AI Won't Plan Your Trip - But It's Transforming Travel

Is AI all hype when it comes to travel planning? We go beyond the buzz to uncover how artificial intelligence is quietly transforming operations behind the scenes. From analyzing the latest innovations to adopting Mexican gray wolves, we share provocative insights from our industry travels. Discover the unsexy truth about AI's real impact on travel.

Welcome and New Podcast Merchandise

Welcome to No Tourists Allowed, a podcast where two travel industry executives with a combined 71 years on the inside of travel and technology give up their secrets to do the thing everyone wants to do: travel better, pay less, and see more of the world. Here are your hosts, Mike Putman and James Ferrara.

Mike Putman: Hello, I'm Mike Putman.

James Ferrara: And I'm James Ferrara, and welcome to No Tourists Allowed. Mike, did you get that big swag bag? I know you didn't because we don't have any.

Mike Putman: I mean, a mug that says "No Tourists Allowed," a sweatshirt, a tote bag, or an oversized suitcase for your fans. And a little tote bag or overnight bag for yours. I don't know, guys, what do you think? You think you would like it? We came up with a cool design and some cool slogans. I think it could be fun. We're going to have to make a deal with CafePress or VistaPrint or somebody and open up a little store. That's what we're going to do.

James Ferrara: Well, we're already off to interesting topics today. Mike and I have also been on the road, no surprise. We were actually together for a change, and then also separated for a couple of interesting events. Mike, I really want to talk about Arizona, our event together, but you were also in Arizona at another event—a sort of technology and startup focused event that maybe our travelers are not so familiar with. The industry people who follow us will know about it. Can you share with everyone?

Inside the Phocuswright Travel Technology Conference

Mike Putman: Yeah, so just recently I got back from another trip to Desert Ridge, which is between Scottsdale and Phoenix, at the JW Marriott. It was the Phocuswright 2024 annual event. This event really is for C-level travel technology industry folks, and it is crazy expensive. I think they do that to keep out the middle management folks because it is expensive for two days. But it's a great event. They do a wonderful job. It’s well orchestrated, with lots of networking opportunities and educational opportunities. Then there's a component, as James was alluding to, where they share top startup companies. There's a voting thing and the startups get some venture capital for the ones that get voted the highest. Years ago, they actually used to do a codathon as part of the event.

James Ferrara: This is really insider travel industry stuff, folks. It's not known outside of the business, but within the business, this is where the major investment groups go each year to see what's new, to see who the rising stars are, and to see how technology is developing. It’s a really fascinating event with a lot of bankers there and a lot of people interested to know what the trends are. A lot of people we've been working with, new partners, existing suppliers, and the Booking.coms and Expedias of the world—everybody's there.

Serial Entrepreneurs and the Real Role of AI

Mike Putman: And a guy named Bob Diener, James, which I know you know the name. Some of our listeners might know, but he started Hotels.com and then sold that to the Expedia Group. After that, he created another company that did something similar called Getaroom. He sold that company to Priceline for several millions of dollars. And lo and behold, he is back at it again. This guy just keeps reinventing himself. He's a serial entrepreneur. He builds a great distribution aggregator product. He builds it up, builds up the traffic, builds up the supply, and then flips it and sells it. I had the opportunity to have lunch with him. He's certainly one of the great travel distribution guys of all time.

James Ferrara: I bet you could have done a drinking game and taken a shot every time someone said AI at this.

Mike Putman: Oh my gosh, yeah. I was at a dinner the first night with a group of investors with another company that we work with. There were ten or twelve people at this table and we were talking, and of course, AI came up. One investor would say "F AI," and he would use the word instead of "F" because he said everybody calls everything F-ing AI and it's really not AI. This guy actually has a doctorate, but he was also a very colorful character. So that was kind of the theme of that night: F AI.

James Ferrara: Of all the ideas that you saw and all of the companies and programs and new thinking, tell us one you walked away with saying, "Hey, that's really neat."

