me text messages and commenting on things, and he's so engaged in our industry. So, yeah, full credit to Bruce for that and obviously the Focused Right team for bringing you in this year and bringing you back and having this opportunity. I want to make sure all of our listeners can follow you, just like I do on LinkedIn or social channels, so tell everyone how to follow along on your journeys, mark Mechie, or look to collaborate with you in some way.

Speaker 6: 3:21:47

I'm a single social media kind of thing no Insta, no Facebook, none of that. No TikTok, no, nothing except LinkedIn. Linkedin is where I double down, so just find me by name, mark Mekki Mark, with a C-M-E-K-K-I Easy to find. There's not that many. I think there's one. So find me on LinkedIn and, yeah, follow along. I post a lot about this stuff, including the mindset stuff, the culture stuff and experiments and tips.

Speaker 2: 3:22:11

So that's where to find me. That's awesome. I'm so glad we got this opportunity. Mark, Great to see you again and look forward to keeping in touch.

Speaker 6: 3:22:17

Pleasure. Thanks Dan.

Speaker 2: 3:22:23

I now have the privilege to speak to two of the event team here at the Focusrite conference in Barcelona. We have an intern and more of a specialist. We've got Valentina Walsh, who's been running these events for the last few years. So welcome Valentina. Thanks for joining us. Thank you for having us, thank you. And we also have Matisse Casey, who is a student intern, and his mom actually has been on our podcast, Florence. So welcome, Matisse. Great to have you on the podcast as well. Thank you very much.

Speaker 2: 3:22:53

Now tell us a little bit about the event this year. So we'll start Valentina. Tell us a little bit about Focusrite Barcelona 2025. How has this conference been different for the last few years? Obviously, the venue has changed. It's much more extraordinary this year. But tell us a little bit about what you've seen from the conference this year, what some of the highlights have been.

Speaker 8: 3:23:09

Yeah, so, as you said, we're lucky to be in a different location this year. I think it's fitting the atmosphere a bit better and I think, in terms of the difference, I think it's fitting the atmosphere a bit better and I think, in terms of the difference, I think it's a bit more intimate this year. The new theme, especially of the technology takeover, is really exciting. We're seeing a lot more of the AI being spoken about in comparison to last year, so it's very exciting, yeah.

Speaker 2: 3:23:37

Tell us a little bit about your role, because obviously the Focusrite team puts a lot of time and effort and care into these events. I love attending them. Everyone I've spoken to and people I've heard from on the podcast have absolutely loved being at your Focusrite Europe this year and it's my first time at the Europe conference. But tell us a little bit about what goes into putting on an event like this, because I see I wouldn't say the stress level, but because obviously you've got a great team dynamic, but there is certainly you guys are focused on delivering a great conference. So tell us a little bit about your role and what you've been doing over the last couple of days.

Speaker 8: 3:24:01

Yeah, so a lot goes into this. I've been lucky to be helping Laurie Harris plan the events, trying to get as many startups joining new attendees. It's really important, especially in the build up to the event, so a lot goes into it. And especially in the build-up to the event, so a lot goes into it. In the last couple of days we've just been focusing on making sure everyone's got a smooth experience here, make sure the speakers are getting ready. So, yeah, it's just a lot of the background work, but it's been very exciting.

Speaker 2: 3:24:29

It's kind of like the swan on the water it looks graceful, but you guys are the ones paddling with feet underneath to keep it all together. Exactly exactly. That's awesome. And, Matisse, bring you into the conversation too. Tell us a little bit about what brought you this year. Obviously, you're a student, you're an intern, so likely a bright future ahead of you at Focusrite. But yeah, tell us a little bit about what brought you here this year and your role. So.

Speaker 20: 3:24:48

I've been here for one year. I started in Barcelona last year as well, in June, and I also headed to the US for the conference in November in Arizona, and so I came back this year. I had a great opportunity, and so I'm very thankful for it. I love it here. The experience is great, we're doing loads of things, we're seeing loads of interesting people, and it's a very nice conference and it's very entertaining.

Speaker 2: 3:25:10

Tell us a little bit more of some of the highlights from this year. Is it some of the people that you've met or some of the sessions? I mean, I know you're not in the sessions. You're trying to make sure that people get to the sessions and like everyone's where they need to be, but I'm still interested to hear some of the highlights from Barcelona from your perspective.

Speaker 20: 3:25:25

Well, there is something I really like to see. It's the global startup pitches that they have. So there are two on two days. There is a startup pitch for smaller companies that have been here for just two years, and then there's a another startup pitch for, like, older companies who are already uh in the game, let's say, and uh. So I love seeing them. I've been able to chat with a couple of them and there are still very interesting people that I have been able to meet and that I have seen, uh and uh on the conference, uh theater stage. So, yeah, it's great, yeah.

Speaker 2: 3:25:56

Yeah, that's fantastic. Actually, the startups has been always one of the things I look forward to at a Focusrite conference. I love that Focusrite builds that into the ecosystem. I've spoken to a lot of them here. I know quite a few of these startups and this is such an important opportunity for them to get exposure to the large corporate clients. So it's interesting that stands out to you, and especially being an intern and seeing some of those people that are hustling. They're like you know they're going to maximize the benefit of being here for this opportunity. Tell us a little bit what's ahead for you in terms of future events as far as you know right now. Are you going to be in San Diego? Are you going to be back for Europe next year?

Speaker 20: 3:26:29

Well, I hope I will be in San Diego. I hope so. It will depend on my schedule because I'm supposed to work, I'm supposed to do an internship, starting in September, I hope being there. And well, if they want me for the next years, I'll be here. It'll be a great opportunity again.

Speaker 2: 3:26:43

So it's fantastic. It's great to meet you. I'm thrilled it has worked out as well as it has for you and Valentina. Tell us a little bit about your future plans with Focusrite.

Speaker 8: 3:26:58

So in the next two weeks I'm going to TTS in London, which is run by Northstar, so that's the next event we've got going on. It's a bit more of an exhibition, less, more of a conference, and then I'm tied to Barcelona. So I hope to be back next year, and I haven't been to San Diego or the folks right conference, but I hope to join that and you're based in London is that right? Yeah, I'm based in London. I've been based here for the last couple years, though. Like studying yeah uh.

Speaker 8: 3:27:18

So yeah, it's been quite convenient to join the event, but I go back to London for the event and that's fantastic and I know Focusrite is very focused on the European market.

Speaker 2: 3:27:26

This is a big year for Europe in so many ways, given the geopolitical events that are happening, so I'm thrilled to be here in Europe and a lot of people feel the same way. A lot of Americans I've spoken to on the podcast that many of our listeners have heard from are here because they see a lot of business opportunity in Europe, so it's obviously an exciting time to be based in London and focused on the European market. Yeah, exactly. And then, in terms of Matisse, where are you based? Remind me again where you're based.

Speaker 20: 3:27:51

So I'm currently a student in a business school called EDEC. So I'm based in Lille, so in the north of France, right? But right now I'm in the south of France, so I came back.

Speaker 2: 3:27:59

Yeah, great place to spend the summer. It is, yeah, it's fantastic. Well, it's terrific to meet you both. I look forward to keeping in touch and hopefully having you back on the podcast again in the future.

Speaker 8: 3:28:08

Thank you so much for your time. Thank you and goodbye.

Speaker 2: 3:28:13

I'm now excited to introduce someone to all of our listeners who I've gotten to know quite well over the last couple of years but we've never recorded a podcast together and he's finally on Travel Trends. He is the Global Head of Travel for Stripe, james Lemon. James, welcome to Travel Trends.

Speaker 21: 3:28:33

Thanks.

Speaker 2: 3:28:33

Dan, it is brilliant to be here finally. Like you say, it's been a long time, but why not do it at a big travel event? Yeah, exactly. So here we are at Focus. Right, I'm sure most of our listeners know what Stripe is, but just give everyone a quick overview because obviously your role is unique at Stripe the fact you guys have gotten into the travel space. So just tell everyone a little bit of background of Stripe and specifically your role.

Speaker 21: 3:28:49

Yeah, so Stripe is. Ultimately, stripe's vision is that financial infrastructure will fix the world right. So we started off as a payments business so that any customer, any business, can take money in as many ways it needs to. And these days it's a pretty complicated space. People want to use wallets, they want to use buy now, pay later. They want to use local payment types that are popular Businesses and goodness. This is so true in travel. They want to pay out right, you're paying out around the world and that's been typically pretty clunky. And then also, you want to manage that money. So actually, you know, if you are a big global business, you want to manage it all. So Stripe came together saying like we want to be the infrastructure that solves for that, from the biggest companies down to the smallest. And we're not travel specific. You know we work with the Amazons, the Shopify's, some of the world's biggest retailers, about half of the S&P 500. But my job is to make us really popular in travel and make sure everyone understands how you translate something that sounds quite technical.

Speaker 21: 3:29:44

That just makes sense for travel businesses.

Speaker 2: 3:29:45

Well, and Stripe itself has an amazing technology story and is a remarkable company that has just had explosive growth and obviously, given the size of the travel industry, it makes total sense to have someone like yourself leading that practice. And I think one of the things I just wanted to acknowledge James for is that connects to the reason that we've actually met a number of times is that as he built out the travel practice, he partnered with Travel Massive and Ian Cumming, who is a good friend to both of us and I would say is very much a pioneer and a legend in the travel industry. He's been on our podcast. I think very highly of Ian and the organization he's built and you guys have partnered together to run events all over the world. So tell everyone a little bit about that partnership between Stripe and Travel Massive.

Speaker 21: 3:30:26

Yeah, I think, probably driven by lockdown, I came to realize just the absolute value of community having people around you that you can learn from, you can share ideas with, you can get stuff done, and I think travel is the ultimate ecosystem that needs to be driven by community. So I first went to a travel massive event 2018. I think it was upstairs at a pub in london. They fit 50 people into a room that was clearly designed for 25 and I was doing a different startup at the time, but they put me on a panel about. You know why it's so hard to hire people in hospitality and we just had the best time just great energy, great passion.

Speaker 21: 3:31:00

So when I came to Stripe and I thought we have millions of users around the world in travel, not everyone actually spends much time with people from Stripe. So why not do this world tour where, as I go to these events or as I visit customers you know, let's put a tab behind a bar in the evening, maybe let's run a panel or an innovation showcase or just buy the drinks, but it's a great chance to hear what's going on, hear what people are building, say thank you to our customers, find new customers. So massive shout out not just to Ian but to the entire volunteer community at Travel Massive. It is a phenomenal business, but also just a big shout out to anyone building travel communities Like we've got to pull together to build an even better industry for our customers.

Speaker 2: 3:31:39

Well and to exactly your point. I mean the fact that you decided to go down the path of partnering with Travel Massive, connecting with their chapter leaders and all of these major urban centers that have large Travel Massive communities, and you can all of a sudden go in as Stripe, connect with that community, bring more people out, and I've had the privilege to be probably three or four of these events, including one at ITB in Berlin a few months ago, and it was fantastic just to see the community come together. And, of course, ian is the one that introduced the two of us in the first place when it was like and again, that's just his spirit of community is like a super connector, and obviously then we've met a number of times, we genuinely get along and it's kind of like that's, you know, that sense, the spirit of community which brings us to Focusrite. And all of a sudden we're here in Barcelona. So tell me, james, what brings you to Focusrite Barcelona this year?

Speaker 21: 3:32:27

I think, ultimately, we're talking about innovation at a faster pace than we've ever talked about it before, and Focusrite is great for bringing together people from across the ecosystem. You've got the distribution layer, you've got OTAs, you've got hotel groups. You've got a whole range of people that are just really passionate and building in the space. It's not just about hotels, it's not just about travel agencies. So I guess it's the best place to hear what people really think about, like what's going to be the practical use cases in AI? What's going to be happening in stable coins? Like, like, what's going to be the practical use cases in AI, what's going to be happening in stable coins? Like, what are the partnerships we need to be thinking about for the next couple of years? So I'm here to learn. I'm here to reconnect with people. I know I'm here to find Stripe's next kind of cohort of customers that we don't already have.

