I believe the US travel industry (companies, media, prognosticators) is currently spending too much mental energy, attention, opportunity cost and focus on the inbound Chinese traveler market while overlooking opportunities from other lucrative source markets. Fixating on ‘the Pre-pandemic level return of Chinese Inbound Travelers’ is like a friend who’s separated from his longtime girlfriend that keeps talking about the good old days; hoping...

Every aspect of the travel industry benefits from shorter tourism visa processing times --- hotels, guides, tourism boards, airlines, transportation companies, attractions, restaurants, etc. I am speechless (and that’s hard for somebody as opiniated as me) to the point of being shell shocked at the wait times people are experiencing to enter the USA as a tourist or for business. I had to re-read,...

Larger travel companies have and will continue to dominate the initial wave of large language model AI benefits. Where does that leave (comparatively smaller) travel startups

While it can be challenging to differentiate travel startups & travel apps from a customer viewpoint (the most important of viewpoints at the end of the day since they are paying all the bills so say), it's an essential step in identifying, attracting, and retaining hyper-niche customers. By focusing on unique value propositions, user-centric design, excellent customer support, continuous innovation, and unique strategic data...

As a traveler or even as somebody from the travel industry, have you ever struggled to differentiate between two different travel app offerings? Perhaps you've found yourself comparing two travel apps, or two different travel software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers (expense reporting services, trip itinerary aggregators..), and felt like they were virtually indistinguishable from one another. This can be very frustrating for somebody within the travel...