[Kerwin At AI Travel Pulse] Four Kinds of People at Every Travel Conference Right Now

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Hi AI Traveler,

I hope you are well today.

A slightly different format of the newsletter today.

I’ve been to a few conferences over the last few months, and I’ve realized that there are three—actually, four—very different mindsets when it comes to AI in travel. Let’s take a look and get your take.

The Angry Ones

Let's be honest about what happened. You built something. A website, a blog, a knowledgebase full of genuinely useful travel content — the kind that took years to develop, real relationships to source, and real money to maintain. And then, without asking, without paying, without even a courtesy email, AI companies crawled it, consumed it, and used it to build products that now compete with you for the attention of the very traveler you were trying to reach.

The frustration is legitimate, and the loss of advertising revenue is real.

I get it.

But here's where it gets complicated: being angry doesn't stop it, and it doesn't change what comes next, as the AI players are investing literally billions into the AI industry.

So what can you actually do?

A few things are worth knowing. The legal landscape is shifting — the New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft, and that case is slowly establishing that this isn't a settled question.

Several other publishers have followed. If you haven't reviewed your Terms of Service lately to explicitly address AI scraping, that's worth doing with a lawyer. You can also update your robots.txt file to block certain crawlers, though compliance is voluntary and enforcement is murky, and it may mean you won’t show up in AI searches, which you really want to do. AI Large Language Models (LLMs) is a new traffic source.

But the more interesting play — and the one I think gets underused — is leverage. Here's the uncomfortable truth: when AI models don't have good travel data, they make things up. They hallucinate hotel amenities. They invent opening hours. They confidently recommend restaurants that closed two years ago. Your content isn't just something they took — it's something they need. And a handful of smart travel publishers are starting to negotiate licensing deals and data partnerships rather than just filing complaints. That's a posture worth considering.

The anger is earned. The question is what you do with it?

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The Quiet Adopters

You know who you are.

You're using AI to draft the first pass on customer itineraries. You've got a ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini/Perplexity tab open right now that your CMO has never officially sanctioned. You figured out three months ago that it cuts your email response time in half, and you haven't told anyone because you're not sure if you're supposed to.

There are a lot of you. More than anyone in the industry is publicly admitting.

And honestly? The instinct to just get on with it rather than wait for a formal policy is understandable. The tools work. The competitive pressure is real. Why sit on your hands while your rivals are moving faster?

Here's the thing, though — shadow usage carries its own risks that are worth taking seriously. When your team pastes customer data into a consumer AI tool, that information may be used to train future models, depending on the platform and your settings. You should be very careful about posting identifiable customer information to LLMs.

When the AI drafts your brand content without guardrails, you get something that sounds vaguely like everyone else unless you train it to sound like you.

And when something goes wrong—a bad recommendation, a data issue, a brand moment that lands poorly—"we were using it informally" is not a great place to be.

The move here isn't to stop. It's to surface. The companies that are handling this best right now are the ones that took the shadow usage as a signal — their teams were clearly ready — and turned it into official policy. They picked tools, set guidelines, trained their people, and got ahead of it. The informal adoption became a competitive advantage instead of a liability waiting to happen.

If that's you, consider this your nudge to bring it upstairs.

Remember, it’s just another tool.

The Ones Just Waking Up

No judgment here at all. The honest truth is that most coverage of AI and travel has been either breathlessly optimistic or catastrophically doomsday, and neither extreme makes it easy to understand what's actually happening to your business right now. Let me walk through it plainly.

AI is already touching your traveler at almost every point in their journey — most of the time invisibly. Airlines, hotels, and DMOs are using it; GuideGeek is powering many websites now. I think their latest customer is FIFA. Matador, the creator of GuideGeek, saw an opening and went for it, even as many in the industry were considering it.

When Visit Germany created Emma, there was an uproar, but that’s the way of our industry. We just need to move with it.

When customers search, Google's AI Overviews are now answering travel questions directly on the results page. That means fewer clicks through to your site, even when your content is the source. This is already affecting organic traffic for hotels, DMOs, and travel publishers — not hypothetically, but measurably, right now.

When customers plan, tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini help build itineraries, compare destinations, and answer questions that used to require a travel agent or frequent tab switching. Expedia and Booking.com have both built AI assistants into their platforms. Google's own travel search has been quietly restructured around AI-generated summaries.

And customers are they themselves going directly to the LLMs to plan their trips and ask questions.

When customers book and travel, AI is powering dynamic pricing in ways that are more sophisticated than they were even two years ago. Chatbots are handling customer service at scale, which I totally hate, as I’ve experienced it firsthand, and it’s terrible.

Personalization engines are deciding which offers you see, which emails you receive, and in some cases which price you're quoted.

What does this mean for your specific business? That genuinely depends on what you do. If you're an OTA, both the threat and the opportunity lie in the search layer.

If you're a hotel, the question is whether AI is positioning you well or hallucinating your amenities.

If you're a travel agency, the interesting question isn't whether AI replaces you — it's whether you can use it to do what you do at a scale you couldn't before.

If you're a DMO, your content strategy just became a lot more complicated and a lot more important at the same time.

You're not behind for not knowing all this last year. But this is a good moment to get current; i.e. pick one and learn it.

The Loud Ones (You Know Who You Are)

And then there's the fourth person (me :-)). You probably spotted them immediately because they're the ones who won't stop talking about it.

They're not using AI because someone told them to. They're using it because they're genuinely good at what they do, and they recognized early that it could make them even better.

They're the travel advisor who uses it to research a destination they've never been to in depth, a process that would have taken weeks before.

The tour operator who finally has a way to get the first draft of everything — proposals, FAQs, marketing copy — off their plate so they can focus on the part only they can do.

The DMO content lead is producing twice as much with the same team.

The content creator used it to analyze their statistics. Or plan all the shots they need for the next photoshoot or optimize their round-the-world trip.

They're also, if we're being honest, occasionally a little exhausting over drinks :-).

But here's what the loud ones understand that the other groups may not quite yet:

AI doesn't replace expertise; it multiplies it. AI is just another tool in the toolbox.

A mediocre travel advisor using AI is still a mediocre travel advisor.

But a great one using it well is operating at a level that wasn't really possible before — more responsive, more informed, more creative, more efficient. The tool doesn't close the gap between good and great. It widens it.

If this is you, keep going. And maybe find a slightly gentler way to bring the angry ones with you — because you're going to need them eventually. Their content, their expertise, their hard-won industry knowledge? That's what makes your AI outputs actually worth anything. You need each other more than either of you realizes.

In Closing

I attend industry conferences because I love this industry (aviation and travel).

It’s always great to hear and see what others are saying and their perspectives.

I do have some genuine concern and frustration, though, that we're going to lose people along the way who didn't have to be lost.

If you're angry, stay engaged; channel that anger into creating a product your users want; use AI to help you :-).

If you're using it quietly, bring it into the light.

If you're just waking up, welcome — you're not late.

And if you're loud about it like me? Keep going. Keep sharing. Keep dragging people forward.

I cover all four of you.

AI Consultancy

If you’re running a travel brand, content business, or DMO and want to understand how AI fits your workflow, I offer a one-hour AI strategy consultation.

One hour · $597
Reply to this email if you’re interested, and we’ll take it from there.

How are you using AI to help you in your business?

Please do me a favor and share this newsletter with at least two people. Thank you in advance.

Until next time.

Kerwin
Founder, AI Travel Pulse

P.S. Don't forget to check out your welcome gift if you haven't already: A Guide to Popular AI Tools