Speaker 21: 3:33:06

I'm here to host drinks tonight with Travel Massive. So yeah, every year for the last three years we've been having.

Speaker 2: 3:33:25

This is the first day and james and I are connecting at the end of the first day, but the conversations that I've heard so far are they love the venue, they've already benefited immensely from the sessions they've attended and all I've heard so far is just positive feedback. On day one and this isn't even really officially day one, this is kind of the pre-day Really Things kick off. Things officially kick off tomorrow morning. Yeah, so from your experience on day one, how does this compare to previous years? And are there certain other aspects to being here, other highlights that you would call out to our global listeners that you know don't quite have the privilege that we have to be here in this room amongst this company, attending these sessions? What are some of the other things that maybe stood out to you this year, james?

Speaker 21: 3:34:06

I think they've got some really fantastic speakers. I think I've heard people from you know the world of AI and some of the big OTAs and I think that's great. I think those guys are really setting the pace. I think they have got a nice round table format where they maybe get three or four experts, but actually they want people to chip in. They want people to throw their thoughts into the hat. I've unfortunately missed the startup presentations, but I'm hoping, as I'm sure your listeners are hoping, we can catch all this stuff. Watch it back later, because you've got to look at the top 10, top 20 startups today, because they are the guys that will be disrupting things tomorrow. So I will definitely be kind of downloading those catching up when I get them over.

Speaker 2: 3:34:48

Yeah, no, you bring up a really good point, which is Focusrite. Europe is the main website, focusriteconferencecom. But if you look up Focusrite, a lot of these videos. I know they are videoing a lot of these sessions and that's not always the case with a lot of conferences, so a lot of the content will be available. They've obviously got Focuswire and they've got us here, but they've also got videos in each of the rooms. So I, like you, have not had the opportunity to attend some of those sessions, and I keep looking at the agenda.

Speaker 2: 3:35:13

I'm like, oh my God, one missed, another one, but it's all good, I'm loving what I do and I'm hoping that I'm going to be able to catch those later, like yourself. Let's get back to Stripe James and some of the plans that you have. I know you've got an additional team member and he's actually going to be speaking at our AI Summit a little later this year, which I'm thrilled about, but tell.

Speaker 21: 3:35:37

Yeah, in travel we are really excited about what we would call the platform space. This is software businesses that build for their customers. So you think about a hotel property management system, a travel agency reservation system, a system that does reservation tech like. Those guys are fantastic at doing what they do with stripe. They effectively white label payments. They make sure everyone gets a great booking engine. You might have a terminal that you can kind of walk around and take payments with. Maybe you can even issue cards for your staff or for your customers. Like that's the space we want to win, and I think that means that they can help their customers be innovators. And then in the enterprise space, it's really about working with the big hotel chains, helping them drive more direct bookings, big kind of travel agencies, as they think about not just taking money in from their customers but actually paying out to their suppliers around the world.

Speaker 21: 3:36:26

It is hard to be the CFO of a travel agency today. You've got virtual cards. People are talking to you about stable coins. You've got all these different ways to pay out. We want to make that much, much more programmable like lower cost, programmable, faster, so we never stop innovating. The funny thing about Stripe is that most of what we do is what I would call horizontal. We didn't necessarily build everything we have for the travel industry. I just get the really fun job of translating that to make sure it works for travel. Travel customers are happy, and so it means I've got to really skill up as well. Like, what are we doing in AI that helps our customers? What is stable coins? How do you talk about it? To someone who's been you know it's just brand new. It's completely alien.

Speaker 2: 3:37:03

Well, let's demystify that for our audience that just asked themselves that question what are stable coins?

Speaker 21: 3:37:08

So here's my layman's version. So the world of crypto is split into two. Right, it's got the consumer stuff we all know and it's like you know, it's the meme coins. There's a ton of junk in there. Anything can happen. Maybe you're investing in it, maybe you're not. And then you get what's called the stable coin space.

Speaker 21: 3:37:28

People think about blockchain or Web3 in terms you hear, but effectively every dollar you have of a stable coin think of the words USDC is a good one.

Speaker 21: 3:37:38

Every dollar you have of a stable coin is backed by a real dollar sitting in the US treasury somewhere.

Speaker 21: 3:37:41

So it means you now have this completely programmable tool to move money around the world, hold money in developing countries, but it's all safely inflation-backed to the dollar, so it's never going to go up, but it's never going to go down.

Speaker 21: 3:37:52

Now look, if you're in the US or Europe or Australia, you're probably like my money's fine in my bank, that's fine. But if you're offshore in Africa or LATAM, these guys are already holding something like $16 trillion every year in US-backed security somewhere. So we're now giving them a way to do that that is programmable, safe, lower cost to move around. So it's a real revolution in the way that travel companies can pay out and receive money, but also that travel companies might want to hold funds and then pay out their own suppliers and staff in time. So lots more to come. We're just getting some pilots out the door now, but we know of a leading OTA that have put someone on this full time this year and they're basically saying his only metric is find us our first stablecoin use case. So every travel business needs a stable coin strategy.

Speaker 2: 3:38:38

Interesting.

Speaker 2: 3:38:38

Well, one of the things that came up when I was on the Tourpreneur podcast and looking at tour operators, one of the things that I'd highlighted from my experience is that actually one of the main profit drivers is currency exchange and interest, like actually how you manage the money, and obviously this is the world that you're in and a lot of tour operators think of the profit they need to drive from their business, not the other financial instruments that are at play.

Speaker 2: 3:38:59

So having someone like you here is actually really interesting for me and for our listeners, because some of the questions and the discussions we can have. So one of the things I wanted to ask you, james, since we're finally having the opportunity to have this conversation and this is just going to be a snippet we're going to have James back in season six. We'll have them involved in the AI summits. You're going to hear more from Stripe and from James and the team, but one of the things I'm keen to know is that when travel companies are looking at different options around payments, what is it about Stripe that you find really resonates and, if you wouldn't mind sharing along those lines, is like that where are you seeing the growth? Like what specific verticals within travel are embracing Stripe the most.

Speaker 21: 3:39:37

Yeah, I think those businesses that see that payments is a strategic kind of almost business of its own are the ones that do really well with Stripe. So you go. If you're just obsessing about the cost of your credit card payments and transactions, you're probably not going to do very well with Stripe. But if you're thinking, look actually my checkout where customers pay, it's actually just part of my marketing funnel and I've paid all of this money to drive traffic through my marketing funnel why are we kicking everyone out at the last minute? Because the payments doesn't work? We don't have the popular payment type they want. So I think that's really that global reach and optionality of hundreds of ways to pay is probably like our dominant proposition.

Speaker 21: 3:40:14

But Stripe was built by developers and I think, even though we're great in enterprise, we're still very, very developer friendly. So if you want to get moving quickly in an agile way, it's completely programmable. It's a single stack and a single API. Like these are parts of our DNA that like we just we obsess about as kind of almost like with craft and beauty, like we want this to be a wonderful experience for developers. So you combine those two things great business outcomes, really easy to work with really fun people that host drinks around the world. There's your magic secret sauce of why Stripe's doing well. So, yeah, anyone in travel can use it. There's a big kind of. If you want to attract your customers on the front end, if you want to pay out suppliers on the back end, if you just want to think strategically about the money running through your business, now's the time to come and talk to Stripe.

Speaker 2: 3:40:58

Very cool.

Speaker 2: 3:40:59

I got one more question for you and then I want to make sure people know where to find you and connect with Stripe and learn more.

Speaker 2: 3:41:04

But the specific question I have is that, as we sit here at Focusrite, one of the things that I love about the Focusrite conferences I've been to is that, based on the meetings you see here and the presentations, you have a pretty good idea of what's going to happen in the travel industry over the next six months. I've talked to Pete Como about this and he's very humble. He's like, oh, maybe three months, but I've typically seen what's going to happen in the next six to 12 months in our industry is often shaped by the opportunities that are realized at a conference like this, and so one of the things I wanted to ask you, since you've been in this industry for many years, you have a great understanding of the travel space, and here we are almost in mid 2025. What is one of the major trends that you're paying attention to in the travel industry that you think will have a meaningful impact over the next year?

Speaker 21: 3:41:50

So the biggest trend in travel at the moment is absolutely AI, and I can't believe you've had anyone here that hasn't told you that. But let me just like dig into that a little bit so it doesn't feel like a generic answer. I think that we're sitting here right now not knowing what direction it's going to take, and so there are ways to position your business with the right tech stack to go. Whichever way it's going to go, you'll be ready. We need to get out of some of the legacy ways of thinking of like my property management system will hold me back or we can't do it that way because I don't want to be merchant record. There's so much optionality now. There's so much modularity to the way that you can build this in. But from inspiration, search, book and now payments, there's going to be an explosion of ways that consumers want to do that Really new, popular ways, and that could be AI chatbots.

Speaker 21: 3:42:33

It could be within your social media. It could be companies that have never been travel agents before, like banks and rugby clubs and football clubs. Your content could show up anywhere and no one knows if intermediaries will do well or suppliers will do well. But it's going to be a really exciting time where everyone can show up with their value proposition and, by the way, value propositions need to like. You should have that by now. Are you known for price? Do you have a great loyalty program, so people just really resonate with your brand? Those things will still be important in ai. Our job is making sure and we have these sdks ready to go. Now we have our first case studies. People like the plexity. There will absolutely be a pay button in all of these new channels, from social media to ai agents to wherever your travel content shows up. So you need to be ready with a company like strike to, to go whenever that customer needs to pay, be there with like a one-click checkout.

Speaker 2: 3:43:20

So that's what we're obsessing about and that, I think, is what we're going to be talking about for the next 12 months Exciting and you heard it here first and we'll pick up that conversation definitely in a few months time at the AI Summit. But thanks so much for joining us, james. This certainly didn't disappoint. I was so looking forward to this and I want this conversation to go on, but I know this is like a short spotlight from this event. But I certainly look forward to future collaborations and certainly learning more about the Stripe journey. So thanks again for making the time for this.

Speaker 21: 3:43:47

Thank you for having me Cheers.

Speaker 2: 3:43:50

I just had the pleasure to meet Aaron and Ryan, who are working on a really exciting project with a colleague in the UK, and I thought let's bring them on the podcast because I'm really intrigued specifically by Ryan because he works at Feedonomics and Aaron works with BigCommerce and it turns out this is all now under one parent company. So I'm intrigued to get the whole story, but I worked very closely with Feedonomics for a number of years so I was really excited to see that you were here, ryan. But, aaron, let's start with you on the big commerce side. Tell us a little bit about your role, what you do and what brings you here to Focusrite Awesome, yeah, thanks for that, daniel.

Speaker 7: 3:44:24

So Aaron Gelhaus actually the Senior Director of both Feedonomics and BigCommerce here in Europe originally came over to London to really help expand the Feedonomics presence and have just recently kind of overtaken the BigCommerce enterprise sales team which I help lead here in Europe and really excited to be here at the conference the Focusrite conference today, especially in partnership with Ubique Digital, which is an agency partner of both feedonomics and BigCommerce and really helping to launch a unique accelerator that is tying together all of our portfolio products and services under BigTravel. So that's what brings us here today.

Speaker 2: 3:45:04

That's great. No, thank you. Let's just give everyone a bit of an overview of BigCommerce.

Speaker 7: 3:45:07

Well, I mean, at the end of the day, we're not trying to replace Shopify, right, shopify has a place. They are an excellent e-commerce platform, particularly in kind of, you know, simple, generic direct-to-consumer retail use cases. Right, I think where we have found a lot of traction on the big commerce side is for those kind of more discerning use cases in industries that have more bespoke needs. Right, we're API first, we're composable, we're very flexible in terms of, ultimately, whatever additional tech you need to build out the optimal experiences that consumers are looking for, including things like having complete optionality around payment gateways and other things that are a little bit different for more complicated and complex use cases.