Innovative AI Tools for Travel Operations

Mike Putman: The first thing that comes to people’s minds when they think of AI is travel planning. They think this is going to be the killer application for AI—that you're going to talk to a machine and it's going to develop this complex itinerary for you and give you recommendations. Everybody's kind of chasing that dream, and the reality is it hasn't really proven out so much. I think there are components of what AI can do that can really help, but no one is going, "Hey, I'm going to use this service to book my travel instead of calling a travel agent or instead of booking myself." But what has been successful are tools that utilize AI to handle processes that humans used to do in the travel spectrum. One of the things my company is doing is using AI to call and reconfirm every single hotel booking that we get. We used to have human agents call every hotel and say, "Hey, I got Suzy Lu coming in on the 23rd of March for two nights. I want to reconfirm the price and the confirmation number." If they have any issue, we can say we talked to Pedro on November 25th and he reconfirmed the room. That's a very costly thing to do, and there are very few people doing it, actually. We were doing it because we need to provide a higher level of service to our members. We created a way to take AI and make those phone calls for us. There is a natural voice that understands natural language. We feed it information, it calls the hotel, and it'll say, "Hey, I'm Mark calling in from Custom Travel Solutions. I want to reconfirm this reservation I have for Suzy Lu." It gets through all the IVR prompts. The person might ask how to spell the last name, and it spells it out. It does all these really cool things and then encapsulates the information to say this has been a confirmed booking. There was another tool I saw that was really interesting, and it's a collaboration tool. If you're online and you're planning a vacation and you have other decision makers—it could be your wife, your partner, or a group of college friends—and you pull down information for three hotels in Palm Springs, this tool allows you to share that information. It makes a session for all your friends. All you have to do is put in their WhatsApp number, telephone number, or email address. Then they come back to a web page that says, "These are the things that I'm looking at, vote on which one you think's the best." It creates this dialogue which allows for people to collaborate and choose what hotels they want. It’s so sophisticated that people can even put their own credit card numbers in and the system will affect the payment that way.

James Ferrara: We're talking about Phocuswright, naming the event, guys, and sort of emerging technologies and companies in the travel industry. Very exciting event. You know, Mike, together we have developed an AI-based tool. It's another example of AI used in operations as opposed to the sexy forward-facing stuff. We developed something together called content concierge, and we're using it for InteleTravel travel agents to post content on social media, write promotional emails, or create any kind of writing like that. The AI helps them write it. You can change the tone—"I want it more promotional" or "I want it more price-driven"—and the AI keeps coming back and refining the content. Then you can edit it yourself and put your final product back into the system, and the system will critique it for you. It might say, "I think it's a little weak on the call to action," or "I think you need to change this word to get a stronger reaction." Then you actually post it, and there's even a feedback end where you put what you've posted back into the system so the system learns what you think is good. This is pretty sophisticated stuff made possible just in the last year or two because of these new language models and AI like ChatGPT. It's another example of ways that AI might be used that aren't so typical but are very powerful.

Mike Putman: Absolutely. With that content creator, too, you can take one piece of content you create and the languaging that you use in Facebook versus Instagram versus TikTok is different, but the content creator will rewrite it so it's Instagram-ish, Facebook-ish, or TikTok-ish. Then you can easily post and it does all that work for you. There are a lot of great things coming out with AI, and there are a lot of dogs out there, too. A lot of people think just because they stick AI in front of the name of a company, they can raise a lot of money. That probably was true early on, but people are kind of seeing through that right now. A lot of what you guys may be seeing out there actually is being created by AI. You see it when you go to Facebook or LinkedIn; there are now AI assistants offering to help you.

A Deep Dive into the Hermosa Inn and Paradise Valley

James Ferrara: Just one thing to keep in mind is a lot of the content that we're starting to see is AI-generated, and you might want to realize that. It might make a difference to you in one way or another. But I was just coming back from the Phoenix area, where we were just the week before for an executive retreat. We had that at a beautiful place that I've never even heard of before.

Mike Putman: Well, you went from the JW Marriott, which of course is the top end for Marriott, their luxury product. And the week before, we were together in Paradise Valley, right outside of Phoenix. It’s a kind of unusual spot.

