One of the biggest mistakes businesses make is believing that customers are paying for something called luxury.

In reality, they are usually paying to remove stress, uncertainty and inconvenience, because people rarely spend serious money simply for something more expensive; they spend it because it makes life easier, more enjoyable and, most importantly of all, makes them feel valued.

I was reminded of that lesson this week when we celebrated our friend Julie’s 60th birthday with a luxury holiday to Mauritius. After already spending a daft £2,300 upgrading our flights to Business Class with Turkish Airlines via Istanbul, we decided to push the boat out a little further by spending another £200 to use Manchester Airport’s Aether private terminal.

I must admit that it was my lovely wife Ruth’s idea and I approached it with fairly modest expectations. After all, how much better can an airport experience really become and having already paid for Business Class seats to remove much of the pain of a 14-hour journey, I wondered whether this was simply another premium product aimed at separating suckers from a little more of their money.

But I couldn’t have been more wrong.

The easiest way I can describe the Aether private terminal is to compare it to upgrading from a Premier Inn to the Burj Al Arab, Dubai’s 5-star luxury hotel. Both ultimately provide a place to sleep, but one transforms the entire experience, and Aether does the same for the airport experience.

The moment our taxi pulled up outside, our holiday effectively began.

A personal concierge greeted us, took our luggage, dealt with the baggage tagging, organised security and escorted us effortlessly through every stage of the departure process, leaving us with nothing more stressful to do than hand over our passports and boarding passes before settling into an elegant lounge that felt more like an exclusive members’ club than part of one of Britain’s busiest airports.

I was told they typically welcome fewer than 100 guests a day, and during our visit, it genuinely felt as though we had the entire place to ourselves.

The service was exceptional throughout. Sally, our personal concierge, and the rest of the team somehow managed to strike that difficult balance between being constantly attentive without ever becoming intrusive, ensuring champagne glasses were always full for the ladies while Bobby and I somehow never found ourselves waiting very long for another beer. Unlimited drinks are nice, of course, but if I am honest, that wasn’t what impressed me most.

The biggest surprise of the afternoon came from Chef Matt’s kitchen.

Airport food has become something most travellers simply tolerate. You expect inflated prices, average quality and overcrowded restaurants where spending £40 or £50 per head has somehow become normal, despite receiving a forgettable meal. Instead, I found myself enjoying a superb Penang curry while Ruth slowly worked her way through a beautifully presented tasting menu. I can honestly say I have happily paid well over £100 per person in restaurants that failed to produce food anywhere near this standard.

In fact, if the Aether restaurant was open to the general public, I suspect it would become one of my regular dining destinations regardless of whether I was flying anywhere. Once you mentally value the meal on its own merits, the cost of everything else suddenly becomes surprisingly modest.

That then raises the obvious question.

Is the remaining experience worth around £100 per person?

For me the answer is an unequivocal yes.

Private security, no queues, luggage disappearing into the system without you having to think about it again, personal escorts through the airport, and, with certain airlines, including Emirates and Qatar Airways, being driven directly to your aircraft rather than walking through crowded terminals, completely change the emotional experience of flying. Even when airlines require you to board conventionally, the Aether staff escort you to the gate and ensure you are among the first passengers on board, making the whole journey feel calm, organised and remarkably civilised.

Interestingly, however, I am less convinced by the arrival service. Being collected from the aircraft steps and taken through a private immigration channel certainly has its attractions, particularly for celebrities trying to avoid attention, but personally I am not sure I want to spend extra time waiting while my luggage is identified and collected. I would rather not have a meal, and what I really want is to get home to the coach and a glass of wine, so that’s why the express version is priced at a reasonable £100 per person.

The real lesson, however, goes far beyond airports.

Businesses often become obsessed with adding more features when the real opportunity lies in removing friction. Customers remember how you made them feel far longer than what you gave them, and Aether succeeds because every member of staff understands that their job is not simply to process passengers but to eliminate every irritation traditionally associated with flying. That is why the experience feels so memorable and why, despite initially questioning whether it could possibly justify the price, I finished the afternoon already planning to book it again.

A huge thank you to Chef Matt, Sally and the entire Aether team for creating one of the best customer experiences I have encountered in years. If you are travelling through Manchester Airport, particularly on a special occasion or long-haul Business Class flight, I genuinely believe this is one luxury that is worth every penny, because sometimes the best investments are not the ones that make life more extravagant; they are the ones that simply make it effortlessly enjoyable.

For the last thirty years, businesses have competed on three things: price, product and convenience.

The internet made comparison shopping effortless, Amazon redefined convenience, and AI is now making it possible for almost every business to produce good marketing, good websites, good sales copy and even good customer support at a fraction of the cost it once required.

Undoubtedly, the lovely Ryanair will see it as an opportunity to cut costs. As with their flights, they will no doubt be brutally efficient, using AI agents to answer every customer service call instantly, without empathy, and offering no option to switch to a human agent. To be fair, there is nothing wrong with this approach, but I personally think that in an AI-dominated world, exceptional customer care will be one of the few genuine competitive advantages left.

That may sound like a contradiction given my promotion of AI Tools, which are incredibly good at answering questions, solving problems and responding instantly, twenty-four hours a day, in every language imaginable. At Neural Voice, we’ve demonstrated exactly that by creating AI voice agents capable of holding natural conversations with customers in over forty languages, with response times measured in fractions of a second. The technology is simply remarkable.

