Last week, I had the pleasure of attending the AITO conference in the beautiful region of Asturias, Northern Spain. My role was to act as a catalyst for a debate about how AI will impact specialist tour operators and how businesses should start implementing AI into their operations.

My core message was that, because travel is a high-value transaction based on a promise to deliver a product at a future date, “Trust” in them as humans or in their company’s brand is their key defence against AI disintermediation, where customers go to “Destination Management Companies” (DMCs) and organise their own itineraries using the knowledge of the internet.

Some individuals argued that their expertise was vastly superior to that of the internet and that AI was prone to “Hallucinations” that could lead to disastrous outcomes. To some extent, I think they have a point, but I reminded them that AI is currently just a “one-year-old child” and that they should be prepared for the rapid progress approaching. I believe it is unlikely that their agents will know about every restaurant, bar, and attraction, or the full details of every possible hotel choice, whereas AI already does.

I advised that they should continue to keep all sales contacts “Human”- facing, as I believe humans prefer buying from humans, but empower their agents behind the scenes with as much AI knowledge and tools as possible so they can continue to know more than their customers.

For example, why not have AI listen to all customer calls and automatically prompt agents on their screens with information they might want to discuss with the customer, or send via WhatsApp or email, using professionally generated content and PDFs with full quotes for the itinerary and pricing.

I also demonstrated how they could extend their interactions with customers by using Travel Voice’s “AI Reps” to manage pre-departure customer service and in-resort information flow when they lacked on-the-ground human representatives. These AI reps use a “Cloned” voice of the agent who handled the initial sale to provide continuity of interaction.

Some operators recognised the advantages of this but wisely expressed a desire to test these tools gradually on a subset of customers so they could “Test and Learn” without risking lasting damage to their brands or reputations. This is always a sound strategy when implementing AI.

However, nearly all the operators I spoke to like the idea of using AI Review Agents, pre-programmed with detailed knowledge of a customer’s itinerary and weather during their stay, to have a “Chat” with the customer upon their return. They encourage customers strongly to upload holiday photos and videos. Our extensive testing already shows that this leads to much more detailed user content being captured, which AI can then use to generate reviews for Tripadvisor, Trustpilot, etc., to be posted by customers. These reviews are automatically seeded with the agent’s name and company details, creating a “Digital Word of Mouth” within trusted sites that power most “Large Language Models” (LLMs) responses to customer searches.

This same content can also be used on the operator’s website and added to their CRMS so that they know not just what holidays customers took last time but what they enjoyed doing during those holidays.

None of these tools replaces humans, as they mainly perform functions that the business currently misses due to scalability or resource cost restrictions, thereby logically increasing business stickiness and repeat booking levels.

Most businesses expressed the opinion that they need to embrace AI as a back-office tool to increase efficiency and allow their staff to focus on the human-facing sales functions, but few had a definitive plan and found the vast array of AI tools daunting.

My advice is simple. If you want to implement AI successfully, the project must be led by the business owner or leader and cannot just be delegated to the IT or marketing departments. It is also advisable to bring in “External Advisors” to demonstrate the “Art of the possible” in a morning session and then guide a business team comprising both senior managers and internal young AI advocates in identifying the 5-10 things the business could do immediately.

This should then be reduced to a maximum of 5 projects to ensure the initial focus is maintained and that these first experiments in “Test and Learn” succeed, allowing the AI rollout to get off to a positive start and creating a virtuous cycle of efficiency gains.

This blog is not an advert, but if anybody does want some low-cost AI Advice, contact me, and I’ll put you in touch with Neural River, the AI Consultancy business that I have invested in as a Chair.

he announcement that the DNATA group is to close Travel Republic, hot on the heels of On the Beach’s closure of its “Dynamically Packaging” (DP) trade arm, makes it feel like the end of the era for independent DP in the UK.

Having been deeply involved with the Dynamic Packaging sector since its inception, as a founder of On Holiday Group alongside partners Bill Allen (On the Beach) and Brian Young (G Adventures). I spent many enjoyable hours in Kingston pubs with Travel Republic’s founders, discussing strategy and exit options!

