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You’re a marketer in one of the most competitive industries.
You may be tired of trying, over and over, to use the same marketing strategies that you read about online or learned about in school - but is that really going to move the needle?
We all know the big brands - Booking.com, American Airlines, The Points Guy, Royal Caribbean, Marriott, VRBO, and Hertz... but what about the emerging brands that have found their path to scale?
The Travel Marketing Podcast is about sitting down with successful marketing professionals in the travel, transportation, and tourism industry to learn what has worked for them, what they’ve learned along the way, and what new trends they’re noticing.
We are Propellic, and we’re on a mission to create more diversity in thought for the planet. We’re doing that by helping brands - specifically travel, transportation, and tourism brands - increase their reach through intelligent marketing that travels further.
TRANSFORMING TRAVEL EXPERIENCE WITH AI
This is the Travel Marketing Podcast brought to you by Propellic, bringing you the news and insights and what's working and not working in today's competitive transportation and tourism landscape. From emerging brands to the most established professionals, these lessons of intelligent marketing will help your marketing plan travel further.
Brennen Bliss:
I don't really know how to introduce my friend, John, John Lyotier. He's one of the founders and CEO of Travel AI. This man is first off, just a good genuine person. And second, brilliant, innovative, and at the leading edge of everything in technology and travel. I mean, like a loan driving marketing a billion and a half dollars in bookings.
I don't know for what period of time that was, it's quite possible that that's been in just the past couple of years.
His brand Travel AI is growing like very few that I've seen and just the quality of his thoughts, the quality of his mind and the words he has for marketers really made me smile today.
So we'll dive right in.
I want to talk about AI, I want to talk about OTAs, I want to talk about travel affiliates, I want everything, everything you do is so deeply ingrained into the business of travel and just understanding unit economics and using marketing to make those unit economics work for you.
You look at marketing more from a mathematical standpoint from the way I interpret it than you do from a brand standpoint, which is there's nothing wrong with that. There's two distinct ways to look at it in a blend in between, but I really do see you as more of a numbers driven marketer. How do you leverage marketing from a math standpoint?
Like, how do you look at it as a function of your business?
John Lyotier:
I guess it goes back to origin stories. Everyone has an origin story, whether you're a villain or a superhero. Graduate from university, degree in English, narrative history or classical, classic liberal arts. Uh, this is right for the .com era.
So I'm much older than you. I wanted to get into advertising copywriting at a time. I thought that'd be kind of fun. I love the creative. I love the persuasion. And, uh, but as, as I started to do some tech companies. I quickly realized that marketing was becoming math. Uh, this is now late nineties, 2000 timeframe.
And as soon as marketing became math, it became very clear how it works is you still have to get a person's attention. But the moment you have their attention, you can put numbers attached to what's your cost of acquisition, what's your return on ad spend, what can I do to get a person in the door and get them to say yes.
And with that as a background, this is now in the era of one cent keywords in Google AdWords. Like this used to be a glorious time. It's when you used to be able to, a keyword for one cent with no checks at all. Like I, when they finally started to increase it to a minimum of five cents, I still have the legacy keywords that were for all sorts of different things.
So that's a really long time ago. But the principles held up, um, all the way through is that as long as you can get a person In the door, raise their hand, say, my name is John, I want this. Then it's just a question of math and that went on. And if you take that approach, it all comes down to how much traffic can you get?
Where do you get the traffic from? What markets are you able to go after? What's the lifetime value of the customer? And then just playing with the levers from that point. Can you increase your conversion rate? Can you increase your cost of acquisition or decrease your cost of acquisition? Can you increase your lifetime value?
Can you play with those numerals all the way through? And then you can basically build your business model, frankly, on a spreadsheet. And as long as you're playing in a large enough ocean, which is the largest ocean on the planet. You can catch a lot of fish and that's kind of how we approached it.
BB: This is something we distinctly spoke about in the pre interview about four minutes ago. Quote unquote pre interview gives it a lot more credibility than what it actually was. But, but you talked about the size of the travel market. So what you shared with me, I'd be really interested in having you share in the same way.