But technology is not what builds a brand; it’s humans.

I think that customer-centric airlines like Jet2 and Easyjet will use AI not just to replace humans but to supercharge their humans with co-pilots that, at a minimum, double their productivity, allowing them more time to talk to customers and guide them through both the holiday booking process and in-resort.

Think about your own experience talking to customer service departments. I’m sure you weren’t looking for someone to simply read information from a screen, but rather wanted your problem understood, ownership taken, and a solution delivered quickly.

AI is becoming brilliant at the first part, but humans are still significantly better at the second element, delivering a solution, because, let’s be honest, AI not only makes us sound bland but also tends to play it safe and avoid making decisions. This is why the Travel Voice customer service solution uses AI voice to answer the initial call and communicate all basic information, but then triages the customer’s issue into a priority response list that is passed to human agents to respond to. This co-pilot approach supercharges human agents by giving them all the information they need, allowing them to handle 3 times as many calls that require their human empathy and decision-making skills.

This allows our partner business to build stronger customer relationships by removing the frustration of long wait times whilst still maintaining human-to-human customer service, which, in our opinion, really stands out. For example, in an emergency such as war breaking out in Iran, when no UK airline could cope with the surge in customer service calls, they delivered an awful, brand-damaging service that could have been avoided if they had already implemented Travel Voice AI’s first solution.

However, Ryanair proves that it’s not just service that customers buy into, because millions switch to them based on £10-£20 price savings.

Unfortunately, I am prime evidence of this, as just a few years ago, I hated Ryanair with a passion after a litany of Covid-19-related dirty tricks. Broken cancellation buttons, understated brought-forward balances, and a rip-off £95 amendment fee per seat, not to mention refunds that never seem to appear in your bank account, did not sit well with me as a customer.

Yet today I’m back to booking half my flights with Ryanair because they offer the best flight times and prices on short-haul routes, where, to me, airlines are little more than bus services with little differentiation. However, I would never take this laissez-faire attitude to booking a long-haul flight or a package holiday, so the need for customer service needs to be contextualised based on the product being sold.

Similarly, I am happy to book simple trips online, but I used a trusted human Travel Solution Network (TSN) homeworker to book this year’s complex family holiday, involving multiple departure airports and varying durations, because we simply could not afford to get it wrong.

Some businesses, like On the Beach, proudly position themselves as digital-first and stubbornly refuse to offer a phone-booking option, seeing it as unnecessary and undermining this stance. However, TSN has proven to both major airlines and other OTAs that adding a prominent telephone number actually increases online conversion by boosting customer confidence that, although they are booking online without human assistance, they can contact the business by phone in emergencies or if they need to change their plans. So, it’s just the hinted availability of human assistance that drives increased conversion.

Interestingly, I believe AI could widen this gap even further between airlines like Jet2 and Easyjet, who care, and the uncaring Ryanair, because rather than reducing human interaction, it can be used to increase it.

Instead of wasting hours on repetitive emails, database searches, or administrative tasks, staff can focus on the conversations that genuinely require empathy, judgment, and commercial thinking, and that allow humans to talk to customers when they need assistance and human empathy.

However, I see many businesses still making the opposite choice.

They view AI too simplistically as a cost-cutting exercise, able to reduce headcount whilst hiding behind chatbots that frustrate customers and make it almost impossible to speak to someone who can help.

In my opinion, this is very short-sighted, as although it may improve this year’s profits and even impress the city, it will erode the trust that took you years to build.

History repeatedly shows that businesses rarely lose customers because of a single mistake. They lose them because customers feel nobody cared enough to put things right.

That principle isn’t changing because of AI, but if anything, it becomes even more important.

As AI levels the playing field by giving every company access to extraordinary technology, the emotional connection between customers and brands becomes increasingly valuable. Trust, responsiveness, accountability and genuine ownership are becoming scarce commodities.

So, cost-focused and cynical businesses like Ryanair may be asking how many customer service staff AI can replace. I think they are asking the wrong question because the better question is one that I think is not in their DNA,

How can AI give every member of our team more time to delight customers than any of our competitors?

Customer delight is what builds a long-term, sustainable Brand, not just low prices, because sooner or later somebody else will turn up with newer and bigger aircraft that can deliver lower prices, rendering your price proposition redundant.

AI will change many things, but it cannot replace trust, which I think is travel companies’ superpower. This trust needs to be earned over many years and often stems from the quality of human interactions, so I think the humans in travel still have a major role to play and a healthy future.

Governments have every right to protect industries that are genuinely strategic to national security; defence companies, critical infrastructure such as steel production, and sensitive technologies all deserve careful oversight.

Airlines, however, are a different matter entirely.

They are commercial businesses operating in fiercely competitive global markets, and if Europe starts blocking perfectly legitimate investment simply because the money originates in America, I fear it will damage the very industry it claims to protect.

That is why I found today’s Reuters story about the European Union reviewing airline ownership rules illogical, particularly given that key staff are deliberately leaking it to damage the easyJet share price.

The timing could hardly be worse. easyJet currently has two competing takeover bids from major US private equity firms on the table, with Apollo’s £5.7 billion offer edging ahead of Castlelake’s earlier proposal. Shareholders were naturally optimistic that a bidding war might continue to drive the price even higher. Instead, the market suddenly worried that Brussels might simply change the rules of the game.