James Ferrara: Yeah, this hotel, which I think someone from your group found, was a great choice. It's a boutique hotel with forty-two casitas or villas, and it’s in the middle of a neighborhood. It's interesting—there are no gas stations or fast food places or upscale restaurants. It's just dropped into the middle of a residential neighborhood.

Mike Putman: Well, that's because it did start as someone's house. It's at the base of the foothills right outside of Phoenix and Scottsdale, but it started as a private home, a private ranch actually, for a famous artist. There's a famous poster, an illustration of a horse drinking water from a cowboy's hat called "The Last Drop." It's a famous 1920s or '30s illustration. The artist who created it built this house in what was then the desert. The guy's name was Alonzo Megargee. He went by the name of Lon. That's the name of the restaurant on the property, Lon's. Apparently, he was a bit of a partier, and back in Prohibition, they had tunnels and root cellars dug under this house where they would hide out if the sheriff came or they'd be partying down there to stay out of the eye of the law. It's a beautiful adobe stucco building with wood ceilings and wood rafters. On the property over the years, they developed the outbuildings, which are forty-two casitas—little individual stucco houses. The rooms have beehive fireplaces, Western furniture, beautiful ceilings, and incredible landscaping. The gardens were lovely with Bougainvillea and cactus. There’s a top-shelf restaurant, a little spa, a great bar, and pools.

James Ferrara: The key that made this such a good pick for our group of twenty-five was the convertible meeting space. We actually spent our days in Lon’s library. It was really beautiful and rustic with the original floors. We had a dining space right adjacent to us so that we could have our meals there or go outside. The weather was beautiful. Actually, what looked like a wall of bookcases opened up, and they were doors to the dining room next door. That was kind of cute. It’s not inexpensive. I wouldn't say it's over-the-top expensive, but if you're planning an executive retreat, this is a place that couldn't hold much more than twenty-five people. I would certainly recommend it for a two or three-day retreat where you want to get your team together and do some work. The restaurant attracts a local clientele and there's a big Sunday brunch there. The food was really great. Very pretty place.

Mike Putman: And I should clarify, I didn't find it—I selected it. It was found by our event team at MGME. They started with a list of thirty places and we whittled it down all over the country until we finally selected this. Beyond the selection of the hotel, it's really important to me when we do events that we include a real sense of place. I have no interest personally in going to a big hotel and sitting in a ballroom for days. I want my team to know about Phoenix, about Scottsdale, and about the Paradise Valley. If we're going to be there, I want us to learn about it and carry that back with us so we can help travelers and customers.

Authentic Arizona: Architecture, Wildlife, and Local Cuisine

James Ferrara: We did get off-property and do a couple of interesting things. One is we went to Taliesin West. If any of you are architecture buffs, you will know that is the winter home and architecture school of Frank Lloyd Wright. He built Taliesin West from a camp with canvas tents to an incredible series of structures. It’s such original, beautiful architecture, lying low in the desert and made of materials from the desert. It’s spectacular to walk through. Mike, what was your impression? Was that your first time to Taliesin West?

Mike Putman: It was, and it was interesting. I'm glad I did it. It was a good experience and I did learn a lot more about Frank Lloyd Wright and his design process. There was a little bit of a mixed message from the group, though, to be fair.

James Ferrara: Yeah, not everyone is enlightened, but that's fine. I still think everyone who went there will talk about it. Then we went out to the Desert Wildlife Conservation Center, way out in the boonies. This is a facility where they take in animals who have been involved in accidents or were illegally kept as pets. They get rehabilitated and, whenever possible, returned to the wild. It's really noble work and I was very happy to support it. We got to walk around and see javelinas, coyotes, the endangered Mexican gray wolf, pumas, mountain lions, and bears. We got in the middle of all these coyotes who started howling like crazy. That was quite an experience. The company adopted some Mexican gray wolves, and we're paying for their care for the year. It felt good to support this kind of work and it gave us a real view of what the wildlife is like in the desert.

Mike Putman: It was a really authentic experience. The guides taught us about the service they provide to the community and the animals. I think everybody really enjoyed seeing animals. I'd never seen a wolf or a coyote up close.