Speaker 2: 3:45:55

Yeah. Well, for me, that connects the dots, especially when you think about the travel industry and why many travel brands and I'll say this that they don't use Shopify. I mean, if you're going to buy a t-shirt, if you're going to buy some sneakers or you're at a market, you know Shopify is a great solution for so many e-commerce applications, but travel is complex. It's a considered purchase, unique needs, which is where you need an API. I'm going to come back to this, but let's bring in Ryan in the conversation, Tell everyone about your role and also explain Feedonomics, because I love Feedonomics, but I want everyone to know about Feedonomics because we swore by it with our digital marketing team. There's so many great applications for that platform, but yeah, yeah, sure, and thanks for inviting us on the podcast.

Speaker 5: 3:46:33

So I'm Ryan. I'm a solutions engineer with Feedonomics. I've been with the company from very early days, from when we were really just like working with like small businesses. I was based in Los Angeles but ultimately moved to Europe to really help build out our enterprise offering within Europe itself. So, yeah, but ultimately what Feedonomics is doing is we're taking data from wherever it lives within its source. Systems could be BigCommerce, could be Shopify any sort of e-commerce system manipulating that, transforming it and then exporting it out to different advertising channels and marketplaces as well. That obviously translates quite well to travel, especially if we're looking to actually sort of advertise different flight routes, different hotels, different rooms and rate values that could be associated with those.

Speaker 2: 3:47:10

Yeah, well, it's interesting you mentioned Los Angeles because that's where I was based when the team came to me and recommended using Feedonomics, and at the time I think our budget was around $10 million in paid media and I was trying to convince Facebook and Google to work with us directly, and they don't work with companies directly for often less than $50 or $100 million, or so they said, what's your monthly spend?

Speaker 2: 3:47:34

And we didn't meet that criteria, and so many companies that listen to this podcast are in that same space. They're small to medium or medium to consider themselves larger businesses, but large for travel is not the same as large in other sectors, and so it can be more difficult to work with those big brands directly. So you need solutions, you need partners, intermediaries. So we used Feedonomics for exactly what you described was basically creating a feed of all of our travel products to be able to do paid social advertising very effectively and carousels and remarketing, and so that's why I'm such a big fan of it, because it massively increased our conversion rates and the team loved using it. So tell everyone a little bit more about who uses Feedonomics in the travel space. Yeah, so I probably can't drop any specific names.

Speaker 2: 3:48:16

I might have to defer to Aaron on that. But yeah, you guys are under non-disclosure. You're like yeah.

Speaker 5: 3:48:22

It's a little bit tricky. So, I would say there are large flights, there's a lot of large hotel brands. Also, travel aggregators is another big one. Anyone who has a lot of data and they're looking to advertise that elsewhere, right yeah, and we typically look the more complex, the bigger sort of use cases are a good fit for feedonomics.

Speaker 2: 3:48:37

Yeah, and then tell us a little bit of this project. There's nothing I want to get into, so jump back in here, aaron, and tell us a little bit about this project you're working on. What brings you to the Focusrite conference?

Speaker 7: 3:48:47

Yeah, thanks for that. So so again, it's really in partnership with Big Travel, which is really the brainchild of a agency partner of ours, ubique Digital, based out of London but with presence globally, and what they've done, which is really unique, is essentially take the enterprise-leading products that are underneath the BigCommerce umbrella, so that includes the modern website experiences that BigCommerce is able to deliver at enterprise grade. And obviously there's a lot of legacy players in this space right X, hybris and Magento and SAP. And so I think what big commerce can do on the platform side is really kind of drive down total cost of ownership and really create those more personalized experience. And so what they're doing is marrying that value proposition on the big commerce side with feedonomics and what we're able to do in terms of optimized data out to all of the major channels that are relevant for travel.

Speaker 7: 3:49:47

And again to Ryan's point, we can't share too many logo rights, but major airlines, hotel systems, resorts, are all super reliant on having really up-to-date data in these channels in a personalized manner to help ensure that we're getting the conversion rates that we need. And then, thirdly, underneath the umbrella is MakeSwift, which is really a really modern marketing digital editor which really empowers marketing teams to have everything from really sophisticated A-B testing of experiences on their own site and be able to pivot those experiences very quickly, as we know that the demands of today's consumers are changing rapidly. And so how do we best set up these travel organizations, hospitality organizations, with really agile tools that are going to add incremental revenue to their go-to-market teams, and that's the goal.

Speaker 2: 3:50:39

Well, it's really interesting, and what I didn't understand until we sat down to have this conversation is just that you guys are all integrated into one larger organization now. So if you're going to want to do business with BigCommerce or with Feedonomics, it's all part of a family of brands.

Speaker 7: 3:50:53

Well, yes, and you're teasing out what I so much wish I could share. At the end of July, we're actually announcing a new parent brand as well, which all of these will be housed under, which I think will help unify that total commerce story in a real way. But at the end of the day, just like you, and what attracted me to Feedonomics leading that team, even though I now wear both hats right is that Feedonomics will always be a brand unto itself too. It has its own brand equity. It has its own followers. It will always be e-commerce platform agnostic. 30% of our install base is on Shopify Plus. That's not going away, right, so I think that's an important message for folks to know too.

Speaker 2: 3:51:31

Yeah, that's really interesting. Well, I think the one thing that would be helpful for all of our listeners, given this big project that you're working on and one of the key reasons you're here at the Focusrite conference is just sharing some insights for other travel companies that are looking to improve their digital game, whether it's like they're going through a digital transformation, which I think we've been talking about for more than a decade, and now obviously we're in this world of AI. But I'd love to hear from the two of you Clearly, you're experts in this space and have a lot of relevant experience what would be a couple of recommendations you'd have to our global listeners, whether it's utilizing your technology stack or looking at working with different travel brands. What are some of the big trends in digital marketing that our listeners should be paying attention to?

Speaker 5: 3:52:13

Yeah, sure, I'll take a swing at it. So I'd say it comes down to a couple of different things. Yeah, sure, I'll take a swing at it. So I'd say it comes down to a couple of different things. So probably the biggest one is making sure that you have dynamic data being presented onto these different social channels and remarketing channels, affiliate channels, right. A lot of times the travel agencies that we're speaking to they're large, massive brands that everyone's heard of, like household names throughout Europe, but they don't have a way to get their data from their source systems into these different channels, actually market it to the people that want to buy them, right? So a big thing for Feedonomics is helping us understand what their source systems are, making it as simple as possible for their teams to come in and leverage that data for those different marketing channels and, as you know, the powerful transformations that go behind that in terms of merging multiple different data sources. Transforming that data on our channel-specific basis is something that we do on a day-to-day basis for our clients.

Speaker 2: 3:52:58

Yeah, data, data, data. Yes, that line, the data, is the new oil. That's another one of those. But yeah, what about you, aaron?

Speaker 7: 3:53:06

No, I mean not to belabor that point and you kind of hit the nail on the head. Right, that's a saying that is out and flooded in the market, the data is the new oil is resonating right for a reason.

Speaker 7: 3:53:23

I think in this era in which now we're a couple years removed from, obviously, ai being a buzzword and it's been operationalized by nearly every brand in retail, I think there's still a lot of valuable ground to be covered in travel around AI.

Speaker 7: 3:53:33

But, going back to your point and kind of underpinning what Ryan said, even applications of AI and agentic AI and what's coming down the queue is only going to be as the data that's underpinning those LLMs and those bots and all of those things, right, and so that's what's super interesting about the feedonomics side of the house is the ability to really ensure that the best catalog product, et cetera data is not only being syndicated out, but then you are having what I would call the virtuous feedback loops of further enriching that data, further targeting that data and personalizing it over time, and obviously then that has significant implications on the owned website too.

Speaker 7: 3:54:10

I think the only other thing I'd add to your point is that you know, digital transformation no longer has to take a 12 or 15 person internal team and working groups and six months process to align on which products you would like. I think modern SaaS providers that are really at the cutting edge in this space and I think what really big travel represents is the ability to really, in an agile way, deploy revenue generating technologies, prove out the business case and grow that more internally with your.

Speaker 2: 3:54:46

to leverage is the efficiency gains, the productivity and being able to scale content at such an incredible rate that you can now have a marketing team of one that would have outpaced a team of eight or 10 just by leveraging these tools, so it's an exciting time for many of us to be in the travel marketing space. As far as listeners want to find out more information about feedonomics, about big commerce, where should they go or where should they follow up with either of you guys to learn more information?

Speaker 7: 3:55:24

Yeah, I think the easiest way in the travel industry is just go to bigtravelcom. That's really going to be kind of the wrapping up all of our value propositions and really where Ubique has been a thought leader in this space to help really cohesively bring together the value proposition of our enterprise software and services across these different offerings.

Speaker 2: 3:55:46

And then we mentioned Ubeak. I just want to make sure that all of our listeners can find Ubeak, which is U-B-I-Q-U-E digital. So Ubeak Digital if you want more information on this project. But it's a real pleasure meeting you both, aaron and Ryan. This was a surprise highlight of this conference and one of the reasons that we're all here. Any last thoughts on what you're hoping to get out of the conference in the next couple of days?

Speaker 5: 3:56:08

So I would say, just really understanding the problem, right, I think from my perspective, I really get into data, data, data, right, that's kind kind of my entire role, so really understanding, like, what are the specific issues that everyone's seeing in today and like especially integrating the different AI, llms and where pseudonyms could fit in there.

Speaker 2: 3:56:24

Cool, that's great, and Aaron, bring us home.

Speaker 7: 3:56:27

Oh, I mean, I can't. I don't know if I can top Ryan. So, you know, knowing the problem is always critical. I mean, look, at the end of the day, I always get amazing insights and learn at every one of these conferences from what everybody is doing. I think the pace of change in the travel industry over the next few years is going to make the last decade look like a snail's pace, right, and so we're super excited to lean in and the travel vertical, our team partners, you know, as you noted, with performance marketing agencies globally. Next week we're at Cannes. It's a busy Cannes line. It's a busy summer for us in terms of really ensuring that we're staying ahead of all of the trends that are going to be critical for brands to stay ahead in this AI-driven world, and so, yeah, very excited to be here and thanks for having us.

Speaker 2: 3:57:18

For sure. Thanks a lot, guys. My next guest is Jillian Jones, and she's the identity lead at Condatus and you may remember you heard from one of her colleagues at our event in Phoenix with Focusrite. And here we are in Barcelona, and it's Jillian's first time at this conference as well, and I was looking forward to catching up with you. So welcome to Travel Trends, Gillian.

Speaker 22: 3:57:39

Thank you so much, Dan. Thanks for having me.

Speaker 2: 3:57:41

Of course, yeah, thrilled to have you and the organization back on the podcast, especially given how important the concept that your business applies to. So let's give everyone a bit of an overview of what you do at Condatas.

Speaker 22: 3:57:52

Yeah, no, that's great, thank you. So, yeah, condatas, we are a team of around 45 digital identity experts and we work across the full range of identity. So, whether that be kind of employee centric or consumer centric, and just really making sure that our customers and the organizations that we work with are at the forefront of their identity strategy as it builds in with cybersecurity. And yeah, we're really very, very heavily partnered with Microsoft. So, again, we work very heavily on the Microsoft Entry Platform and, yeah, just making sure that identity is front and center for a lot of people just now, because it is a growing and really important part of your cybersecurity strategy.

Speaker 2: 3:58:27

For sure, and I've definitely heard a lot of talk about it here at the conference and there's a few people in this space you, of course, gave a great presentation in Phoenix on stage, and then I spoke to Lucy, of course, your colleague, but one of the things I was keen to ask you is, given it is your first time coming to Europe, you've traveled all the way across the US.

Speaker 2: 3:58:47

Yeah, you're based in Scotland. I think most people will pick up on your lovely accent right away because you're based in Edinburgh. But tell everyone what brought you to Focusrite Europe this year yeah, so.