The result was predictable. The shares fell sharply by 10% today.

Ironically, my AI technology was watching from a very different position.

When I checked my computer after hearing the announcement, I found that my AI investment platform had automatically sold my easyJet holding two days earlier. Not because it knew the announcement was coming, because it didn’t, but because it didn’t need to. The software simply recognised that the balance between risk and reward had shifted dramatically. Once the share price had climbed to within about 10% of the expected takeover value, there was relatively little upside left, but considerable downside if anything disrupted the deal. The mathematics had shifted, so the AI exited the position without emotion, without greed and without trying to predict the future.

As events unfolded today, I felt incredibly fortunate that it had, because now I can buy the shares back at the 10% lower price and pocket what I think will be another upside.

That might sound contradictory, but it isn’t.

The market is reacting to political uncertainty rather than any deterioration in easyJet’s underlying business. The airline has not suddenly become less valuable overnight, and millions of customers will still fly with them next year, filling most of their aircraft at decent yields even given the threat of Global Warming on travel patterns. Most importantly, their excellent management team has not suddenly forgotten how to run an airline or build a tour operation that dramatically improves profits.

All that has changed is that politicians have introduced uncertainty, and I suspect that uncertainty will prove temporary because it’s plainly illogical in my view and hard to defend.

The argument appears to be that European airlines should remain under European control to preserve “strategic autonomy”. I struggle to understand that logic.

America has invested hundreds of billions of dollars in European businesses over the past few decades. European companies have invested heavily across the United States. Global capital markets exist because capital flows to where it can generate the best return, regardless of where it was earned. If investors are willing to commit billions to improving European airlines, creating jobs and strengthening competition, why should their passport matter?

Nobody is suggesting that safety regulation should change. Nobody is suggesting that route approvals, maintenance standards or consumer protections should disappear. The regulator would still regulate, and the airline would still operate under European aviation law; the only thing that would change is who owns the shares.

If we start blocking investment simply because it comes from outside Europe, we risk making European businesses less valuable, reducing competition for corporate assets and ultimately harming the very shareholders the market is supposed to protect.

easyJet is a perfect example.

If these bids collapse because of regulatory uncertainty rather than commercial merit, shareholders could lose billions of pounds in value, meaning pension funds, private investors, and even Employees holding shares lose. The only winner is political ideology, and this has to be challenged.

History suggests that markets usually find a way through these situations, with corporate structures evolving and regulators refining their thinking. Commercial reality eventually overtakes political posturing, and therefore I would not be surprised if a workable solution eventually emerges that satisfies both the regulators and the bidders.

And you know what, if I’m wrong, I still have an investment in an airline that is increasing its profits rapidly as it expands its tour operations.

If Castlelake walks away from its pursuit of easyJet this weekend, which I still think is the most likely outcome, I suspect the market will once again do what it has consistently done over the last decade and focusing entirely on the negatives of high fuel prices, geopolitical uncertainty, airport disruption and airline yield pressure, whilst continuing to ignore what I increasingly believe is the most important strategic transformation taking place within the company.

The reason I remain a bullish easyJet investor, irrespective of whether a private equity bid ultimately materialises, is that investors still appear to value the business primarily as a low-cost airline, even though it is rapidly becoming one of Europe’s largest and most profitable integrated leisure travel businesses.

Historically, airlines have always struggled to achieve attractive valuations because the economics of aviation are notoriously difficult. Fuel prices fluctuate, aircraft are expensive, labour costs continue to rise, and geopolitical events can wipe out demand almost overnight. As a result, investors have traditionally applied relatively low earnings multiples to airline businesses, regardless of how well they are managed.

However, what many investors appear to be missing about easyJet is that the company has quietly built a highly experienced, driven management team, lead by airline CEO Kenton Javis, who started his travel career with me at holiday giant Airtours before moving to Tui, and the highly respected Garry Wilson at the helm of easyJet Holidays. You simply cannot buy this level of experience, and between them, they have created one of the UK’s fastest-growing package holiday businesses, and, importantly, one that benefits from a structural advantage that very few competitors can replicate.

The publicly available numbers tell the story.

During the 2025 financial year, easyJet’s airline business generated approximately £415 million in profit from over 104 million seats sold, equating to roughly £4 per seat flown or £8 per return flight. By comparison, easyJet Holidays generated £250 million in profit from around 3.1 million package holiday customers, equating to approximately £81 of profit per holiday customer sold. In simple terms, easyJet currently makes around ten times more profit from selling a package holiday than from selling an airline seat.

This distinction matters enormously because, whilst the airline business itself will probably continue to grow at relatively modest rates, the holiday business still has substantial runway for expansion. The package holiday operation currently represents only a small percentage of the total customer base travelling on easyJet aircraft each year, meaning there remains a very significant opportunity to convert existing flight-only customers into much more profitable holiday customers.

To put this into perspective, every additional one million package holidays sold annually at current profitability levels would add approximately £80 million of additional profit to the group, so assuming a growth of 5 million over the next 5 years, add £400 million to the bottom line, which, at a sensible P/E of 10 would increase the business value by 4 billion, which is an extraordinary figure.