JL: Sure. So why are we traveling? Yes, we love to travel. Everyone loves to travel. Every person you talk to always has a bucket list destination. Everybody creates incredible memories from travel. There's lots of reasons why we travel. The sheer volume and size of the travel market. It's the largest industry on the planet, both by GDP contribution, by employment.
It's soon to be a 15 trillion market. One in 10 people are employed by travel. The size and rate of growth is, I think it's currently about 8 or 9 percent growth per year. It's doubled in a generation. And if you look at it, there's no real market like that. So we're in travel because it's the largest market.
Uh, we predominantly do English speaking, which is 20 percent of the market, but we've recently launched new brands that are Spanish, German, French. We're looking at Arabic. We're looking at all sorts of different languages. Because that's where the people are. And if you can, if you can play in those spaces, that's a fun place to be.
And if you're a math driven marketer, where you want to be the largest cohort of possible people you can reach, that's in travel.
BB: Let's talk about the brand ecosystem. We've got this high level brand that's kind of emerged out of nowhere, travel AI. Which is exciting because again, when you say AI, they slap it on something and it's supposed to create this investor sentiment and make something really exciting and interesting, but it rarely ever actually connects with the core business model, which is very different in your case.
So tell me a little bit about Travel AI as an entity, as well as all of the incredible brands that you have operating under it.
JL: Sure. So well, it emerged out of nowhere. We've been around for many years. Kind of got into the travel space a little bit by accident in 2013, we operated for years as Left Travel.
We were perfectly fine with nobody knowing our name. We operated quite anonymously, except for our customers. Um, our customers are large travel sellers, but everybody always wanted to know, how do you do what you do? How are you able to drive volume? How are you able to go out and drive customers? How do you raise intent?
And really we said, well, we're a data company masquerading as a travel company. And that was kind of our line for years. And, uh, last year we decided to rebrand as travel AI, not because of the investor sentiment or anything like that, but we thought finally we had a way to explain what it is that we did.
And going back to the size of the travel market, you take the large market travel with the most disruptive technology being AI or the applied use of AI, and you put them together to make Travel AI, and we're Travelai. com, we went out and. bought the asset, the domain name, but really we're able to use a decade's worth of data and all these different technologies to go out and personalize that travel experience to attract new customers, to drive more demand to the benefit of our customers.
And I think an important point to sort of make up the front is that our customers are not travelers. People assume that we have all these travel brands, be it rentbyanowner.com or vacationcottages.com, or we have over 300 brands launched now.
BB: Yes. I would, I would specifically like to call out, what is it? Pickleballtrip.com.
JL: Pickletrip.com. For those who love to play pickleball, when they travel, you can go to pickletrip.com and find properties around the world that have pickleball courts, either on premise or within geoproximity to certain destination. We have 20,000 properties that we have a pickleball court either on premise or within basically within, at least within two kilometers, about a mile.
So lots of them. So there's, we have a pet friendly brand. We have. Business class discount, our approach in a way is not that much different than the Hyatt or the Hilton who has numerous brands that the luxury brand, the discount brand, the mid market brand. We just take that to the nth degree because in the online world, you don't have restrictions as far as service area.
It takes a large physical world person, a lot of time, a lot of money to launch a new brand. Yet we can launch a brand in weeks and some of our micro brands, as we sort of call them, are launching daily.
BB: Let's talk about that. You just said that you can launch a brand daily. Yes. How? I mean, like, we can't just stop there.
JL: Okay. It depends on, we sort of, uh, segment brands into three different levels. Primary, secondary, and tertiary. A primary brand is like RedBite Owner, where we have a very well built out website, long history, yes, very good organic ranking, even some paid campaigns. You're fully built out socials, email campaigns, whatever you would expect of the brand, we would do that for a primary.
We may have secondary languages. So another brand, the hotel space is Hotala, but we would have Hotala. com of course, but we also have Hotala.es, Hotala.mx, Hotala.ar. Uh, we're launching hotels into other languages and that's a primary brand. Secondary brands would be well built out brands targeting unique consumer persona.
Vacation cottages.com for people who love to go to the cottage. It's life is better at the cottages is the brand attached to it. Beneath that we have much more granular things, almost like in microsites that could be a small geographic area or could be reaching a certain type of consumer. The bigger brands, they take obviously longer to develop and, and we work at them for years and they're always under development.