Speaker 22: 3:58:57

So I mean, focusrite in Arizona was the first time that I'd gone to any Focusrite conference and I have to say I was just like really blown away by the quality of attendees, the quality of conversation, the interest levels in digital identity. I think what we found, particularly with the European one, is it is smaller but it's very much more intimate lots and lots of really interesting conversations. But I think that Europe is in a slightly different position when it comes to digital identity. There are some pretty big regulatory movements. We've got EIDAS, european Digital Identity Wallets. It's a little bit further forward. So I think people are closer to really feeling the impact of these solutions and what's going to happen to them. So the interest is definitely a little bit more advanced, but only because I think that the actual technology is really on our doorstep now, right, and I think that we'll see something similar in San Diego, hopefully later on in the year. We'll see the interest kind of filtering through.

Speaker 2: 3:59:50

Yeah, for sure. I'm convinced of that because my good friend, Shane at Microsoft, who's been on our podcast, he's also part of our AI Summit later in October. We wanted to talk about having you involved there because he is very focused on this topic as well in any of his presentations and obviously he was on stage as well in Phoenix. But at this conference, I'm very keen to know, since you weren't presenting and you've obviously had a lot of opportunity to attend the sessions what are some of the highlights and standouts beyond the digital identity side from focus right europe. What are some of the things that brought you here and some of the things that you all of us were surprised to discover?

Speaker 22: 4:00:27

yeah, I mean, I think, um, what's been, obviously, ai like everyone loves to talk about ai and I I completely understand why it's going to be so important, particularly for travel and hospitality. It's going to be so important particularly for travel and hospitality. It's going to really revolutionize the industry in so many great ways. I think that what's been really really good to hear about, though, is people kind of really acknowledging that actually it's already here. In fact, it's been here for a while, and if you are not already thinking about this or actively doing things, you need to be, and actually it was really interesting.

Speaker 22: 4:00:57

A couple of the presentations were talking about, you know, um, some companies have said you have to use this internally. Build a bot, build an ai agent, get get comfortable with the tech yourself as an employee, as an individual, and then you can see how it can extrapolate out to clients and really kind of getting under the hood of things. And it's quite interesting because we we do something very similar in terms of digital identity. I'm'm always saying, like, start with your employees, get your employees secured first, really look at what you're doing around your join, remove or leave processes and then go through the different phases and then take it to your customers, because that's a great way to make sure you've got a really rounded strategy. So it was quite interesting to see some of the parallels and conversation across different technologies.

Speaker 2: 4:01:37

For sure, and that's where the topic of AI I know it's come up in a number of different sessions.

Speaker 2: 4:01:43

I've heard some of the feedback that many of our listeners would have heard over the course of this podcast from various guests and it really is sort of a mixed bag and I think one of the key things that many of our listeners and many people in the industry are trying to understand, like the best use cases of AI, like show me actually an example of it, don't talk about it, like show me, and so on that topic, I'm just given that you are very active in technology and travel and one of the areas I know that. I was at the aviation festival conference a couple of weeks ago and there was big talk. I was moderated a panel and with an airport and a startup incubator that works very closely with airports and we were talking about how AI is being applied and facial recognition. So obviously you're doing digital identity. So, yeah, I'm keen to know, from an implementation point of view, what are some of the more interesting utilizations of AI that you have seen.

Speaker 22: 4:02:34

Yeah, it's a really good question. I think this is the thing. There's a lot of discussion about AI, but I think that sometimes people don't really get into that, and this is how this is where you start, so your first agent should be X. This is the sort of challenge you can solve for because it's reasonably low barrier to entry, but it's a good impact. I think sometimes we miss that, and I think it's the same with digital identity. To be honest, I think sometimes we try to solve for a really really, really big problem, but actually you need to take it down a smaller chunk. So I think it just depends on what the customer requirements are and figuring that out.

Speaker 22: 4:03:04

I think that one of the really interesting things that we're seeing with AI is it makes me nervous. In full disclosure, I think that we have the opportunity for so many different things to be handled by an agent, but who is that agent? And if you're acting on my behalf, how are you going to make sure that that is done in a secure way? So identity actually, I think for me it should be in lockstep with AI agents, because you should be able to verify that the agent that you're talking to is, in fact, the agent of a company. It is, in fact, my agent and especially when we get into agent to KI and they're actioning things they're making payments, they're making bookings on your behalf you would better make sure that's done securely, because otherwise you're just opening up a whole new channel for attack and it's scary.

Speaker 22: 4:03:50

But the tech is there, we know what to do, we know how to implement this in a secure way and we know how to advise people. So I think one of my big things is speak to the experts, speak to Microsoft. They're launching you know so many different platforms to really combat that. And again, they've got, you know, entra for Agents that they've just announced as well. So that's going to be part of their Entra platform. It's going to be part of their cybersecurity strategy.

Speaker 2: 4:04:22

Like the tools there. Just ask the questions and really make sure you're leaning on your advisors. I think, yeah, no, all valuable advice. And so moving beyond AI for a moment, since obviously there's so many aspects to this industry and you're clearly close to all of the developments, certainly from a technology point of view, but I'm just generally curious, what else you're focusing on in 2025, going into 2026? What are some of the other major trends that you're seeing in your business or just you're conscientious of in the industry?

Speaker 22: 4:04:42

Yeah, I think that what's been really, really exciting is identity becoming such a big part of cybersecurity and therefore people having a much more holistic view of it.

Speaker 22: 4:04:55

So previously, what we would have seen would have been, for example, you would have an IAM team within an organization, super focused on the employees would not be minded to, or empowered to, or even required to, look at the customer side of things.

Speaker 22: 4:05:08

But I think that that's changing because actually what we're seeing is the tooling is now such that you can have the same kind of tools to do internal identity and external. So actually it's like maximizing your investment that you've made on your tooling, but also seeing the repeatable patterns and processes. So across the industry, we see loads of different challenges between you know, seasonal workers, temporary workers and people that are not always going to be part of your organization but need to access information and need to access resources always going to be part of your organization but need to access information and need to access resources. This is common across airports, airlines, tour operators, the whole hotels, everybody. So I think it's really good that we're seeing people actually having a more holistic view on it and actually we're now in a position to say, okay, start here, here's day one, here's day 10, here's day 50, like and work them through the process.

Speaker 2: 4:05:53

Yeah, I know it's really fascinating.

Speaker 2: 4:05:55

I think tell us a little bit more about what the plans are at Condatus over the next year, since obviously you're in a category with, I would say, explosive growth. Like you said, you're 40 team members now, but clearly there's so many utilizations, implementations and, especially as Microsoft continues to highlight this technology and push in this direction, have people become that much more aware of not only data security but specifically the impacts of it to themselves? Absolutely, they've had some sort of exposure to a risk or they've had a scare. But, yeah, tell us a little bit about how you see your business evolving the next year.

Speaker 22: 4:06:30

Yeah, so no, we are on the cusp of some really exciting times. So, based on the client base that we have and based on kind of, I suppose, the industry expertise that we have, we're really going to. So, based on the client base that we have and based on kind of, I suppose, the industry expertise that we have, you know, we're really going to be doubling down on our travel and hospitality business. So we're going to grow in that area and we, as I say, have a number of really exciting clients in that industry anyway, and we're looking to expand upon that and grow our team on that basis. But, yeah, as you say, the partnership with Microsoft really is, I think, what's really taken off. And because they are now so empowered around Entra and around digital identity, we're just going to see more and more requests coming in in terms of, okay, what do we do about this? What happens?

Speaker 22: 4:07:05

I think we've seen, obviously in the last couple of days, like huge announcements from Apple, google. They are going to be moving into the digital identity wallet space. I think that that's only going to drive adoption. Apple Pay is the new norm, right? Everyone just kind of pays in that way, and I think it's going to be very similar for digital identity and therefore people are going to have to respond. And where do they start? How do they do it? And I think that's going to drive the growth of Condatus. But we have big plans and big aspirations. So, yeah, watch this space. I'll probably be here next year with here and a little bit more stressed.

Speaker 2: 4:07:34

That's really exciting. Well, I'm certainly looking forward to seeing you again in San Diego, and hopefully you'll be back on stage doing another great presentation. So tell everyone, Gillian, how people can follow up with you and learn more about Condata.

Speaker 22: 4:07:45

Yeah, absolutely so. Of course you can find me on LinkedIn, you can find me on the website and, and you know, obviously I'm sure we can publish my, my email address after this. But really, I mean, just get in touch with any way you can and you can book time with me, I think even on our website, I'm pretty sure. But but yeah, I think it's, even if it's just for an informal chat of okay, we hear all this stuff about ID. What does that mean? Where do we start? What does it look like? You know, I'm really passionate about travel and hospitality. It's been my, it's been my bag for a long time and it's a great industry and I sometimes think it's forgotten in, like retail and things like that. It kind of gets lost in the noise sometimes, but for me, it's the best industry, full of really really talented, really smart people, and this is something that is going to change the way that we work. So I want to get in front of it as much as possible yeah, for sure.

Speaker 2: 4:08:27

So we clearly share that passion, like a love for this industry and also the awareness of how it's going to change, sure, and so that's obviously, um, clearly a strong bond that we have. And that's obviously clearly a strong bond that we have, and that's one of the things I was like, so looking forward to seeing you again and catching up, but I definitely am going to continue to follow your journey and look forward to further collaborations together, but also just keeping in touch and then seeing you again in San Diego. So, jillian, great to see you again. Thanks a lot for being here.

Speaker 22: 4:08:49

Thank you so much, dan, and yeah, we'll catch up in San Diego.

Speaker 2: 4:08:55

I'm delighted now to introduce you to two co-founders of a really fascinating travel company called Traversingai, and I'm going to speak to Blair first and then bring Kyle into the conversation. And the reason for that is because Blair gave a presentation here at the event, but also because Blair and I have been in touch but not met yet. I was in Vegas for Virtuoso last year and Blair had reached out. We tried to get a coffee and catch up there, and so we're finally meeting in person today. So, blair, it's a pleasure to meet you and welcome to Travel Trends.

Speaker 12: 4:09:22

Thank you, it's a pleasure to meet you too.

Speaker 2: 4:09:24

Awesome. Well, tell everyone about Traversingai. Tell everyone what this company and what it is you guys do.

Speaker 12: 4:09:29

I would be happy to so. Traversingai is the AI contact center designed for hospitality, and I think that's the main thing that sets us apart. We are specifically focused on calls, messages, bookings. As a hospitality background company. I'm an ex-hospitality executive, I have 25 years of hotel background and experience, and Kyle here has founded a hospitality technology company, and we've taken our two multiple decades of experience and combined them into this powerhouse of AI contact center and transition for properties as small as eight rooms into as large as 3,000 rooms and a few properties in between, to help them transition what was a cost center into a true revenue center for our partners.

Speaker 2: 4:10:15

That's really cool. And obviously, being based in Vegas, which is home for you, that's obviously the heart of hospitality in many ways with the hotels and the industry in the US, and you've come all the way across to Barcelona to be here for Focusrite Europe. So I'm really keen to understand what brought you over here. Is it European market expansion, partnership opportunities? Tell us a little bit about what brings you here to this conference.

Speaker 12: 4:10:34

Yeah, all of the above I mean the opportunity obviously to participate and focus right, I think, is a huge one and have the opportunity to pitch and present our company. It's an amazing platform. We're happy to be here and to share what we're doing. We have some partners that we just launched here in Spain, and so we want to continue to grow our reach here in Europe overall and continue to expand our partnerships worldwide and really just showcase the product and be able to help more and more hotels because they need it.

Speaker 2: 4:11:03

Yeah, that's exciting. Tell us a little bit about the session that you're involved in here at the conference.

Speaker 12: 4:11:08

It's a startup session, so we are specifically a startup. We were competing against some other amazing startups about 15 different startups that are also scaling amongst some pretty amazing technology that's out there and we will find out today at one o'clock how we did I like to use the word we Kyle. So, it was a good one. That's awesome.

Speaker 2: 4:11:32

One of the things I've always loved about Focus Right.