This is why I believe the current debate around whether Castlelake should pay 650p, 700p or perhaps even more for easyJet may be missing the bigger picture. Private equity investors are not stupid, and although they understand that airlines alone are difficult businesses, they also understand that integrated travel businesses with strong brands, direct customer relationships and high-margin package operations can command substantially higher valuations.

The irony is that whilst public market investors continue to value easyJet as if it were simply another cyclical European airline, private equity may be looking at the business very differently, seeing not an airline with a holiday division attached, but rather a rapidly growing holiday company that happens to own one of Europe’s best short-haul airline networks.

Whether a bid emerges this weekend or not, therefore, becomes almost secondary. My suspicion remains that easyJet’s long-term value will ultimately be determined not by the number of seats it flies, but by the number of holidays it sells.

Until the market fully understands that distinction, I believe easyJet remains materially undervalued and will continue to buy shares.

One of the most important lessons I learned during my corporate career was that leadership is often overrated and team construction is massively underrated.

Throughout my years in large organisations, I saw many charismatic leaders succeed, but only when they were surrounded by people whose skills complemented their own weaknesses. The best leaders were rarely the best operator, salesperson, financial controller and strategist all at once. Instead, they were usually people who understood their own limitations and deliberately built balanced teams around themselves, enabling the team to make better decisions collectively than any individual ever could.

When I moved into entrepreneurship, I initially assumed that, as an entrepreneur, I needed to be involved in every decision and operational detail. However, because I wanted to launch multiple projects at once, this simply was not possible. Over the years, I found that the most successful businesses I was involved with were those where I deliberately stepped back from day-to-day operations, sat on the board, provided strategic direction and acted as a sounding board, whilst allowing talented operational leaders to run the business.

The reality is that, as a pluralist launching multiple businesses, I enjoy creating them far more than operating them. Some of my best investments have been those where I resisted the temptation to interfere and instead focused on helping great people become even better.

I also learned another lesson, which, even to this day, I wish were not true. The team is far more important than the idea itself, so park your ego, Steve and focus on finding the team.

Throughout my career, I have built what I call my “ideas shelf”. It exists both physically and mentally, containing hundreds of business ideas, observations, market opportunities, and commercial concepts I have collected over decades. Some are good ideas, some bad, and some are potentially brilliant.

However, what I have learned repeatedly is that taking a brilliant idea off the shelf and trying to force it into existence without the right people around it almost always ends badly. Conversely, I have seen average ideas succeed spectacularly because the team executing them was strong and could simply pivot around the inevitable obstacles that nobody had seen at first.

This lesson feels more relevant today than at any other point in my career because artificial intelligence is changing the economics of entrepreneurship faster than anything I have previously experienced. AI is fundamentally reshaping demand channels, changing customer behaviour and giving entrepreneurs capabilities that would have required entire departments only a few years ago. Today, one talented founder supported by AI can perform work that previously required teams of developers, marketers, researchers, analysts and customer service staff.

However, despite all the headlines suggesting that AI will replace people, my own experience so far suggests something rather different. AI superpowers talented people, but it does not replace ambition, judgement, industry knowledge, leadership or commercial instinct. The human operating the AI remains the critical ingredient.

The exciting consequence of this is that we can now build businesses with fewer people than ever, raise less capital than ever, and move faster than ever. However, there is still one thing that technology cannot solve, which is finding the right person to lead and champion an opportunity.

For me, the reality is that I now have more opportunities than people. Across our various AI initiatives, I have accumulated a growing backlog of projects that I genuinely believe could become substantial businesses. The constraint is no longer technology, capital, or ideas, but finding ambitious, capable people who want to build something meaningful.

At the same time, I recognise that joining an early-stage business is risky, particularly for those with mortgages, families and successful corporate careers. That is why I have developed a more pragmatic model, in which rather than asking someone to jump off a cliff and commit full-time on day one, I am perfectly happy for projects to begin as side hustles alongside existing careers until there is clear evidence that the opportunity is gaining traction and has sufficient funding to support meaningful founder salaries. Ironically, this approach also significantly reduces cash burn during the most vulnerable stage of any startup.

Equally, I recognise that not everybody joining a new venture is necessarily looking for another full-time executive career. Some of the most valuable people I have worked with have been those approaching the end of their careers, who possess extraordinary experience, industry contacts and commercial wisdom and who are willing to mentor and support the next generation of entrepreneurs.

Through our AI incubator model, we now have opportunities to combine experienced industry veterans with talented younger people who have the energy, technical skills and ambition to build the businesses of the future.

So perhaps I have finally reached the stage where I must admit that I do not need more ideas. I do not need more technology. I probably do not even need more businesses.

What I need is more people.

People with sector expertise, ambition and operational experience. People who want to build something exciting whilst having a bit of fun along the way.

So, if you have ever thought you could run a business better than those currently running it, if you have expertise that deserves a bigger opportunity, or if you simply fancy building something interesting during one of the most transformational periods in business history, perhaps you should email me at se@steveendacott.co.uk to arrange a highly confidential conversation.

After all, the next great business on my ideas shelf might just be waiting for you.

For years, businesses have chased Google reviews because they helped persuade customers to buy. A strong 4.8-star rating made you look more trustworthy than a competitor with 4.2 stars. More reviews generally meant more clicks and more sales.

