Arnie Weissmann
At the Phocuswright Conference in San Diego last month, AI figured prominently in almost every presentation, from startups to established OTAs to legacy reservation systems.
As I was leaving the conference, a man named Rohit Khanna approached to tell me about his company. A few details in his background distinguished him from most attendees: He initially worked in his family travel agency but became so enamored with the potential that AI had for travel that, two years ago, he left the agency to dedicate himself to understanding AI's applications to selling travel.
His journey led him to become one of 1,000 Perplexity Business Fellows (Perplexity is a generative AI company) who share learnings across a global, interdisciplinary network. "I'm the only nerd from hospitality and travel," he said with a smile.
Signature Travel Network's executive vice president of information technologies, Karen Yeates, introduced him to Dave Upton, an Australian entrepreneur who had founded Australia's first OTA, Travel.com.au, and then took it public in 1999.
Upton and Khanna hit it off and, despite a 15-hour time difference, worked together to create an educational platform that can help even the least technical travel advisor use AI to grow their business.
"People are scared of AI. Change is never easy," Khanna said. "But it can make life so much easier. We want to turn fear into power. This technology is so transformative; it's not only affecting our professional life but everything around us."
Consequently, he said he believes that making AI easy to use and understand -- to demystify it -- is important for all aspects of a person's life. "This technology is already here, and it's not going anywhere, so you need to understand it," he continued. "Our courses are designed to be very simple and fun. There are no technical terms."
Khanna and Upton's company, AI Crash Course, covers the waterfront with access to 200 tools. It teaches advisors and hospitality professionals how to create AI agents to assist with everything from research to answering phones. It offers tools to increase productivity, create content and design, manage customer relationships and engagement, analyze data and boost sales and marketing. It shows how to use AI for task and time management, to improve workflow and create video and voice tools.
"When people think about this technology, they think, 'Oh, I have to spend millions of dollars.' Small businesses don't have that kind of money," Khanna said. "If you need to generate a training video, it can be done in five minutes, but your first question would be, 'What tool do I use for that?' It's all in there so you don't have to go looking for it. There are tools available from Google or Microsoft or OpenAI that people can use without any extra cost."
But because those tools are constantly being updated, Khanna said that a lot of people, seeing new releases of an AI program every few months, think they can just wait until it all settles down before they need to learn it. Although the output becomes better, he said, the user fundamentals don't necessarily change much.
One differentiator from many other AI educational websites is AI Crash Course's focus on ethics, its acknowledgement of AI's vulnerabilities and its stressing the importance of responsible usage. These were all topics Khanna felt were, in the main, ignored by speakers on the Phocuswright stage.
"You have to worry about safety and security and responsible use," he said. He was surprised that there was so little appetite to discuss these issues in even his private meetings with other Phocuswright attendees. One privacy concern of his regards how user data flows when people use the Expedia or Booking.com apps within ChatGPT. Data is shared only when a user activates and uses those apps, but the exact scope of what is exchanged between ChatGPT and the OTAs is not always clear to users.
Khanna also advocates for the importance of maintaining human authenticity in the face of AI advancements, not only from a philosophical perspective but because he believes that real experiences will increase in value as the world begins to rely more and more on AI.
"Raw and real will turn heads," he said. "My whole point in building this thing was not to replace humans but empower humans with knowledge."
At Phocuswright, he ran into a delegate who, citing AI, said flatly, "Travel advisors are dead." "I shook my head and told him, 'You are sadly mistaken, my friend,'" Khanna said.
Can anyone become AI proficient? He uses his own experience as a proof point that they can. Although he's now invited by Google, Microsoft and other companies to take advanced, specialized classes, he didn't have a technical background when he started. His qualifications? "Enthusiasm and curiosity," he said.