Speaker 2: 4:11:34

This is my first European conference, as our listeners have been hearing throughout these interviews, but I'm a big fan of Focus Right, especially the US, and one of the things that I've always loved about Focusrite for the last 10 years is that they have really connected with the startup ecosystem and given startups the opportunity to come in present, often on the first day, which is when you're at, and then find out on day two.

Speaker 2: 4:11:53

But a lot of people actually myself included would always come to the conference to be a part of the startup pitches, because you would see the latest technology and innovations and figure out the companies to partner with. So, whether you win two hours from now, you've already won by being here and getting on that stage. I want to bring Kyle into the conversation now, too, to understand a bit more about your background and how you decided to create this company after some previous success, and I know you're based in San Francisco. So tell us a little bit about your background, kyle, and how you decided to create this company after some previous success, and I know you're based in San Francisco, so tell us a little bit about your background, kyle, and how you created this company.

Speaker 17: 4:12:25

Yeah, as the reformed tech bro. Actually, I don't even know if I'd be reformed, but coming from a startup background, so doing a product at Yelp and Coupa and Apartment List in San Francisco, I had the classic tech guy hubris of looking at the travel space and saying, oh, I'm going to reinvent group travel planning, which is the. I think Eric Blackford said it best when he's like I've seen so many pics broken on the rock of group travel planning. So that's where we started in 2012, the first time going to a Focus ride, and it's built. You know, use that product to start talking to our customers and understanding what people are looking for. And we found that they were looking for suites. And then Las Vegas was our biggest market. So we went around Las Vegas and said, hey, can we get your suites? And then Las Vegas was our biggest market. So we went around Las Vegas and said, hey, can we get your suites? And they were like, absolutely not slammed our doors in their faces, but one hotel did let us in.

Speaker 17: 4:13:27

And then eventually we met Blair when she was over at Caesars and then later on, when she was at the Venetian, she opened up the whole concept of like, hey, connecting rooms are. You know we have every suite here connects. We need to sell these and like. So that became our business. And then so we started doing connecting rooms.

Speaker 17: 4:13:46

We powered it for Hilton and so that was the last decade was doing connecting rooms, which is a very odd passion, but it is something. As you know somebody who travels with kids, it's important to me. But then Blair and I, surviving a global pandemic together, decided to start building this, where it's the traversing AI as a result of all the different things that we've built, all the technology, but being used in a way that directly benefits our hotel partners. We're not a brand that anyone is ever going partners we're not looking to. You know we're not a brand that anyone is ever going to hear. Unless you work at a hotel. You know we will be quietly in the background just making sure that when you call the hotel, they answer and everything works.

Speaker 2: 4:14:31

I'm going to go back to Blair because I want to make sure that all of our listeners know, when you think about hospitality, what type of clients would fit the profile for utilizing Traversing.

Speaker 12: 4:14:43

That's a great question. Anyone that has a contact center, anyone that has a need for innovation, that is struggling with, maybe abandonment rate, with retention in their call center today, with answering the phone, that struggles with bookings directly. If any of that resonates, those are the people that need to pick up the phone and call, send us an email, go to our website. It's a very easy thing to say I want to learn more and it's an easy thing to adopt to say let's try it and see if it works.

Speaker 2: 4:15:12

One more question for each of you, given that you are running a leading tech company in this travel space. What do you think is one of the big trends you're paying attention to, and it would almost be a prediction over the next year, when we see each other again, maybe in San Diego later this year or back again in Europe next year? Obviously, ai is a big theme, but within that, if there's one specific application or area, what excites you most? What are, kind of, one of your big trends you're paying attention to in 2025?

Speaker 12: 4:15:40

Yes, it's so funny. I just asked the same exact question to somebody else earlier. I love this. I love it. You know, I think AI is such a big box, right. If we were to look back five years ago, covid is the big trend and now, five years later, it's AI, right? And how do you define that? I think what we're looking at right now and the big thing that's transitioned, has been the launch of an open AI, chat, gpt, the cloud or the agentic models right, and so, as we're entering into this MCP space, I think that's really going to change the idea of Google and saying, oh, I'm going to Google it. Well, I think that's going away. And I actually heard it on this trip. I took a gondola ride over to Manjute earlier this weekend and a daughter said to her father when he was asking about an architect builder oh, just ask ChatGPT. It's not Google any longer, right, that's not the norm, and I think that's probably one of the biggest trends. How do we apply that into travel?

Speaker 12: 4:16:44

That's something that we've been trying to ingest and I think that we've seen some of the bigger box players, like your Expedia's, your bookings, that are already getting into this space, but it's the hotel partners that need to really pay attention to how do we get in there, and I think that's something that we can also help with too.

Speaker 2: 4:17:03

Yeah, I think that's a really insightful observation, and I think one of the things that certainly we all need to be paying more attention to is these real world applications of AI, which is one of the reasons I was keen to have you guys on this podcast and understand exactly how you're applying that technology, what market sector you're focused on and where you see the opportunity, because the reality is there's no shortage of opportunities for productivity gains, and we're so at the early stages.

Speaker 2: 4:17:19

When we did our AI summit last year, in February of 2024, we didn't realize at the time, but we were definitely ahead of the curve because even after we ran that first AI summit dedicated to travel, the number of people said to us afterwards like, oh, let's bring more marketing, they wanted to expand it. And this year, all everyone's talking about is AI and it's like, all of a sudden, the interest we're seeing. And it's like because people are actually starting to see the benefits and they want to see more examples of those benefits, not just the talk about what it could do, but what is it actually doing to transform industry now, how does it work right, how do I make it tangible to me and how do I make it apply?

Speaker 12: 4:17:55

And I think that's the real win. It's not just. I've been to so many conferences in the last few weeks. It's been a whirlwind, I swear. And I hear a lot of talk about what it can do. But how do I apply it to my business and what does that make? And I think for a lot of hotels specifically where I always felt the pain in the hospitality spaces, this is great information, now what? And it's taking that now what into real action.

Speaker 2: 4:18:19

For sure that's exciting. And then, Kyle, let's bring you back in for that exact same question what are you paying attention to? What excites you most about this next year? What are the big trends in travel that you're focused on?

Speaker 17: 4:18:31

Yeah, everything does change so fast. Like last, like November is when MCP even became a protocol. Like when Anthropic's like yeah, let's give tools to AI agents so they can operate in the real world. And Voice AI a year ago was nowhere near where it is today, where it's as good as any. It turns every call center agent into a podcaster in terms of like, that's been a big improvement to a podcaster. In terms of like it's, it's the so it's it's the. That's been a big improvement and it's the so yeah, I definitely see like, giving tools to agents being the most important thing, because you give the opportunity for surprise and delight, because it's in the hospitality space or in any space. Right now, everyone's using AI on the backend to make their jobs a little bit easier, but what it should do is make the customers stay even better, where I can have instantaneous response and help and something that really takes care of me.

Speaker 17: 4:19:25

And because of that, I'd say, a year from now, that windowless room in the back of hotels that currently houses their call center, it's not going to have people in it anymore. Those people are going to be out on the floor talking to the guests and actually interacting. I don't think there's going to have people in it anymore. Those people are going to be out on the floor talking to the guests and actually interacting. I don't think there's going to be a human-operated call center in a year at hotels. There's just no reason and those people can now be delighting the guests and giving them in-person experiences, Because hotels just don't have enough people and there's certainly not enough people on the floor. Get them out of that window, that very dark, windowless room.

Speaker 2: 4:20:03

That is a huge shift, a massive shift for so many travel companies that have relied on contact centers. So let's make sure all of our listeners can find out more information about Traversing. Obviously, the main website is traversingai, but what would be the best ways to connect with you, kyle?

Speaker 17: 4:20:20

and also to follow up with you, Blair, Speaking of windowless rooms.

Speaker 17: 4:20:21

That's where I belong and I should just be making things. So contact Blair for sure. She is the hospitality part of the whole thing. I will go happily back to my hole after this and just make stuff for hotels, which is what I enjoy, but yeah, blair's out there at all these events. So if you're coming to these hospitality events, look for her, she's there. Sometimes I'm there reluctantly, but it is actually enjoyable to come to Focus right and some of these events that are great. But yeah, look for Blair, she's out.

Speaker 2: 4:20:55

That's great. Thank you, kyle, and it's Blair McCoy, m-c-c-o-y, which, for those of you typing it into LinkedIn right now and looking to connect with you, that's probably one of the best ways, and Blair B-L-A-I-R-E Any other ways that you'd like to highlight for people to follow up and connect with you, or social channels, newsletters.

Speaker 12: 4:21:14

What else you guys got going on. They else you guys got going on. They can email me directly. If you're hearing this podcast. Please email me directly at blaire B-L-A-I-R-E at traversingai. I would love to hear from you and help.

Speaker 2: 4:21:26

Awesome. Well, it's great to meet you both. I'm glad we finally connected in person, blair, and I look forward to seeing your success and hopefully having you guys back as part of our AI Summit later this year. I now have the opportunity to speak to Alex Farmer, who is the chief commercial officer at Nazaza, and he is actually on his way to Toronto later tonight, but before he heads off, we're having a chance to sit down here in Barcelona at Focusrite. Welcome, alex, great to have you on Travel Trends.

Speaker 2: 4:21:54

It's a pleasure to be here, my friend, first-time caller, long-time listener. I appreciate that Alex was telling me how he's been enjoying the episodes and I certainly appreciate that it's nice to meet people that obviously enjoy travel trends and have some context coming into these conversations. So let's start off by telling everyone a bit about Nazaza, the company that you are working with, and your background in the travel space.

Speaker 23: 4:22:12

Certainly so. My background in the travel space starts at Nazaza actually. So I've been with the company, as you say, for two and a half years. I joined as our chief customer officer, now also responsible for sales and marketing, and come from the tech space. So I'm one of those kind of what am I? Somebody that is bringing a different, maybe, mindset to folks that have been in the travel sector for a very long time. So I'm kind of a non-invited guest in some forums.

Speaker 23: 4:22:36

Let's say Well, an industry that's in need of disruption in so many different ways? Yes, yes indeed, and maybe we get into that today. But yeah, my background's tech. I grew up in San Francisco and have been in London for 12 years. Nazaza we are a packaging platform, so that means we help tour operators, otas and airlines do packaging better and almost exclusively dynamically. So they're taking individual content sources and putting them in simple cash flight plus hotel offerings, or all the way to your most complex tailor made B2B, you know, agent driven 1721 day tours. So anything from simple to complex B2B, b2c if it's two travel products in the same basket or more, nazaza can help power that.

Speaker 2: 4:23:15

Cool and just for our listeners who are multitasking Nazaza is N-E-Z-A-S-A and obviously you have the nazazacom, if people want to check that out. So tell us a little bit about the reasons you came to Focusrite this year, because I know it's your very first Focusrite let alone, not in the US.

Speaker 2: 4:23:32

This is the very first Focusrite ever for you and obviously we're here in Europe together. It makes sense. You're based in London, but we've seen a lot of Americans that are coming across for this conference. Tell us a little bit what brought you to the conference this year.

Speaker 23: 4:23:44

Yeah, I mean, I think now is an unprecedented I'm sure other guests are saying the same thing, but now is a really unprecedented time for change. I don't need to break any news that AI is really transforming the travel sector. So I think it's more important than ever to especially get a lot of technology players together to talk about how we can help travel brands weather that storm, and a lot of the talks today and yesterday have been about exactly that topic and I feel you know, coming from the software industry, it feels now that there's more consensus in travel. Finally, if I may, that we need to partner and bring in really good technology to keep pace with other industries and consumer demands, and I think that consensus is growing. And now the next question. Obviously that's the easy part how the hell you do? It is the complicated part, and I think learning from others, and here especially with some really good speakers, has been particularly impactful.

Speaker 2: 4:24:35

Yeah, I've heard a lot of great feedback from a number of the sessions. I know there's quite a few on AI. What have been some of the standouts for you so far? Obviously, we're having this conversation kind of midway through day two, so there's still lots of great content today and tomorrow. But yeah, what have been some of the standouts from today and what else are you looking forward to to supply?