That was the old world.

The arrival of AI-powered search engines such as Google Gemini, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Microsoft’s Copilot has fundamentally changed the role that reviews play in winning customers. Reviews are no longer just there to influence humans, as increasingly, they are there to influence the AI systems that recommend businesses to people.

Imagine somebody in my home town of Rochdale asking Gemini a simple question:

“Where can I get the best breakfast in the Rochdale area?”

Five years ago, Google would have shown ten blue links, a map and perhaps a few sponsored adverts. The customer would then spend time clicking through various websites and reading reviews before making a decision.

Today, Gemini increasingly attempts to answer the question directly.

Instead of providing links, it may recommend three or four breakfast venues and explain why they have been selected. This is where reviews become incredibly important.

The AI doesn’t simply count the number of stars a business has achieved. It actually reads and analyses what customers have written. If hundreds of customers have described a café as having “the best full English breakfast”, “great coffee”, “friendly staff” or “excellent value for money”, Gemini can recognise those themes and use them as evidence when deciding which businesses to recommend.

This is a major shift.

A café with 500 detailed reviews talking specifically about breakfast quality is likely to be viewed very differently from a café with 5 generic reviews saying little more than “great service”.

The words matter.

The volume matters.

The recency matters.

And of course, the overall star rating still matters.

The same principle applies across virtually every local business category. Whether someone is looking for a plumber, solicitor, travel agent, accountant, restaurant, garage or estate agent, AI search engines are increasingly analysing customer feedback to identify which businesses genuinely deliver the service people are searching for.

This creates both an opportunity and a challenge.

The opportunity is obvious. Businesses with lots of high-quality reviews have a chance to become the AI-recommended choice in their local area, but the challenge is that most customers simply don’t bother leaving reviews, even when they have had a great experience.

Business owners know the frustration. You can provide excellent service to hundreds of customers, receive glowing feedback face-to-face and yet only a tiny percentage will actually take the time to write a review online.

That’s why tools such as Review Wizard (www.reviewwizard.co.uk) are becoming increasingly important.

The reality is that many customers don’t leave reviews because they don’t know what to write or don’t have the time, and once they have left your venue, they are 82% less likely to leave a review.

Review Wizard removes that barrier by helping customers create a professional review in seconds. They simply select a few key phrases or dictate their thoughts, and the AI helps turn those ideas into a polished review that reflects what they actually want to say.

The review remains completely authentic, under the customer’s control and posted from their phones, but crucially, the process becomes dramatically quicker and easier.

That matters because AI search engines are looking for both quality and quantity. A business with 500 genuine reviews is often viewed as a more trustworthy source than one with only 50 reviews, even if both have similar ratings.

In the coming years, I believe we’ll see a major shift in local marketing budgets. Businesses have spent decades investing heavily in websites, SEO and Google advertising. Those channels will remain important, but customer reviews are rapidly becoming one of the most valuable digital assets a local business can own.

The reason is simple.

Reviews are no longer just influencing potential customers; they are increasingly influencing the AI systems that decide which businesses potential customers ever get to hear about in the first place.

In an AI-driven search world, every review becomes part of your digital reputation, part of your marketing strategy and potentially part of the reason Gemini recommends your business ahead of the competition.

That’s why getting more customer reviews has never been more important.

In my opinion, the latest speculation surrounding a potential takeover of easyJet is just a fishing exercise rather than the start of a genuine acquisition process, because none of the foundations for a real bid is in place, making it look more like a PR and clickbait exercise rather than a realistic bid.

The announcement by American investment firm Castlelake certainly succeeded in one objective: it moved the share price. However, when you dig beneath the headlines, the substance appears remarkably thin as Castlelake itself has admitted that it has not approached the easyJet board and does not have a firm deal in place with cruise giant MSC, despite reports suggesting MSC could become a consortium partner.

That raises an obvious question. If you have not spoken to the board, do not have your strategic partner formally signed up and are still evaluating whether a bid makes sense, why announce your interest publicly? One possible answer is that you are testing the market to see how investors react and what valuation level might be required to secure support for a future approach. The immediate share price jump following the announcement provided exactly that information.

None of this means easyJet is unattractive. Quite the opposite. It remains one of Europe’s most valuable but undervalued aviation assets, with highly desirable airport slots, a strong brand, and a growing holidays division converting £ 6.00-per-seat profits into £50 Holidays. along with a network that would be difficult and expensive to replicate. The fact that takeover rumours keep resurfacing is evidence that many industry players recognise this.

The proposed MSC connection is particularly interesting.

From MSC’s perspective, there is clear strategic logic to a merger, as MSC has spent years building a vertically integrated travel empire that spans container shipping, ferries, logistics, and cruises. Adding a major airline would create a European version of the integrated holiday model that TUI has successfully operated for decades. Cruise customers could be funnelled directly onto flights, holidays could be packaged together, and customer acquisition costs could be reduced across the group.

The problem is that while the deal makes strategic sense for MSC, it is less obvious why it creates significant additional value for easyJet. Airlines generally create the greatest value when combined with businesses that either strengthen their network, increase their customer base or unlock major cost synergies. A cruise operator can provide some additional passengers, but the overlap is relatively limited compared with other potential partners.

If I were looking at the strategic landscape, three alternative partners that I think would stand out as being significantly more interesting.