The secondary brands, we can spin out in about two to three weeks. And then the microsites right now, it's, we're doing four or five per day of those microsites. But those microsites are going to very unique, small audiences. How do we do it? Obviously people have probably played around with the generative technologies, be it your chat, GPT equivalents or your image generation technologies from either DALI or MidJourney. We kind of use all of that. We built our own little content creation engine that applies into different models. Whether we talk to the open AI APIs or Anthropic or open models for the right type of content creation. Part about Arabic, it's because you'd be able to tap into some of the new Arabic LLMs that you can go and create languages or output in Arabic using some of the new technologies coming out.
Yeah, we use all of that to feed our content team who basically is the human in the middle of the content creation. It's not yet. I said, it's not yet the push button make website, but it is coming soon. Push button, make website, then have the human curator. Add this soul into the machine, infuse the soul into the machine, as we say.
But it is down to the push button that creates content, reaches the prominent, that person a moment of inspiration to give them what they want. If they're looking for a vacation rental in Florence, we should have Florence vacation rentals. I think that's one of the ones we have or Mount Baker cabin rentals.
BB: And so I've got a fairly hardball question for you, probably one of the ones that is more like a little bit more sharp than anything I'd typically ask you, but I'm just really curious what your response would be. When you say you can put up a website in a day, etcetera, however you do it, do you feel that you're still serving the traveler?
Are you serving them unique product, a differently filtered product? What do we think about the impact on the traveler by having 300, 400, all different?
JL: Great question, and it's not too sharp. So let's go back to the time where I was talking about early in my career and when marketing becomes math. I remember circa 1997, 98.
I was working in a company for retail banking software, super exciting industry. It wasn't, although just before not that the millennium. So there was a bit of concern about what's going to happen at Y2K. But the promise at that point was look at all these amazing marketing technologies, be it email, be it websites, intranets, and how you can use them to create one to one marketing, truly personalized marketing.
And Don Peppers and Martha Rogers wrote a book called one to one marketing, that was their age. And you had to use your email marketing service providers. And then there was no MailChimp creating these email tools at that point. But you could go out and create an email that basically filled in the form of a person's name.
That was one to one marketing, but really it was mass marketing trying to be as personalized as you can get. You fast forward a generation, 20 years later, and really up until some of these generative technologies have started to come out. You're able to create brands or primary or secondary brands that reached consumers with something that appealed to them.
So a comparison, we look at the packaged goods model of Unilever or Procter & Gamble and selling Shaku, if you're Procter & Gamble, you have. A shampoo for curly hair, for straight hair, for blonde, brunettes, redheads, men, women, children, you know, lots of different types of shampoo. And there's probably some formula differences in the shampoo, but really P&G is only concerned about whether they can operate shelf space in that landscape of the grocery store.
To make you buy that shampoo. But you as that consumer feel that this brand speaks to me. Pick your brand here, body sprays, deodorants, soaps, whatever it is, because it speaks to you. As you start to get in the mass customization of travel, can you speak to someone that creates a unique persona?
Our pet friendly brand is for people who love to travel with their pets.
Our family friendly brand is about people who want to travel with their family. The filtering that you can do attached to that experience gets a person the moment that they start to search for the concept of organic paid email, where this is, wow, this person really understands that I'm looking for pet friendly properties.
And all I see on the site are pet friendly accommodations. This is exactly what I'm looking for. We have an eco-friendly brand that we've been able to segment out. Those properties that are more eco-friendly than another one, basically a continuum of one to 20 million. These are the most eco-friendly based on destinations, either from information, get more partners or from that somebody who identifies with that persona is more likely to respond to that market.
And then you basically take it down to the next level. Somebody who's looking for a cabin rental in Mount Baker, Washington State, as they have an entire site that talks about Mount Baker and the imagery and the experience. Here's what it's like to go to Mount Baker. It's exactly what they're looking for.
As long as you have access to the inventory of that market, you really reach that consumer and all the different pain points they have before. It used to be hard to build that, but now it's actually kind of easy because these technologies help you adjust things and do things at scale. You couldn't do that before.
Now you can.
