Monthly Archives: February 2026

Customers are your Travel Superpower

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In today’s digital landscape, authentic customer voices drive more bookings than any marketing campaign. User-generated content (UGC) has evolved from a nice-to-have into an essential sales driver. When travellers share their real experiences, through photos, stories, and reviews, they create trust that no brand message can replicate.

However, most UK travel businesses rely on third-party review sites like Trustpilot and Feefo to send emails to their customers, primarily to gather brand-level booking review scores, and just leave customers to post hotel-level reviews on TripAdvisor, who then try to switch sell customers via their price comparison engine to other brands.

This is just madness and shows how many businesses are ignoring their Superpower: the best advocates they will ever have for their brand are customers who have travelled with them and had a good holiday.

Research indicates that if a business does not request reviews, less than 20% of customers voluntarily leave one, but when asked for feedback, 80% respond.

So, the most important thing is just asking!

However, too many travel businesses focus solely on their brand reputation, even when they have 25,000 positive reviews and a 4.6/5 rating. What’s the point? Do you really think another few hundred reviews will change anything?

At the same time, these businesses aren’t even asking their customers how their holiday went, opting for the lazy approach of using TripAdvisor review scores on their websites to reflect supposed hotel quality, rather than engaging with their own customers.

This has the benefit of demonstrating a certain level of independence and a review system, as TripAdvisor has been operating for quite some time, but it’s time for these scale travel businesses to start collecting and taking their own customers’ views more seriously.

I have therefore made developing tools to gather reviews as one of the main focuses of my Travel Voice business.

Our new “Review Talk” tool creates an ultra-personalised “AI Voice Review Interviewer” for every booking, pre-programmed with the customer’s name, party type and booking details.

Knowing the hotel name and location allows review agents to research the hotel’s facilities and nearby bars and restaurants, enabling an informed, two-way conversation with the holiday maker leaving the review.

Also, we all know that the weather is a key factor in holiday enjoyment. Knowing the travel dates and hotel location allows the Review Interviewer to understand the weather for each day of the holiday, so they can ask contextualised questions about what customers did on rainy days, for example.

This high degree of personalisation, combined with the simplicity of leaving views via a chat to a Voice Interview, increases the average amount of content gathered compared to written reviews by a factor of 5.

This content is then used to drive “Digital Word of Mouth” with AI used to craft well-written reviews pre-seeded with the holiday company’s name and formatted for all major review sites such as Tripadvisor, Trustpilot, and Google, with deep links so that once a customer has approved the created review, they can post it on behalf of the business.

The aim is to ensure that the brand name is visible throughout the “Trusted” sites such as Tripadvisor, which large language model search engines like Gemini and ChatGPT use when responding to customer queries, for example, “What are the top 5 All-inclusive hotels based on review scores?” The AI search provides links to Tripadvisor’s page for this hotel, and as customers scroll down, they repeatedly see the brand name of a travel business used by a customer to book that hotel through our brand-seeded reviews.

These same reviews can be used on the travel companies’ sites to provide detailed guidance to future customers and to drive fresh SEO content at a hotel level, further boosting site visibility.

Ironically, we call this product “Review Light”!

To find out how we are taking this ten times further, businesses will need to sign up for a meeting, as some ideas are simply too good to share publicly with competitors.

Packages, Not Price Cuts: The Faster Path to More Direct Hotel Sales

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During my 40-year travel career as a tour operator and, latterly, as the CEO of On Holiday Group, I have spent a lot of time with beach hoteliers and have some good friends who are still operating successful hotel chains.

A key topic of discussion has always been the “Love: Hate” relationship hoteliers have with Booking.com, the consumer favourite hotel booking site. Given Booking’s extensive SEO history and strong PPC bids on Google, they often appear above or just below any direct hotel adverts and strive to enforce their price parity demands to ensure that hotels’ direct prices do not undercut their own site’s prices.

This means that bookings often account for over 40% of hotel sales, with commissions ranging from 16% to 25%, providing the hotel with a strong incentive to increase direct bookings and reduce this lost margin. This incentive is further enhanced when booking offers its “pay at the hotel” option, as many customers use it to make speculative or back-up bookings, which generate high revenue and reduce no-shows!

However, many hotels still make basic mistakes when operating in source markets outside their home country.

1.        Not offering “£ Sterling” Prices.

Research by Shopify states that 49% of UK customers will not purchase if prices are not in sterling, which seems a bit high, but when OHG managed booking sites for hotel partners, we increased hotel-only conversions by 35% by offering Sterling pricing.

2.        Not offering Flight Inclusive packages.

Google research shows that although 60% of customers searching for hotels want to book only a hotel, 40% would book a flight-and-hotel package if offered. As I often say to my hotel friends, “How do you think UK customers get to your hotel? They don’t swim!” Not offering holidaymakers the option to buy a package is therefore the biggest barrier to direct bookings for hotels

3.        Create free “upgrades” for direct bookings.

Assuming you need to honour Booking’s price parity guarantees, be clever and incentivise direct bookings by:

a. Priority access to late check-outs. The biggest hassle for any guest is checking out at 11 am for an evening flight. Every room needs to be cleaned and prepared, but it’s easy to clean rooms for late-afternoon arrivals to create late check-out options. Direct bookers should be given priority access to these.

b. Best Sun beds. Upgrade the hotel’s best sun beds with comfier cushions and only give access to them to your loyalty club of direct bookers.

c. Digital Rep. My business https://travelvoice.co.uk/ has created AI Holiday Reps accessible via customers’ phones using WhatsApp that can be promoted via QR codes around the hotel, which cost just 15p a minute of use and can advise customers not only about the hotel’s facilities but also about local bars, restaurants, taxis, buses, and attractions.