The first is Air France-KLM. Although the group has publicly stated that it is not actively pursuing easyJet, its chief executive also notably refused to rule out interest if approached. Air France-KLM would gain access to easyJet’s extensive short-haul network and valuable airport slots across Europe, particularly at Gatwick and other strategically important airports. The network synergies alone would be substantial and could feed traffic into long-haul operations across both Paris and Amsterdam.

The second is International Airlines Group. Competition regulators would undoubtedly take a hard look at any transaction, but strategically, it is difficult to ignore the value of combining British Airways’ premium network with easyJet’s leisure and short-haul strength. Gatwick remains one of the most attractive aviation assets in Europe, and easyJet’s position there would be highly attractive to IAG.

The third, and perhaps most intriguing, is a partnership with a major global technology or travel distribution platform. As artificial intelligence increasingly becomes the control tower for travel purchasing, ownership of the customer relationship may become more valuable than ownership of aircraft. Imagine a future where the vertically integrated group becomes an AI search engine pumping travel into its travel funnel, while easyJet supplies the transport and easyJet Holidays supplies the package holidays at an industrial scale. Although completely left-field, this for me delivers far more value than what is effectively a slot sale to another airline, particularly when these legacy brands have singularly failed to evolve to meet a changing marketplace.

My suspicion is that we are still some distance away from a genuine bid. Castlelake has until the end of June to either put up or shut up, and the lack of board engagement suggests this process remains highly exploratory rather than advanced.

However, the bigger message should not be ignored. The market reaction demonstrates that investors believe easyJet is undervalued, and once takeover speculation starts, it rarely disappears completely. Whether the eventual bidder is MSC, another airline group or, as I suggest, a left-field strategic player, I suspect this will not be the last time easyJet finds itself at the centre of takeover rumours.

 recently attended the ITT Conference in Malaga, Spain, where I met travel influencer Gill Antonin, who has a massive 5 million followers, unlike my 5.6 million TikTok followers, which he had earned rather than just bought like me (Well, that’s what he tells me), and therefore had a large amount of instant credibility.

Over a beer at the opening party, he started talking about “Travel 4.0”. My immediate reaction was that this sounded suspiciously like what I often describe as A-F-B-M,  “Airy Fairy Bollocky Marketing”, a term I coined in the 1990s to describe Industry Veteran Richard Carrick’s regular rants. Let’s be honest: Travel has always had a habit of inventing new buzzwords to describe things that have already been happening for years, and I’m probably more guilty than most.

However, the more Gill explained it, the more I realised he was describing the current state of the travel industry remarkably concisely.

Travel 4.0 is essentially the travel equivalent of the wider Industry 4.0 term. It describes the point at which technology ceases to be a support function and becomes woven into every part of the customer journey.

Artificial intelligence, big data, automation, cloud computing, mobile apps, virtual reality, digital payments and connected systems now all work together to create a more intelligent travel ecosystem.

When you look around the travel sector today, Travel 4.0 is everywhere.

Customers are already researching holidays on their phones, receiving personalised recommendations based on previous behaviour, using AI chatbots for support, boarding aircraft with digital boarding passes, and receiving real-time notifications throughout their journey. Travel businesses, particularly low-cost airlines, increasingly use predictive analytics to forecast demand, automate pricing and personalise marketing. AI assistants like my own prototype at https://www.holidayrep.ai/ are already helping customers plan trips and answer destination questions.

In many ways, the online travel revolution of the last twenty years was simply the warm-up act, with Travel 4.0 now connecting everything together into a seamless digital experience.

The interesting thing is that most travel companies believe they have already embraced Travel 4.0 because they have a booking engine, a CRM system and a bit of AI bolted onto their website. The reality is that many are still operating somewhere between Travel 2.5 and Travel 3.0 because, although they have digital tools, these tools are often disconnected, fragmented, and heavily reliant on human intervention.

But as usual, the key thing was not what Gill said but how he made me think about what comes next.

If Travel 4.0 is technology-centric, I think Travel 5.0 will become human-centric.

As we discussed at length at the conference, I firmly believe that the human element of travel is vital, because in essence we are selling a virtual product based on a promise to deliver something 6-9 months later. That requires a lot of trust, and although the super brands can build that trust, the rest of us will continue to rely on our human sales staff to establish it through face-to-face conversations or phone calls that are full of empathy and the expertise to extract from customers what they want, often before they even really know. How often does a customer ring up with one destination in mind but hang up having brought another?

I just think AI will make the best sellers a lot more efficient because their co-pilots are handling the bullshit admin that has dominated half their lives for far too long, allowing them to handle 2-3 times more customers a year. Unfortunately, the obvious conclusion is that 2-3 colleagues will disappear. Sorry, guys, if you don’t want to hear that, but maybe it’s time to jump into the AI world to make sure you’re one of the survivors.

At times, I think my blunt honesty does me no favours. After saying this on day one of the panel debate I hosted, I got into trouble for dragging Gill on stage at the last moment, against the organisers’ express wishes (sorry, guys, but he was worth it). I found myself labelled by Jacquline Dobson, Barrhead’s eloquent CEO, as Anti-Human.

Interestingly, when I gently challenged her about this comment over a beer in the evening, asking what about my comments on the panel had given her his view, she confessed that she had missed the session and had only just been told so by another delegate.

