Will AI Disrupt — or Entrench — the Travel Industry's Big Players? | Rafat Ali (Founder & CEO, Skift)
And can we stop the enshittification of travel?
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So will AI dethrone or entrench the big players in travel? Rafat Ali says for the first time in a while smaller players have a chance to disrupt the travel oligopoly. But it could go either way...
On the latest CRAFTED., the OG blogger and founder of Skift (which bills itself as the travel industry’s homepage) and I discuss:
Why every AI launch seems to promise the same thing: “Tell me where you want to go, and I’ll plan everything.”
Whether these agents are really all that good — and where they’re likely to reside (e.g. on OpenAI or Expedia or some startup)
Why, in an age of data, it baffles him that airlines don’t know what you’ll do when you land — and how this is changing
The enshittification of travel (esp. in America, esp. in Las Vegas) with maximum extraction and “luxury holding up”
Why no consumer AI travel apps have really impressed him (whereas there’s lots of interesting stuff underway in B2B)
Plus Rafat’s greatest dad hacks, including why he flies long-haul business class with his three young kids, and what how he frees himself from caring about the glances he gets from fellow travelers (”don’t give a sh*t; you’ll never see them again.”)
Enjoy this one. I did!