Speaker 23: 4:24:50

right. So I don't want to get too in the weeds here, but as a packaging platform, you know, you can think of us. I'll share my non-travel background by really kind of making a strange analogy. Now, you know, if you think of a Shopify example, where you're an e-commerce layer, Shopify sells stuff and you know consumers used to doing online shopping because they can buy a shirt, they can buy shoes, they can buy a pair of trousers all in the same basket. That doesn't really exist, with a lot of OTAs, tour operators they're just trying to figure it out.

Speaker 23: 4:25:24

But, uniquely, if you're an online e-commerce company, you have access to your own warehouse, right. So you know where all the products are at the certain time and you own them. So it's easy to put three things in a box and send it to somebody's house. But with our supply problem, you have, you know, a boat tour that's completely disconnected and off the internet, but it's special and wants to be accessed. And then you have hotel API standards that are completely disparate, and the way they map the fact that you have a microwave in the room is different for every hotel across the world, right? So it's such a an interesting problem that we've been talking for a really long time about solving with better API standardization.

Speaker 23: 4:25:58

What excites me now is the conversation actually is can we just skip that step and can we take a quantum leap forward by using AI to parse plain text data in whatever structure, to get a much more standard view of the quote? Let's call it package supply chain. So there were some interesting talks about how we can kind of you know, there was a way to digitalize as an industry where we kind of go through it as in the long hard work that other industries have already figured out. But now I think there's a really unique opportunity that we're hearing about at the event to take a quantum leap and skip all that stuff that would take us three, five years to get past. So it gives me a lot of inspiration and positivity about the future of travel and travel technology as well.

Speaker 2: 4:26:38

Yeah, and it's one of the things that FocusRite's always done particularly well, at least from my view.

Speaker 2: 4:26:42

This is the first time in Europe and I've been to the US conference a number of years. Technology has always been a big strength distribution, certainly, partnerships, and specifically the large OTAs, you know, airlines, hotels and car rentals even even though there's not been a lot of car rentals here this year, but nevertheless those are kind of the big sectors that USA typically focus on. There's a lot more niche players, interestingly, here in Europe. But I want to get into a bit more about Nazaza and exactly what you guys do and how it relates to you being here, because, having had a look at your website and understanding the Trip Builder solution and some of these, like you have AI, co-pilots and the whole dynamic packaging these are certainly all the things that tour operators, otas, dmcs they're very much in need of, because so many of these travel companies are not technology companies. It's not been their strength. So tell us a little bit more about the types of clients you work with and the types of services that you offer?

Speaker 23: 4:27:39

Certainly so. We work with some of the largest OTAs, tour operators and airlines in the world. We're very much an enterprise-focused, mid-sized and enterprise-focused organization. Our biggest customers are probably TUI Explorer, which is owned by Schoensland Dare Tour. We also work outside of Europe with other large organizations as well, but those are probably our largest customers and really the name of the game for them was about digitalizing how they sell complex itineraries. You're right, these companies aren't tech companies and I also think that there is an element of I think there's a growing self-awareness of those companies that they're not tech companies, which didn't always exist, to be clear, and that's been so. They want to partner with companies like Nazaza to help them digitalize how they sell complex tours.

Speaker 23: 4:28:27

Digitalization used to be getting a PDF from a DMC and downloading the pictures and loading it onto an online contact us form, but we can obviously do a lot more than that. So what we're doing for these organizations? Maybe I'll take the TUI example. Tui, of course, they sell in many different markets in Europe, but they also have their own DMCs through TUI amusement. So digitalizing individual contracts for us. Excuse the example there's a hotel in Peru. They have a contract with that hotel in Peru, the DMC that's based there. Somebody sat in an office in Germany wants to buy a trip that happens to take a stop in Lima, right, and being able to dynamically build out that itinerary from all these individual content sources, swapping in and out dynamic live supply with static rates from the DMC, is really helping them optimize margin, increasing basket size and ultimately increasing conversion, Because one of the other trends that I didn't talk about in your previous question is the desire for consumer personalization.

Speaker 23: 4:29:15

I can go to ChatGPT and I can get an amazing itinerary, but I can't book it. So one of the other things that our product helps customers do is take the output of AI generated itineraries with our AI planner co-pilot and turn that into a live, bookable basket pulled from all of these individual supply sources dynamically. So you know just to conclude on the TUI example, there's a lot of you know digitalization of their full supply chain. But, most importantly, they've optimized their margin significantly because they're not just selling a static fixed tour, they're being able to swap in components based on price, they're able to mark up appropriately and they're able to drive conversion because they can personalize the itinerary to the consumer's need or desire.

Speaker 2: 4:29:53

The interesting example you shared with Tui I found fascinating because they're a large global player and they actually have put a lot of effort into becoming more of a technology company. I know they're putting a lot of effort in the AI I've met some of the team members there but this is where you can't do everything, and so you also, even if you're actually developing some of your strengths. Around technology, there's always this question of like buy or build, and the difficulty is always in the build, because, like, the cost can increase, the time scales get pushed back and then you may not have a product that is fit for purpose.

Speaker 23: 4:30:22

It's a bit of a false choice as well, because you can build a lot of stuff that makes sense for your specific organization, but you can also then bring in great partners to buy and build.

Speaker 23: 4:30:33

I think that's an important step that the travel industry needs to take. If I can use maybe an oversimplified example I've worked in tech my entire career the debate about do I buy a CRM or build one, it doesn't exist, because I'm not in the CRM business. I'm in the business of, in this example, selling travel technology. I think it's about time and I think we're getting there that we kind of get beyond that paradigm, because it's a paradigm that's plagued other vertical software, other software verticals a long time ago and they moved past it. Yeah Right, and, and travel is special, but I don't think it has to be different. So so I I'm I'm bullish on that, continuing that trend, continuing where there's better technology that serves more needs of these companies. So there's a more natural decision to bring in tech as opposed to go and build tech, because, at the end of the day, delivering memories for travelers versus building complex technology they're very different things.

Speaker 2: 4:31:31

Well, another thing just to add to that too. When you're talking about buy and build, obviously, one of the key things that, unfortunately, has been the case for a lot of travel companies is that there's nothing to buy that's off the shelf that actually solves the unique needs of your business, and so, although they can rationalize the fact that they get stuck building things that they probably shouldn't be, because there isn't a solution Chicken and egg supply and demand.

Speaker 23: 4:31:52

So I warned you earlier, if I can break the fourth wall for a second, dan, that I can be long-winded. So I thought I was going to get into that point. I thought you know what, stop, because you're going to go into it. So you brought me back there. I'm glad you did. I was talking about this with somebody last night at a dinner. You're so spot on. I talk about sometimes in the travel sector. It's challenging to even.

Speaker 23: 4:32:16

But there's other organizations that will happen to sell you single components and do some flavor of simple packaging, whereas, nazaza, we say we do simple to complex combining products. We're a packaging platform, but that's not a category that exists like CRM, right. So it's in some ways because technology is still relatively early, and I would argue the reverse is true of what you said as well, which is that because so many organizations were still building their own tech, the industry didn't then have a product market fit to go gallop toward to say this is actually a category that's now established. So you have this very Frankenstein, complex Venn diagram with a million circles, right? So my platform overlaps with somebody else's this much and there's something over here and something over here.

Speaker 23: 4:32:56

And then how is a travel company that's just deciding fine, we should actually buy stuff, not build it navigate that landscape right? So I think you know there's these iterative cycles of improvement and stabilization in the market. I think we're getting there, but you're absolutely right, that's one of the big blockers to saying, yes, I know, I need a packaging platform. A lot of these people don't know it exists, right, exists. So there's a market education piece, which is, of course, then slows down innovation as well.

Speaker 2: 4:33:24

Well, and there's so many different the scale of different organizations. Tui is obviously a great case study and an example, but they're also a large enterprise organization and a lot of the travel industry is still fragmented and there's still a lot of small to medium-sized businesses. So the other thing I'd like to ask you too, just on this topic of understanding Nazaza and what brings you here and sort of the path that you're on, is that what is an ideal customer profile for your organization? What would be your guidance to listeners? When would they actually be at a point to be able to engage in an organization like this?

Speaker 23: 4:33:54

So it's a really important question and I think, if I can maybe be very transparent about our journey we had a bad answer to that two, three years ago and that was partly because the industry hadn't kind of wasn't in a place of maturity where it became clear there's different cycles of innovation in all tech verticals. You have software and then you have the kind of some people go upmarket, some people go downmarket, right, and I think we're now in the upmarket, downmarket phase, which is a good sign for industrial maturity, where Nizaza is an upmarket business. We have a powerful capability that requires a system administrator and it works for organizations. It's very API-centric, so we can solve the needs of the enterprise. Those needs are very different than the needs of a very small travel agency or tour operator. It's a small specialist that's doing $2 million in revenue per year.

Speaker 23: 4:34:40

So to directly and back to, what we were doing poorly three years ago is we were saying yes to everybody and then the system was great, it did some nice things for these companies, but then the roadmap went like this and do I serve you or do I serve you and actually I serve no one? So making a very conscious decision to say look, we have the functional strength to power large organizations. That's where we've gone. There's other players that are kind of close to our Venn diagram, to use the analogy, that have gone the other way, and they have great solutions as well, which is a good sign for the industry. To answer your question, if you're a tour operator, airline or OCA that's doing 20 million or more in revenue from a packaging point of view, that's where Nazaza becomes very relevant. You can work with smaller organizations. I think you'll find that it's probably too much functional, it's too much kit for the solution, the problem you're trying to solve.

Speaker 2: 4:35:24

Right, got it. And then, just in terms of the verticals that you're focused on, just give us an overview. I know I've mentioned DMCs and tour operators.

Speaker 23: 4:35:42

Is that kind of your unique niche. But so two to three years ago we were almost exclusively working with kind of offline itinerary sellers trying to digitalize. That would be your traditional travel agency, your DMC, your tour operator that were selling complex packages offline. We were helping them bring that online for either agents or B2C consumers to directly transact is. We've seen a shift now where airlines and OTAs are trying to move from selling single components to selling the next best thing, the bigger basket, which is at some point a simple flight plus hotel. But a lot of OTAs, for example, can do that now.

Speaker 23: 4:36:07

So then it's a race to the bottom on price. You're selling the same seat on the plane and the same hotel room. So how do you differentiate? And the next frontier we see is actually trying to sell multi-destination, multi-center, all digitally, all online. So really we kind of straddle both business types. Now we call it online first, tour operating, and that's really where the packaging platform that we deliver can play and that's a real shift we've seen in industry and we've tried to kind of keep pace with that change.

Speaker 2: 4:36:33

It's great. And one other question I wanted to ask you too, is that when you think about the organization you're a part of and you look at the travel industry and we're here at this Focusrite conference in Europe, where do you think the industry is headed in the next year and like one prediction or one of the big trends you're focusing on, maybe as it relates to the company in your role, but what are some of the things that you're paying attention to that might be of interest to our audience?

Speaker 23: 4:36:54

So yeah, ai is the obvious answer, but let's be a little bit more specific. I think the interesting thing that we're seeing and we're actually developing something to solve is the AI-generated itinerary space. Let me explain what that means. There's a lot of great startups out there and, of course, the big players like ChatGPT and Perplexity are doing something similar, where they're selling travel products using AI. Right, but right now, if you go to ChatGPT, it'll give you a good itinerary, right? Okay, that's great, but that removed my 25 browser tab experience and it made it one browser tab, but when it comes to transacting and checking out, I still have to open up 25 browser tabs to buy single components, which kind of ends the convenience of that AI-generated commerce journey. So what we're working on, in partnership with some of our customers, is the ability to take the output of whichever AI you use. It could be our AI planner co-pilot or it could be OpenAI, whatever you get an itinerary and then it will read the output of that the plain English output or any language output of the itinerary that's generated and then it will dynamically build a basket from all of the connected single components. So it will allow our OTA and tour operating customers to play in this AI-centric space. Right, because instead of you know, chatgpt or I think Perplexity was the one that now sells hotel rooms. I think it is Instead of buying a hotel room, then buying a flight and then buying an activity, there's a place now for tour operators or package travel sellers to say let's make it even more convenient. You can transact with one browser tab through a trusted brand, which actually will make packaging even more relevant and maybe bridge that generational gap we talk about between DIY, build it myself, versus a digital agency or tour operator package experience that can be transacted in a single basket. So that's something we're really focused on. Take that one step further.