BB: One of the things that I have in my notes that I wanted to ask about actually is kind of the convergence of the last two topics that we've talked about, both AI and segmentation. We've got this level of segmentation that you get from building websites that specifically target a unique consumer like we were just talking about, but at the next level, we can get personal on a person by person basis, right?
That's not just their specific interests that we captured through inbound search, but rather a knowledge of a specific person's travel behaviors and knowledge of a specific person's interests. What work are y'all doing? I mean, if any, to better understand the individual traveler and tailored to their needs.
JL: Lots of different things. I guess it goes back into getting to that web of one. So Brennen has his personal website of exactly what his travel desires, wants, needs are, what you have to prepare for is what comes after the web of one. When you truly have one to one marketing, it's relatively easy now for you to create a profile or persona on any website, including.
Going to the big OTAs and say, hey, bookie, you know me really well. And through the genius program, help me create and match me up to my destination. You know what I like, but that's the web of one. It can truly get down to here is the right property for you at the right moment in time. What I think is coming is what happens post web of one.
Where you have the web of none. How does the system adapt and customize and change in real time for what Brandon wants at this moment in time, we're heavily investing in the whole world of agents and actions and AI agents, basically an autonomous, almost like a travel agent of yesteryear, but somebody who actually truly knows you, but that agent can go out and perform actions in your behalf.
And really create that experience in real time, or whether you, it just takes the input that you're able to feed it. And that input starts from the moment you start interacting with any brand straight through to the longevity that you have with that customer. But what your experience would be different than the next person's experience would be the next person's experience.
BB: It's interesting that action piece is kind of new, like that rabbit device that came out and having the large action model. It's really cool.
JL: Yeah. I think a lot of people say, well, could it be an app? Or not, there's a debate there. And I saw a comment on the weekend about what people don't understand is the speed at which that unit can respond back to users.
And I think that's what most people don't quite realize is that the core value that they're creating there is the speed at which they can get information back to the person. I don't know if their form factor is right, but I fully credit them for attempting that.
BB: I mean, look at the Apple Vision Pro if you're worried about form factors.
JL: Yeah, I think all of those techs, and it really comes back into what is the benefit of AI technologies in any industry? You can apply it to travel, yes, but also education or any large enterprise. I think it's all about bringing the efficiencies into a market and making things go faster and faster and faster.
I know you've tried to create brands and content or whatever. If you just delegate something to your AI agent, you create content or lists. There were a new brand was being launched last night. And I say, what locations do you want to focus on for this? And because we went on to chat to BT and I said, give me a list of the top 50.
Is it right? It's definitely directionally correct, but it's, you can make things go much, much faster. I think what Rabbit's really tapped into, is the idea that they can return information back to that user in really good speed. Right now, they do a lot of round trip that to solve that problem. They still do it all across the same cloud, but you should be able to get the response back in that measured in milliseconds and That's why I think voice is a huge factor in going forward.
But it is about creating efficiencies and doing things that you couldn't do with speed. You couldn't do it before.
BB: Got it. So I'm going to pivot the conversation a little bit and talk about not AI in the context of the traveler, but AI in the context of a business owner, an operator, a marketer, someone who's acquiring customers, which I think you and I both sit in that seat when you're looking at it at scale, because you're a scale based business, you're a bookings driven business.
You're not booking 10,000, 20,000 vacations, you're making 10,000, 80,000 in a booking. How is AI impacting marketing and where do you see the opportunities? Where are you leveraging AI in your marketing operations?
JL: Across the board, and maybe it goes back into the, the aha we had almost a decade ago now, was the value of a traveler.
Who has high intent differs based on the traveler's destination as much as it is from the traveler's origin. And I think a large part of the marketing world of yesteryear, if you will, let's go in and market. We're Tourism Australia, we want to reach Americans who want to go to Australia. Let's go target all the Americans.
And really what you should be looking at is the value of that destination to the user. So practical example, just north of Vancouver here, you have Whistler. If somebody goes to Whistler from Vancouver, once you factor in cancellation rates, We'd earn 30 to 35 per transaction from a Vancouver to Whistler transaction.
Length of stay, maybe staying somewhere a little bit cheaper. Toronto to Vancouver, we may earn 40 to 45 commissions. Somebody coming in from Japan to Whistler, we'd earn north of 100. We'll call it 110 commission. You can start to use the data to say, what is the value of a travel to Whistler when they may be organically searching for the exact same concept of vacation rental in Whistler?