James Ferrara: We had a champagne toast when we adopted the wolves, and the toast was with Gruet sparkling wine. Gruet is a family from the Champagne region of France. In the seventies, they came over to New Mexico and they have a winery and vineyards outside of Albuquerque and up in Taos. Gruet is a delicious sparkling wine. Because we were in the desert southwest, we had an interesting sparkling wine from there. Again, this furthers the idea of not being a tourist, but actually getting deep into the culture of the place. We went on to have dinner one night at the Arizona Biltmore, a legendary hotel designed at least in part by Frank Lloyd Wright. It is probably the most important hotel in all of Arizona. It was quite stunning. We had a lovely dinner outside, but we also spent some time in what's called the Mystery Room, a former speakeasy hidden deep inside the hotel. It is the place where a bartender invented the Tequila Sunrise. So we had the original Tequila Sunrise recipe in the Mystery Room.

Mike Putman: I gotta tell you, the food there was great. We were seated outside, and at night in the desert it gets cool, so they had heaters and blankets. They brought regional food in and served it family-style. That was probably the best meal I had the month of November.

James Ferrara: And then the next night we had dinner at a local restaurant in Scottsdale called FNB. The menu changes every day there. The night we were there, it was Mediterranean food with flavored hummus and some Italian and Middle Eastern influenced dishes. What I really loved about that dinner was we selected two Arizona wines: a Viognier, which is a very fragrant Chardonnay-type wine with spice and floral notes, and an Italian grape called Aglianico. I've had that wine from Italy, but in this case, it’s grown in Arizona. The wines were a big hit.

Mike Putman: So, look, we're telling you all this because I want you to know that we walk the talk. We made this all about Arizona and the desert southwest—not touristy at all. We really got a sense of the culture and the beauty of this part of the country.

Life on the Road: Recent Personal Travels

James Ferrara: I went from there on to see my son in San Diego. He is in the Navy and stationed out there, and he and I had like two days of tacos. We both like fish tacos.

Mike Putman: I had a great time there and then flew from there to Pittsburgh to see Dave Matthews. I had my daughter meet me and we saw the concert and left out the next morning. I was home for thirty-six hours and then I went back to Phoenix for the Phocuswright thing. I'm glad to be home for a little while. James, you were gone after the executive retreat too, right?

James Ferrara: I was, but just down to Fort Lauderdale for an advisory board meeting at a Conrad Hotel. Conrad is the luxury brand for the Hilton Hotels group. There is a beautiful Conrad on the beach in Fort Lauderdale. It was originally built as condominiums and instead was turned into a hotel. They are residence-style suites. I had an obscene suite overlooking the beach with a full kitchen, living rooms, and several bathrooms. It was just me. That's always crazy. I need people to apply to become a traveling assistant or companion for me because I get these great accommodations and it's just me, Mike. Anyway, beautiful property, great food, and you just walk right onto the beach. One thing I want to let our listeners know is that over the holidays, we're going to have kind of sporadic posting of the podcast. We've got personal travel and time off. It’ll be a little sporadic in December and maybe early January, but we will still bring you some content and then we'll get cranked back up mid-January on a consistent basis.

Holiday Schedule and Connecting with the Show

Mike Putman: We are heading deeper into the holiday season, but we'll be here sporadically. I'm not so sure that anyone will notice the difference because we're a little sporadic anyway. But that's the charm of No Tourists Allowed. We'd love to hear from you guys. We really do relish your feedback. I ran into some people at Phocuswright who said thanks so much for doing the podcast. We really do appreciate your being a faithful listener. Please provide your feedback. You can go to NoTouristsAllowed.com and there is a feedback loop there where you can share topics you want us to cover or guests that might be interesting.

James Ferrara: If we've said something in a discussion and you felt the urge to jump in and want to contribute a thought or challenge us on a point, you can always do it by going to the website or even by watching us on YouTube. You could comment right there on the YouTube video and even get into a conversation with our other listeners. We crave that interaction with you. I agree, I do run into people all the time who surprise me and say they listen to the podcast. All right, everyone, we will see you next time. And until then, thank you for joining No Tourists Allowed. Goodbye.