Unfortunately, On Holiday Groups’ VAT dispute with HMRC halted merger talks, and the guys became wealthy young men when selling out to DNATA on 28 December 2011, which now appears to be the business’s peak. At this point, they were serving more than 2 million customers annually and had seen their turnover rise by over 40% to more than £400 million in 2011, making them the clear OTA leader at that time.

Sensibly, DNATA tied the leadership of the business, Kane Pirie and Paul Furner, to the company through deferred payments for a further 3 years. However, the business never prospered the same way again, and like many acquisitions, as it lost its entrepreneurial drive and quick decision-making.

Only DNATA insiders will understand how, from these lofty heights, Travel Republic ended up licensed for fewer than 150,000 passengers in 2025, dropping out of the top 20 ATOL holders for the first time in 20 years.

However, I point to three key factors.

Ryanair: No Dynamic Packaging Business can survive without it.

The massive disruption caused by Covid-19 and Ryanair’s outrageous behaviour towards OTAs led to a legal battle between Ryanair and DNATA, after which Travel Republic removed Ryanair from sale for 4 years, from 2021 to May 2025.

Cheap seat access is vital for any DP engine. While competitors On the Beach and Love Holidays endeavoured to find workarounds to keep selling Ryanair during their openly declared war on UK OTAs, DNATA made the frankly arrogant decision that it did not need them. In my opinion, this move effectively destroyed Travel Republic as a competitive force.

I feel free to say this in hindsight, as I openly expressed it to the DNATA management at the time and felt great sympathy for the team, which did not have the power to overturn a decision made at the highest levels of the owner, Emirates.

Ryanair is the lowest-cost flight provider and is estimated to account for approximately 60% of both Love’s and On the Beach’s flight seats, with both businesses booming again after the Ryanair trade reconciliation.

High EasyJet API fees, squeezing OTA profits, and reducing access to Jet2 seats through its in-house tour operations have made Ryanair access essential, and not doing so has strangled Travel Republic, forcing it to reposition itself as a Dubai- and long-haul-focused operation.

The COVID-19 Google Algorithm Reset.

OTAs in general survived COVID-19 much better than integrated tour operators like Tui, specifically because they had a much more flexible model with no plans sat on the ground and no guaranteed or owned hotels sitting empty.

However, COVID-19 disrupted the hierarchy of Google visibility that protected the top three players’ traffic volumes. The Google history algorithm essentially means you pay less to be in the number one search position if you have been there for the last six months, which effectively blocks new entrants who have to fight their way to the top at great cost (a key reason why Low-Cost Holidays failed).

This created a relatively fixed and unchanging access to customers that existed before Covid-19, protecting relative volumes. However, the shutdown wiped out this history, turning it into a race among the major players to reestablish the pecking order once the bounce-back began.

As a privately held company, Love Holidays was able to be much more aggressive than On the Beach and Travel Republic, gaining a massive market-share boost post-COVID-19. This caused Travel Republic to spiral into consistent losses, which ultimately led to its demise.

Corporate Strangulation.

I am unusual in that I had a successful Corporate Career, rising to Deputy Chief Operating Officer of MyTravel, running all its UK business in 2003, before becoming the rogue Entrepreneur of my later career.

This provides me with insight into how corporate cultures have repeatedly undermined and dismantled nearly every acquisition made in travel.

People are central to every travel business because the most successful ones consistently focus on customers and brands, taking great pride in the businesses they have built.

Every time things get tough, the corporate accountants start seeking cost savings by merging IT, finance, and customer services across the business, which destroys this focus.

With Travel Republic, DNATA immediately expanded its use of technology across other parts of its business, shifting attention away from its UK operations, and further damaged it by incorporating its hotel-buying team into group roles to help establish a corporate-wide bed bank called Yalago.

I am sure these seemed sensible corporate decisions at the time. Still, inevitably, they damaged the Travel Republic operation, and when combined with remote, disconnected discussions about Ryanair, they ultimately put the business into a downward spiral from which it has never recovered.

Summary

I know many clever and resilient people who have worked at Travel Republic and other DNATA-owned businesses over the years, and most have enjoyed working for this generous and considerate organisation.