Speaker 23: 4:38:42

I'm also interested to see how, you know, agentic AI changes packaging. We talk a lot at Zaza about the connected trip, which is essentially taking individual components and putting them in a single basket instead of your more traditional fixed package. And you know, agentic AI could go and buy individual components automatically in a year or two. So that whole pitch I just gave you about doing single basket checkout might become irrelevant in a year, but I still want the you know, the trust of working with the tour operator. If something goes wrong with one of my baskets. They're going to fix it. So actually does tour operating have an even more relevant place to play in this agentic AI future? Who knows? I'll see you in two years on this podcast so we can look at how wrong I was. Dan, let's do it.

Speaker 2: 4:39:22

We'll be at AGI by that point.

Speaker 23: 4:39:23

Yeah, exactly yeah. We won't even exist, matt, or we'll be at the bar. This podcast will be producing itself.

Speaker 4: 4:39:29

What a dream.

Speaker 2: 4:39:29

Yeah, it's a real pleasure to meet you, and I also just especially when you get to connect with someone that listens to the podcast. That's obviously means a lot to me, as you know, but I also want to make sure that all of our listeners can find out more about you and connect with Nazaza, so tell everyone what the best ways are for people to reach out, so I'm highly obnoxious on LinkedIn.

Speaker 23: 4:39:50

So you know we can connect on LinkedIn if you want. Be careful what you wish for. I got a lot of opinions none of them very intelligent, as I'm sure you had learned from this episode. But also you know our website. That's the simple answer. We're pretty active there as well, so look forward to continuing the conversation.

Speaker 2: 4:40:06

That's awesome, alex, great to meet you.

Speaker 23: 4:40:07

I look forward to keeping in touch, yes indeed.

Speaker 2: 4:40:14

Thanks for the opportunity. I now have the chance to speak to one of the startup entrepreneurs, the co-founder of Vidario, adrian Villabruna. He presented yesterday, and he's one of this new crop of startups that are leveraging video content, and so I was keen to have him on the podcast to explain a bit more about who he is and what he does. And I was also keen because his other co-founder is Tony Karn, who's a friend of mine, worked at Intrepid for many years and he runs the Everything in AI website podcast, and he'll be part of our AI Summit later this year. So, adrian, tell us about Vidario, tell us about this company that you started with Tony and what it is you guys do.

Speaker 15: 4:40:50

Sure, Well, maybe start a little bit earlier than that. I'm pretty fresh at travel, so I started two years ago actually, when Gen AI came out. I was one of the first that built Chennai Eye products in travel, but it was more of a hobby. So I don't know if any one of you remember, but I was at a pitch with Christian Watts on his show and I pitched AI Adventures. It was an AI trip planner back two years ago, but ever since, what disturbed me was that everything was very static, it was all image-based and it was not so immersive that I wanted it to be.

Speaker 15: 4:41:26

And I was looking for, you know, options to source video and I couldn't find any. And this is really how Vidario started. The first idea it was it was an API-based video content library, but pretty much we figured out it's hard to monetize. I didn't have the creators, but Tony got very interested as well. We have been talking since day one pretty much when I built AI Adventures and yeah, so it happens that he had a couple of ideas and we said let's do this venture together and we iterated since then. It was a year ago.

Speaker 2: 4:42:01

That's exciting, and tell us how the name came about and what does it represent or mean.

Speaker 15: 4:42:06

Okay, that's a good one, Because many people spell it differently or pronounce it differently, but it's born in ChatGPT, so I looked for a short name that the domain is still available. Yeah, I looked for a short name that the domain is still available. Yeah, and something has. Yeah, no, I asked JetGPT and Videre is Latin for to see and we just put the O in the end for video and so we got to see video, right.

Speaker 2: 4:42:30

Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 15: 4:42:31

Nobody really knows.

Speaker 2: 4:42:32

Yeah, that's cool.

Speaker 15: 4:42:36

And then tell us a little bit about the journey ahead for Videreo? Yeah, I just want to. I mean, it's a three-sided marketplace, really, right, so it's. We have the brands on one side, we have the creator. That's our main customer and then the end customer. It's B2B2C, it's the one who makes the purchasing decision, which is the traveler. I think we have proven interest from brands. That's covered. We have a lot of interest from creators. We know their pain points Right now. For the next three to six months, it's really to work with the creators together in our core group to iterate the product to make it even more shareable, even more immersive, even more cool, so that we can up the conversion rate and that more people are buying and the creators can make more money. That's really that.

Speaker 2: 4:43:18

And then tell us a little bit about video content and how it's driving travel booking, Because I think obviously this is a major trend. You kindly attended my World Travel Market Talk last November and one of the five trends that I'd highlighted there which was an amalgamation of our audience, so I just want to highlight it's not these were not necessarily my top five, these were kind of the list of top five that came from all the interviews I had on the podcast, and one of the recurring themes, of course, is short-form video and just how powerful and how important that is. So obviously you know that major trend. But when we actually look at Vidario the state of the industry at the moment, what do you think is? How important is video content today to travel brands and what do you think the future of that looks like, especially obviously with how you, I guess, prefer companies to start working with you?

Speaker 15: 4:44:05

Yeah, so we are video only, right, so we use it as a conversion enabler or accelerator, so we don't even have images on our platform. It's really video only. But our main use case is not selling me the content or licensing it. We could do that, but we haven't really gone down this path and we got some interest from some brands who want that. But, yeah, for this I think we need more density, we need more volume. But, yeah, what I'm seeing in the future is probably I think Christian Watts also mentioned this that you have on one side your video content where you see the experience. On the other, you have the chatbot where you talk through the experience and get all your questions and answers before you make a booking.

Speaker 2: 4:44:48

Yeah, yeah. Well, given your background not being in travel but also being in technology I know you're focused with Vidario, on video, but what are some of the other aspects or elements of AI that you think the travel industry can really benefit from?

Speaker 15: 4:45:02

So my background I worked at Amazon, I led a data team and, funnily enough, it was in an organization called product classification. So what it meant is making sure every transaction worldwide is taxed correctly, and what this really is is classifying a product, and this is what we are doing with Vidario. Again, we use AI to detect the location from a video, we use meta tags. Our core is really finding the best product that matches to a video, making it a very low lift for a creator to get started and to start selling. So that's kind of the translation.

Speaker 2: 4:45:37

Yeah, yeah, fair enough. Well, I want to make sure all of our listeners can connect with you. Find out more information about Vidario. Of course, I've got the website here, which many of our listeners might have already been familiar with, and you mentioned it at the very beginning. So, since you've got the brand and you've got the com, so V-I-D-E-R-E-O vedariocom, what are some of the other ways that people can connect with you, with Tony, learn more and partner with you?

Speaker 15: 4:46:05

Yeah, I think the best thing is really to send us an email or connect on LinkedIn. So my LinkedIn is Adrian Villabruna. I think I'm probably the only one with this combination. Or hello at vedariocom, and yeah, happy to chat.

Speaker 2: 4:46:17

Yeah, that's great. Well, thanks a lot for joining us in this special highlight episode from Focusrite, and I hope the rest of the conference goes well for you, and we'll look forward to having you guys back as part of our AI Summit later this year.

Speaker 15: 4:46:28

Awesome. Yeah, thanks for having me.

Speaker 2: 4:46:32

I now have the pleasure to speak to Alex Tremes, who's the CEO and founder of Welcome Pickups. I've heard a lot about him. Over the last couple of days, a number of my colleagues have been meeting with you. I finally have the opportunity to sit down and speak to you now directly. Alex, welcome to Travel Trends.

Speaker 11: 4:46:44

Yeah, thank you for having me, Dan, and it's great to be here.

Speaker 2: 4:46:48

Of course, and I know you're from Athens, you're Greek, and it's actually one of the most beautiful parts of the world. You clearly don't have to travel too far to get here to Barcelona.

Speaker 11: 4:46:56

Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2: 4:46:57

But tell us about Welcome Pickups and what you guys do.

Speaker 11: 4:46:59

Yeah, yeah. So Welcome Pickups. We're taking this very boring component of travel, but necessary, which is transfers so point A to point B, from airports to hotels, from point A to point B, whatever that might be, and we're trying to make it a travel experience right. So we want to make it seamless, personalized, friendly, stress-free. All that, and the way we do it is we work with individual drivers.

Speaker 11: 4:47:33

We work with very few drivers and we're serving millions of travelers, so the idea is that the moment you land somewhere, your trip starts there and then so you have a very easy experience you meet someone at the gate. He speaks English, he will tell you about where you arrived, what you can do. He has all the data about you, because we collect a lot of data. He has the airplane data, the hotel's data we collect our own set of data and then during that first hour, he will guide you on what you should avoid, what you should do and all that and he becomes like your friend on the ground, in a sense. And then you can book him for sightseeing so you can see the highlights of the city or go outside the city.

Speaker 2: 4:48:16

Interesting. Okay, so it's more than just the transfer.

Speaker 11: 4:48:19

It's more, it's taking that transfer and putting a lot of quality in it without increasing the price. So it's a fair price service, so it's a value for money service. And we're in 120 countries now. Wow, 400 destinations, almost serving 3.5 million travelers. Yeah, and yeah, we have a model where we bring travelers either through B2C, direct or through partnerships right. So on the partnerships level, we work a lot with travel agents, with hotels, with vacation rentals, with airlines, with big partners like bookingcom, tripcom.

Speaker 2: 4:48:58

Fascinating and I was on your website and for our listeners who are multitasking at home, it's WelcomePickupscom and when I was preparing for our interview, I was looking at the transfers, sightseeing and the guides. But specifically the sightseeing rides is what really intrigued me because, having worked in the multi-day tour space for many years with coach travel, you've always had a driver and a guide, yeah, but clearly when you have a smaller vehicle, you need someone that can do both.

Speaker 11: 4:49:21

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2: 4:49:22

So tell us a little bit about actually how you recruit and hire for someone. Because I get the transfer side of the business the sightseeing part just really intrigued me because I would love nothing more, with my family, to be able to actually not just have the transfer but actually have someone that can actually point out the give us a sense of the city as we arrive in the destination. So tell us a little bit how you recruit and hire for those roles.

Speaker 11: 4:49:44

Yeah. So we again, like we work with individual drivers, we control a lot the experience, we are the biggest part of their revenue, or their sole part of their revenue, and there is a very difficult, let's say, application process where you have to go through and then, once you're in, we control and monitor a lot of things about you and if you're good, you're getting more rides, you're getting a better program and all that. So you're incentivized to do good and we have the optionality to kick you out if you're not doing what you have to do. And the reason is we need few drivers for a million of travelers. So for 3.5 million travelers served this year, we'll have about 10,000 drivers. So each driver is highly utilized and that works.

Speaker 2: 4:50:34

When I was looking at some of the bios on your website, you've got Raul, who is 100% Catalan. Of course we're here in Barcelona and his whole thing is his love of showing Barcelona's hidden gems to travelers. So tapas places, and this is where you want a friend in destination. That's why I was very curious about how do you bring these people on board, because that's a really unique part of your business and I think, what has the most value.

Speaker 11: 4:50:58

Yeah, part of your business and I think what has the most value yeah, like again, welcome thing is as a friend on the ground, right. So you're traveling somewhere. You might not have a friend or you might, and whenever you have a friend, like, it's much better because you see, you get more, you know at ease, you get more information, more authenticity, all of that and that's what we're trying to plug. So, wherever you go either that's a random place, you're traveling from the US or UK to Buenos Aires or Bangkok or Bali or Athens or Cairo you have that service, you have that peace of mind that you have a friend waiting.