I am lucky to have this written outlet to make myself 100% clear. I am not anti-Human. It’s just that I honestly think there will be fewer entry-level jobs in travel, and in the longer term this is a major concern because our best travel leaders have all worked their way through the ranks and understand their businesses inside out, with deep empathy for customers and their needs. I really fear that future business will be dominated by AI marketers who have never lived the product they sell, and the sector is in danger of losing the beating heart that has driven it for years.

One indication of this is that we had no attendees from any OTA at the ITT conference, apparently because they see us as a lot of old travel dinosaurs. In some ways, they are right, and I do believe, as an ITT Board member, that it’s time to modernise. That’s why we have added regular UK events, such as Debate IT sessions in London, to specifically bring these OTAs onto the stage for an interesting debate about AI, sustainability, and issues facing aviation. Not everybody wants to take the time out to spend several days at a conference.

However, those people are missing out on the social side of the conference, where friendships and bonds are built over the years and inspiration is delivered not just by the sessions but the chats over a beer or a wine.

I had not gone; I would not have met Gill or had a week of inspiration driven by my apartment Roomies Martin Lomax and Laurence Woodhams. Conversations shape my ideas and motivate me to launch new businesses, such as Review Wizard, my first attempt at a fully AI-only business. OK, OK, that may be a little anti-human

Personally, I think those who did not attend this year’s ITT conference really missed out and need to think about exactly what they achieved in the business between Monday and Wednesday this week.

Taking time out to think about your business and compare notes with industry colleagues when the AI Juggernaut is heading down the motorway at you, while you sit, legs crossed, in the middle of the road, may not be the best idea.

I am, of course, biased as a long-term ITT member, but I’d strongly recommend you ask people who did attend what they thought, as I personally think the morning-only sessions with plenty of time for afternoon meetings and evening drinks are a strong one that makes it stand above many of its competitors.

Why not give us a try next year?

Every major technology shift creates winners and losers.

When the internet arrived, thousands of high-street travel agencies disappeared. When online booking became mainstream, many traditional tour operators lost market share. Today, AI Search looks set to trigger the next wave of disruption.

The industry is understandably focused on the opportunities. Better customer service. Lower operating costs. Faster booking journeys. However, if I were still running certain types of travel businesses today, I would be sleeping a little less comfortably.

The first and most obvious losers are likely to be people working in travel.

For years, travel companies have struggled with labour shortages and rising employment costs. AI offers a solution that management teams find very attractive. Customer service is already being automated through voice AI and chat agents. Reconciliation teams are seeing AI handle accounting and payment matching tasks that previously required large back-office departments. Commercial teams are using AI to monitor competitor pricing, analyse demand and make yield decisions that once required teams of analysts. Even salespeople are finding their administrative workload being absorbed by AI copilots, so that the most effective salespeople just focus on handling more bookings at the expense of their colleagues, who just get laid off. Travel businesses are increasingly deploying AI agents across customer service, operations, pricing and booking support functions, which inevitably means fewer human jobs.

The reality is that whilst some new AI-focused jobs will be created, far fewer people will be needed to perform many of today’s routine travel roles.

The second group at risk are the Online Travel Agents.

This may sound controversial because companies such as Booking.com, Expedia, Love Holidays and On the Beach remain highly successful businesses. However, their biggest strength has traditionally been controlling customer acquisition.

For twenty years, Google delivered millions of visitors to OTAs. Consumers would search, compare options and eventually make a booking.

AI Search changes that process fundamentally.

Instead of visiting thirty-six websites and spending six hours researching, customers can increasingly ask a single AI assistant to recommend destinations, hotels and itineraries. If the answer is delivered before the customer reaches an OTA website, a large part of the traditional customer acquisition funnel disappears.

Investors have already become nervous about this possibility, causing significant volatility in travel stocks whenever AI booking or AI search developments are announced.

The third group who should be worried are specialist tour operators who believe expertise alone protects them.

I recently met several specialist operators who believed their destination knowledge, personal relationships and specialist expertise would protect them from AI disruption.

I think they may be underestimating the speed of change.

Historically, if a customer wanted advice on a niche destination, they often needed a specialist operator. Today, an AI has the entire knowledge of the internet to call on and can access vast amounts of destination information, reviews, hotel content, local experiences and customer feedback in seconds. Increasingly, it can build highly personalised itineraries tailored to individual requirements. Research is already showing rapid advances in AI travel planning and recommendation systems.

This can then link directly to the same “Ground handlers” and DMC’s that service customers in resort, and DMC’s that service customers in resort need to cut out these supposed specialists entirely.

Many specialist operators may discover that knowledge and access to local partners quickly become commoditised.

The fourth casualty will be travel content publishers.

For years, blogs, review sites and destination guides generated revenue by attracting visitors through search engines to their sites, which they then monetised with click-outs to suppliers. When AI Search consumes that content, summarises it and delivers the answer directly to the consumer, the result is that they are cut out of the process.

Although their content remains valuable if it is not protected from AI search, the website traffic may disappear, and if it’s protected from AI search, the traffic disappears, so it’s the classic zero-sum game where they are bluntly just buggered.

Tripadvisor’s struggles provide an early warning of what can happen when consumers still value the information but no longer need to visit the platform that created it.