However, I really don’t think Travel Republic marks the end of the Dynamic Packaging era; it’s simply a natural shift, caused by the currents of disruption that have hit the UK industry over the last 10 years. Smaller, more tightly managed businesses can react and change direction more quickly to survive these issues.

I clearly don’t know the full story here, but I hope my analysis, written at 4 am from the Dominican Republic, offers some insights and demonstrates how much I care about the topic.

Having been around long enough to witness the birth of the internet and the impact of the migration to mobile on search, it’s fascinating to observe the beginning of the evolution towards AI Search.

Marriott published research this week indicating that the proportion of travellers using AI has risen to 50% from 41% last year and 26% in 2023, nearly doubling in just two years. Unsurprisingly, younger generations are adopting it more rapidly, but even my age group, 55-64-year-olds, shows a 29% usage rate.

In recent blogs, I have promoted the use of MCP standardisation API wrappers as a vital step towards enabling large language models like ChatGPT to ingest live pricing and availability data from travel businesses. Last week, the launch of integrations with Booking.com and Expedia was announced, allowing travellers to search for hotels using natural language queries such as “Find me a private house with four separate bedrooms near top golf courses in Austin, Texas, for less than £300 per night.”

This would have saved me the trouble of switching between Airbnb, Booking, and ChatGPT when planning the trip I’m currently on, though I’m still redirected to these sites to make the actual bookings. This will be the next pain point to be eliminated, with ChatGPT soon becoming a merchant of record and an even bigger player than Amazon, selling millions of products. However, most of these will still come from Amazon, given its clever vertical integration that has made it a key physical distribution player.

I have also been predicting the development of “Digital Twins” that enable us to build a detailed profile of our personal preferences and update it daily by monitoring all our purchases. Retailers like Amazon already use these AI tools to personalise the offers they present to you, and Google even monitors our conversations to inform their recommendation engines.

The most logical place for a “Digital Twin” is on a user’s phone, so hardware manufacturers like Apple and Samsung have a natural advantage in this race. That’s why, at the start of 2025, OpenAI signed a major strategic alliance with them to exploit this opportunity jointly, and all LLMs are partnering with the hardware required to deliver AI tools.

Wearable tech will also play a significant role in how we use AI going forward, with Meta teaming up with Ray-Ban and Google launching the Android XR glasses. These devices connect to your phone but offer extra utility by being hands-free: they function as headphones that use vibration technology in the glasses’ arms, and as listening devices with microphones positioned just above your mouth.

Most importantly, they can serve as a second set of eyes, relaying what you see and offering instant classification, research, or instructions directly on the lenses. I already use these when travelling to discreetly and instantly translate different languages into my ears, although it hasn’t improved my ability to respond yet, as I still need the Google Translate function on my phone to speak the language.  But I’m told this is coming fast.

However, it’s the shopping function offered by these glasses that I’m really looking forward to!

Imagine that, instead of browsing retail clothing stores, you can look at a stylish outfit someone else is wearing and immediately see where to buy it online at what price, with your digital twin instantly showing all your sizes and colour preferences.

This may sound like fiction, but it will be part of our everyday lives within the next 5 years, so we need to start thinking about how these forms of AI will affect the travel ecosystem.

The only businesses protected from AI disintermediation are the travel asset holders—airlines, hotels, and ground transportation —while the rest of the market faces significant disruption.

Logic suggests that major travel companies like Booking and Expedia will grow even larger as they can gather more content while leading AI distribution through partnerships with large language models.

However, with the removal of language barriers, travellers are likely to become more adventurous, seeking unique and authentic experiences best provided by niche specialist businesses, which become more findable with AI search tools, so there will still be a place for the specialists.

I also expect “Event” based travel to boom, which is why I am investing in an MCP-based AI startup aiming to create the ultimate itineraries for Event travel.

The simplification of the travel booking process is also likely to create a new breed of Influencer “Travel Agents”, promoting destinations and specific trips via TikTok shops or Instagram, using their own authentic content creation. So again, I’m investing in this space.

I have always loved disruption, and this is likely to be the fastest and biggest change we have ever seen in the travel sector.

Is your business ready?