Speaker 11: 4:51:31

So, that's the idea, and the way we recruit is like once we onboard like this small pool of drivers, then these drivers bring us a lot of other drivers. We have a lot of referrals because it's a very good business for them too. They're mini entrepreneurs, they're growing their business, they're making a lot of money. So they want more drivers to come in, and we're very selective. Less than 4-3% of drivers who apply get into the system.

Speaker 2: 4:51:58

It's a really fascinating business. I'm really intrigued by welcome pickups and what you guys do, so clearly there's a lot of benefits of being at Focusrite Europe. Tell us a little bit of what brought you here this year.

Speaker 11: 4:52:08

Yeah, I mean Focusrite for us is a great conference because you meet the right people, the executives, and because 50% of our business is through partnerships and you can actually plug welcome, pick tickets in whatever business that is. You know you might be a travel agent or travel advisor or like a hotel or vacation or whatnot, or a big OTA or you know. So here you meet the right people and then you can push some partnerships down the line, you know, in the following months. And yeah, focusrite Europe, focusrite US, is a great place to do that.

Speaker 2: 4:52:43

Well, another thing I'm interested to ask you too is some of the highlights of actually being here. Since we are having this conversation on day three towards the end of the conference. What have been some of the most valuable sessions or some of the insights you've had over the last couple of days?

Speaker 11: 4:52:55

Yeah, I'm that type of person that, uh, never goes into the room, uh, to hear the session. I'm always outside meeting people like you know, um, you know doing my list, like going through my list and all that. So, um, again, this year was was amazing. You know 40, 50, 60 meetings of of very good, um, you know, quality meetings that a lot of things might come out of this. Nice dinners after Focusrite with selected people this is the part that I like about Focusrite networking versus the content.

Speaker 2: 4:53:30

One of the things I'm keen to ask you is some of the trends that you're seeing and that you're paying attention to, whether to grow your business or what's happening in the travel industry this year. So take us through some of the things that you are focusing on as you continue to grow your business, or what's happening in the travel industry this year. So take us through some of the things that you are focusing on as you continue to grow your business.

Speaker 11: 4:53:41

Yeah, I think the trends in our side is anything that happens with AI and driverless. Like you have the robotaxis getting bigger in the US and then you have a lot of AI applications that you can be doing. So from our side, we see the driver as an advantage because that person is becoming that friend on the ground, but we need to empower that person to have as many data that he can have about you. When you arrive, right and us as a business and ground transportation is in that unique place where you have the airline data, the hotel data, you can collect your own set of data. In that unique place where you have the airline data, the hotel data, you can collect your own set of data in that first hour and, based on this data, you can guide the traveler through his trip. Right, you are the first and last hour of the trip. You have the data. So you can do a lot of things with AI now collecting the data, personalizing experience a lot that you couldn't be doing. It would be too manual some time ago.

Speaker 2: 4:54:43

Yeah, and then AI. I just want to ask you one more question on that, because clearly it has been such a big topic here. We've got our AI Summit happening later this year and certainly a big focus for us is highlighting actual real-world use cases of AI. So when you mention how you leverage AI in that scenario, give us a bit more detail so that our listeners can understand how companies like yours are leveraging that technology.

Speaker 11: 4:55:06

Yeah, I mean think of you arrive in Barcelona. Let's say you're coming from New York. What we collect is like is it your first time in Barcelona? Have you been here before? How many days are you staying? What are you time in Barcelona, is it, you know? Have you been here before? How many days are you staying? You know what are you interested in doing.

Speaker 11: 4:55:22

All these things are very unique to then, you know, suggest the right things for you to be doing in Barcelona. And once you build this connection with the driver in the beginning, you're more, you know, prone to listen to that advice and you know AI is helping a lot on then, you know, pulling the right supply to suggest the right things to you on the other side. So, apart from the practical uses of AI and customer support and revenue optimization and all that, there's a lot of things that could be doing in actually personalizing experience and making a much better experience for everyone and tweaking it. Because the way we see it is like if you are traveling for a conference, you have a different need as a traveler versus if you're traveling for a music festival, if you're traveling with your family, if you're traveling, and you have different needs, different like things you want to do, maybe different free time to do that. So it's very important now that we get more and more into that personalization of Trip For sure.

Speaker 2: 4:56:28

No, it's very exciting and obviously your business is just clearly going from strength to strength and I'm sure many of those meetings you've had are going to turn into exciting partnership opportunities. I know a few of my colleagues were in those meetings with you and keen to meet you here and partner with you, and I want to make sure all of our listeners have the same opportunity. So, alex, I've mentioned the website, but tell all of our listeners how best to connect with you and for partnership opportunities.

Speaker 11: 4:56:51

Yeah, you can reach out on LinkedIn or through the website, like on our commercial team. It's very easy to reach us. We're very nice people, very friendly people, clearly.

Speaker 2: 4:57:02

You got that Greek hospitality man. Yeah, very welcoming, yeah, hence the name.

Speaker 16: 4:57:08

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 4:57:08

That's awesome. Great to meet you here, alex. I look forward to connecting with you again in San Diego and have a great summer and look forward to hearing your continued success, thank you, dan, and I look forward to hearing your continued success.

Speaker 11: 4:57:18

Thank you, dan, thank you, and we're waiting for you in Greece for summer.

Speaker 2: 4:57:22

I now have a chance to speak to one of the startup competition winners, and this is the CEO and founder of Impersonality, which is Shlomi Beer. Shlomi, sounds like it was worth coming to Focusrite.

Speaker 13: 4:57:33

Yeah, definitely yeah. So we were approached by Focusrite to be part of the startup competition and pre-selected on the finals to come here. So they invited us. So that was great. And we pitched here on the first day and, yeah, we won yesterday on our category, so that was great.

Speaker 2: 4:57:59

Fantastic Congratulations. Yeah, great to have you here for that reason and also learn more about your business.

Speaker 13: 4:58:04

Yeah, I know I mean what we help, right. For example, a lot of times you will see an ad in companies pretending to be other companies and then trying to defraud either users or the brands themselves or employees of the brand, and so there are different angles of this problem, of course, like especially the companies one and the user ones, but we tackled the company ones and, yeah, all kind of examples. Like you can search in Google for, let's say, british Airways, you see a phone number you think it's the phone number of the brand, right, and then you call but you're getting defrauded because it's a fake phone number, right, that someone pretended to put there as if it were the brand.

Speaker 2: 4:58:50

No, it's a fantastic concept. I mean, obviously you have a background, I assume, in technology and travel. Tell us a little bit about your background before founding this company.

Speaker 13: 4:58:57

Yeah, sure, yeah. So I'm the geeky, the tech guy, right, phd in computer science. But previously, yeah, I've been in many startups, so it's my third startup. Basically, we sold the startup to Agoda 12 years back, then spent a few years running the data business and later on, yeah, founding another company called Search Machines and exited that one. And, yeah, a year and a half back starting in Personali.

Speaker 2: 4:59:31

That's great, so you've already been in the travel industry.

Speaker 13: 4:59:33

Yeah, yeah, yeah, plenty of time, yeah, and flights and hotels especially.

Speaker 2: 4:59:38

Yeah, very cool and obviously you know the benefit of importance and of being at focus right, and so are you planning to be in San Diego later this year.

Speaker 13: 4:59:45

Yeah, hopefully. Yes, definitely, we are going. So part of what we won this competition we were invited to present in the WIT in Singapore, so we'll be there.

Speaker 2: 4:59:55

Fantastic.

Speaker 13: 4:59:56

Showing our solution and meeting more amazing people. And then the next one that will be in October, and then the next one will be in San Diego in November. Right, yeah. Hopefully we'll be there yeah, that's exciting.

Speaker 2: 5:00:10

Tell us a little bit about the journey ahead for Impersonate Ally. What are some of the major developments you're still focused on in 2025? I realize that you're a startup, so there's so much growth potential, but tell us where you're going to be focusing your efforts and and uh, what some of the you know big announcements you're going to be uh sharing over the course of the year.

Speaker 13: 5:00:28

Yeah, um, yeah. So we we launched last year. As I said, we've been extremely fortunate to see work with amazing brands already, like booking viator, um, pandora, like, not only in travel, but uh, flixbus and uh, and we are, we are growing like massively and uh in ahead. So we currently only cover certain types of platforms where the fraud is done, especially on ads. So we cover google and bing, and, and we are going to launch very soon Meta and Instagram and, of course, we are developing, as we speak, all our LLM capabilities. Right. A lot of the same fraud that is done today with search ads and social ads it's being done. It's starting to being done also with ChatGPT and the likes, and there's still early days, right, but these fraudsters, they leverage all the platforms. So we're developing our solution also there and in our roadmap it's to be an increasing our channel solution to more channels.

Speaker 2: 5:01:34

That's exciting. That's awesome. Well, I want to make sure our listeners can connect with you and find out more information. So what would be the best ways for people to learn more about Impersonally and connect with you too, Shlomi?

Speaker 13: 5:01:45

Yeah, so of course, we have our website impersonallyio, right. That's a great source. Everyone that wants to check. We have a free checker online. We have a free checker online so if you put your domain, you can, yeah, real-time check whether your domain is being hijacked by fraudsters through ads. So that's a cool way and you can get instant, like in minutes, some initial results and, of course, yeah, keeping up later up and, yeah, finding us through email or through the forums in the website will be, will be the best.

Speaker 2: 5:02:20

yes, very cool. I'm going to use that today. Actually, I've got a few other and I know some uh clients of ours that will certainly benefit from that as well, so it's exciting to meet you. I'm so glad you're here. Congratulations, congratulations again on your startup victory. So wish you every success in the year ahead and I look forward to seeing you again in san diego. Slomy, thanks for joining us.

Speaker 13: 5:02:37

Amazing. Thank you very much and thank you for having me and good luck, thank you.

Speaker 2: 5:02:43

Thanks so much for joining us on this special event spotlight of Focusrite Europe, recorded all live in Barcelona. I hope you enjoyed all these inspiring conversations. That got many valuable insights and benefits. I also just wanted to highlight that you can feel free to reach out to any of the speakers. I know they appreciate hearing from our listeners and you can find them all on LinkedIn. And don't forget, we are going to be at Focusrite in San Diego November 18th to 20th and we want you to join us. We have a special $250 discount for all of our listeners that you can access with the promo code Travel Trends Special 25. That's Travel TrendssSpecial25. You can go right to the Focusrite website to get your ticket or come to TravelTrendsPodcastcom for the information and the link to be able to go and get your ticket. As soon as you have that, send me an email danattraveltrendspodcastcom and we will schedule you in for an interview, because the full team will be there with me. You in for an interview because the full team will be there with me. We'll have melanie and katherine at the event, so we look forward to meeting many of you in person, some of you for the first time. That's always a thrill for me when our listeners come up and actually have a nice conversation just to say hello and give us some feedback about the show. I certainly welcome that by email anytime and hopefully see many of you in person.

Speaker 2: 5:03:56

Now, over the few weeks, we're going to be releasing a series of spotlight episodes for executives company spotlights as we prepare for season six of Travel Trends, which launches early September with our Captains of Industry theme. These are the executives that are really shaping the future of travel and we're also going to have five themes that are going to be the most important topics in the travel industry. So a lot to look forward to in season six and, of course, our AI Summit at the end of October. Focusrite is a media partner. You can get our tickets through them or you can come direct to Travel Trends podcast.

Speaker 2: 5:04:31

Either way, get your advanced tickets for the Travel Trends AI Summit. Virtually, you can attend from anywhere in the world. Even if you attend one session, it will have been worth it when you look at the lineup of speakers and the agenda and what we're going to cover to help everyone understand how AI is impacting the travel industry and what it means for your role and for your company. So join us for the AI Summit, get ready for season six, and thank you again to all of our guests for being a part of this special event spotlight from Focusrite Europe in Barcelona. Thanks again to the Focusrite team. We look forward to seeing you all soon in San Diego. And until our next episode, safe travels.