4.        Managing Brand Term pages.

It’s vital that the hotel’s marketing department knows how to use VPNs to log in to Google from the UK so they can see what UK customers are seeing, not just what they see in their local market. The two are rarely the same!

They will quickly see which third-party brands are appearing above them in search results, which is madness, as it is relatively cheap for a hotel owner to use PPC to appear in the all-important top spot on model for their brand term, rather than just appear halfway down the page in the SEO results.

Secondly, in the UK, Google Hotels often hog the limelight on desktops by comparing prices per night from multiple suppliers, and you will be amazed at how often a third party undercuts the hotel’s direct site rates. This needs monitoring!

5.        Create a Digital Word of Mouth.

Most hotels understand the importance of Tripadvisor and Google reviews and chase these hard; however, the review game is stepping up a gear with AI Voice review agents interviewing returning customers to automatically write well-crafted reviews pre-seeded with direct booking recommendation and links that the customer then posts to Tripadvisor, Trust Pilot and Google with a single click to making it both the easiest and most effective review driver for a hotel.

Incentivising customers to leave reviews by entering them into a draw to win a free week at the hotel is logical and not against anyone’s review rules.

TSN: the quick and easy Packaging Solution

Garry and Lindsey Winterburn set up Travel Solutions Network (TSN) https://travelsolutionsnetwork.co.uk/ in 2022 to provide a “Cloud Computing” equivalent for travel call centre support, by creating virtual call centres staffed by experienced native-English travel homeworkers who fully understand the marketplace and who support multiple partners, answering 90% plus of calls even in peaks.

TSN scaled their business rapidly by delivering high-converting call centres to partners such as Easyjet Holidays, Etihad Holidays, and, more recently, to several luxury hotel groups.

The hotel packaging service is extremely simple to implement.

Hotels just add a Telephone number to the top of the site labelled “Call for Flight and Hotel Packages”, which is then answered by a hotel-branded TSN-supplied travel agent, who uses the TSN booking tools to package the holiday priced in Sterling and using TSN UK ATOL licence.

The Hotel automatically increases its direct bookings by 40% and only pays a commission per booking based on booking success, with no fixed staff overhead or hourly rates to worry about.

The commission is significantly lower than Booking’s, with nearly zero cancellations, as customers have committed to flights and TSN pays the hotel much earlier using virtual cards from its trust-fund-protected client account.

To be honest, I think this is the simplest way for any holiday hotel to increase its direct sales, so if you’re interested, get in touch with TSN and email them at info@Travelsolutionsnetwork.co.uk

Meanwhile, consider all my other suggestions as well, as these elements are entirely within your control.

The Death of Travel Websites as We Know Them (Thanks to AI Search)

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AI Search needs to evolve quickly, as it is currently a loss-making black hole: neither ChatGPT nor Perplexity is profitable, and Gemini is dramatically impacting Google’s PPC revenues, with a negative knock-on effect on profits.

The entire ethos of AI search is to guide customers to an answer more quickly, generating high-intent customers who are better suited to a “Cost per Acquisition” (CPA) or retail model like Amazon.

Anthropic signalled the first major move in this direction with the creation of its MCP (Model Context Protocol), which is simply a standardisation “Brick” that suppliers must connect their API’s too, so that “Large Language Models” (LLMs) can hoover them up to build super stores with.

However, last month, Google went a step further, launching its new UCP (Universal Commerce Protocol), a standardised way for retailers to connect to Gemini or other LLMs to enable agentic commerce, allowing AI agents to perform product discovery, manage carts, checkout, payments, order tracking, and post-purchase flows.

The key point is that UCP shifts the transaction point from the retailer’s website to within the AI search itself to optimise user intent and reduce booking friction caused by the current need to visit the retailer’s site. The retailer remains the merchant of record and receives the customer’s details; however, fewer human customers will visit the retailer’s site, as most traffic comes from APIs and machines.

So, how will this impact travel businesses?

Clearly, businesses must set up a “Merchant Centre” account with Google and deploy their own UCP servers, though this process is relatively simple. However, what businesses often need from consultants like my own “Neural River” is insight into the wider implications of this change and guidance on what they should prepare for next.

For example, AI Search engines are “conversational” and, unlike travel sites, don’t use “order form” searches to obtain the key search data such as departure date, airport, destination, etc. Instead, they will handle a word-based search, such as “Find me cheap all-inclusive deals to Alcudia in Majorca, for a family of 2 adults and two children, departing on the 12th of July from Manchester airport”.

Now, you may spot a usability issue straight away. That’s a lot of typing!

This is why all AI search engines are rapidly shifting to promote voice search, where users simply chat with the search engine about their needs, as demonstrated by last week’s Uber Eats new voice service.

Initially, there will be some resistance to this move among the “Betamax” generation of 20-30-year-olds, who have been trained only to interact via typing, but the convenience factor will quickly change user behaviour.

The shift to voice will also broaden the query string and introduce more holiday requirements that responses need to meet, such as reliable Wi-Fi, kids’ clubs, and quality restaurants and bars near the hotel.

However, the biggest change is that AI engines will demand “Recommendations” rather than thousands of options, as they want to guide customers to a decision and complete the transaction quickly. So less is more

Also, as “Digital Twins” develop on customers’ phones that know all their key preferences, tagging properties as suitable for XYZ and creating “lookalike” customer groups, where a “Customer like you enjoyed this holiday” will become a key conversion driver.

Therefore, exploring new methods to gather rich user content like Travel Voices’ “Digital Holiday Books” is important for both driving “Friend get Friend” referral sales and creating an extensive database of customer reviews, where new users can talk via AI to previous customers about their holidays.

Travel search is poised for a major evolution, with voice search and recommendations replacing the standard online search forms that are the core of every current travel website.

Are you ready for this shift?