However, the biggest losers will simply be businesses that fail to adapt. Anyone can survive this transition, but they need to start by understanding where they add value and making sure they are visible to AI Search.

The evidence unmistakably tells us that travellers are increasingly comfortable using AI for planning and inspiration, and successful travel brands are investing heavily in AI-driven customer journeys and Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO), the successor to traditional SEO.

That means the challenge is no longer simply ranking well on Google; it’s now about becoming one of the trusted sources that AI systems choose to recommend. The best way to achieve this is to engage with your customers and harvest a large volume of UGC, where your previous customers tell your next customers why they booked with you.

Travel itself will continue to grow. People will still want holidays, flights, cruises and experiences. The demand is not disappearing, but who controls the customer relationship is changing.

History suggests that whenever the gateway to customers changes, the profits move with it.

The travel businesses that recognise this early and adapt their strategy accordingly will survive and prosper.

Those still relying on yesterday’s traffic sources may discover that AI Search has quietly moved the goalposts while they were still playing the old game.

For the last twenty years, the online travel industry has largely been built around a simple concept: buy traffic from Google, convert visitors into bookings and optimise relentlessly. Entire business models, marketing teams, and stock market valuations have been built on the assumption that holidaymakers will continue to click blue links.

That assumption is now being challenged by AI search.

The shift is still in its early stages, but the direction of travel is becoming increasingly obvious. Consumers are moving from asking Google for links to asking AI systems such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity for answers. When the answer is delivered directly, there is often no need to click through to dozens of travel websites. That creates both enormous opportunities and significant threats.

The first casualties could be what I call the “PPC junkies” of the travel industry. Many travel companies have become highly dependent on paid search traffic. Their entire commercial model revolves around buying visitors and then using sophisticated conversion and yield management techniques to maximise profit from that traffic.

Take On the Beach, for example. Very cleverly, rather than constantly monitoring every competitor’s pricing, they simply track conversion rates against the average. If bookings for a destination fall below expected levels, prices are adjusted until conversion returns to normal. It is an incredibly efficient system because customer behaviour clearly indicates whether they are competitive.

The problem of AI search is obvious. If the traffic stops arriving, the optimisation engine stops working. You cannot optimise conversions from visitors who never reach your website in the first place.

The second challenge is that AI search threatens to dismantle some of the barriers that have protected the existing market leaders. For years, Google’s advertising ecosystem has favoured established players with large budgets and long performance histories. New entrants often found themselves paying significantly more for lower positions, making it difficult to compete against brands such as Love Holidays and On the Beach.

However, AI search changes the route to market. A start-up that masters AI visibility, social commerce or comparison technology may be able to reach consumers without spending millions on Google clicks. We saw the internet destroy many high-street travel agencies. AI search could do something similar to parts of today’s online travel hierarchy.

There is also a more subtle threat in merchandising. OTAs have become adept at pushing high-margin “Castle” hotels and products to the top of their search results. Customers tend to click the first options they see, making this highly profitable.

AI systems may not be so easily manipulated. If AI Search genuinely seeks the best answer to a customer’s needs, it becomes much harder for intermediaries to prioritise products solely because they yield higher margins. The winners may increasingly be the products that genuinely offer the best value and experience.

So, who benefits from all this disruption?

The biggest winners are likely to be holidaymakers themselves. The average UK holidaymaker currently spends 6 hours researching a holiday and visits 38 websites before booking. This is largely because Google’s commercial model was designed to maximise clicks rather than to deliver complete answers.

AI search flips that model on its head. Instead of forcing customers to do detective work across multiple websites, AI can narrow options, answer questions, and provide recommendations in minutes rather than hours. We do not yet know exactly how large the time savings will be, but they are likely to be substantial.

Comparison platforms could also emerge as major beneficiaries. One challenge facing AI search providers is that recommending a supplier is not the same as proving it offers the best deal. Consumers still want reassurance that prices have been compared across the market.

This creates an opportunity for comparison engines that aggregate multiple suppliers and provide independent pricing data. Rather than building thousands of direct integrations, AI platforms may increasingly rely on comparison layers to provide confidence and transparency. Hence, my recent substantial investment in the new Agentic AI comparison site Hey Holidays.

The AI search providers themselves are also obvious winners. Google demonstrated that controlling the search gateway is one of the most profitable positions in the travel value chain. The companies that own the customer relationship at the search stage sit closest to the money and furthest from the operational headaches.

Finally, the most interesting battle may centre on the merchant of record. Businesses that collect customer payments before travel takes place enjoy a powerful financial advantage. They generate significant working capital, interest income and foreign exchange opportunities. Booking.com controls £8.6 billion of customer funds that it can invest in advertising, technology or anything else it needs to drive dominance. The ability to control both discovery and payment creates an extraordinarily powerful commercial position.

My view remains that AI search will not destroy the travel industry. Quite the opposite. If AI technology, in general, reduces the number of days people need to work each week, they will have more leisure time and more time to travel, creating a new golden age of demand.

The real question is not whether travel will grow. It is who will control the customer journey. For twenty years, the answer was Google. Over the next five years, that answer is likely to change dramatically. The travel companies that adapt early will thrive. Those still relying on yesterday’s PPC playbook may discover that the traffic tap has quietly been turned off.

Tomorrow’s blog will explore the interesting topic of who the losers will be.