Is that search concept worth an average of 65, if my math was right there, or is the value need to be segmented down? So how do you mark it appropriately to value someone from Japan being different than the value of the person from Vancouver? If I want to have a 150 percent return on ad spend, spend a dollar, maybe a dollar 50.
And I want to make money on that person who's coming from Vancouver. I can spend 20 to make 30. I can spend 30 to make 40 from a person coming from Toronto. I can spend 65 or 70 to make 110 from Japan. And segmenting things on that level allows you to start to apply the data in ways that you couldn't do otherwise.
BB: So what I'm hearing essentially to translate it from my simple mind is basically, you know, for instance, like at the very highest level for a brand. My average customer is worth 40. I can pay 39 before I start losing money to acquire that customer. But at a more narrow level, which gets enabled by AI and bidding driven by AI models, specifically on paid customer acquisition through paid search or whatever you're using.
The more and more specific and understanding that users demographics, where they're coming from, where they're going to, you know, more about how much that transactions were, so you can dial up or down your budget for the specific purchase.
JL: Yes, for pay, but it doesn't have to be paid. Organic works the exact same way.
If you know that somebody from Japan to Whistler is worth a certain price point, why don't you build a Japanese focused site? in Japanese to target Japanese travelers who want to go to Whistler, who have certain search concepts, who have that intent. And because you know, the value of that traveling, you've been able to identify the most valuable travelers in your network.
BB: I would, I personally, just as an aside, would create a site for people in Japan going to Whistler that says, are you confused? You should go to Niseko instead, it's just a little bit north.
JL: but whatever those markets are, like when you start to look at the total number of destinations in the world and total number of locations in the world.
We have across our network, we have 660,000 primary and secondary locations. We have 40 different languages we may tap into. And, but we start to look at those pairs and those concepts and those things. There is enough traffic that relates back to everybody's intent. And when you see something of high value, you basically tell the machine, go off and find me another solution for that.
We, one of our new microsites is focusing on yoga retreats, and the reason we were focusing on yoga retreats is the data told us that our average transaction value for somebody looking for a yoga retreat was above average. And if that's above average, why don't you go out and build an entire brand focusing on yoga retreats that can cater to people who have that intent and interest.
But I don't have to make the call, the data makes the call. And if you listen to the data, the good news is I don't have to make the call to come up with a better way to phrase it. Because if you're relying on my knowledge versus the machine's knowledge, I can't scale, the machine can scale instantly.
BB: So you mentioned the machine twice.
Yes. It's three times in the processing of my listening to you say it, you said it again. So now it's three times. What is the machine?
JL: So good question, even on our travel AI website. And I talked about the factory of the future. The quote, I always say, I don't know who's to be attributed to. So I apologize whoever said it first, but the factory of the future consists of one man and one dog.
The man's job is to feed the dog, the dog's job, make sure the man's not touched the machine. And when we think about it in that context, what we're building is the machine that builds the thing. Yes, we can go out and connect into one of our customers API, whether it's a Booking.com API or Expedia API or Home2Go or PickYourPartner, or we can have the machine connect into their API.
Yes, we can go out and automate. Uh, identification of a domain name, we believe would make a good micro brand, or we have the machine connected into that system. So the machine really is literally the machine that we built over the last decade that allows us to go out, build, manage, host, market, test, measure, the performance of our platform.
And it's a never ending job because you're always having to work on the factory. You're always having to basically make that machine better and better and better and smarter because if you've created enough loops in the system. It should learn from what you've done before and make the next one better after that.
We have 60 engineers working on the machine. We're not a small team, but even though we have a lot of brands, most of the brands are being maintained by engineers and data scientists, as opposed to being maintained by people. Our marketing team is really, really small.
BB: Hold on, did you just tell me that data scientists and engineers are not people?
JL: Well, no, no, they are not meant by tradition. If somebody thinks about a marketing organization, you would have Our paid search team is me with a glass of wine and a few other assistants to help out. It's the marketing engine that most of all this podcast are used to is, Oh, we have X number of people in part of our conversion rate optimization team.
We have, we're working with yourself from an organic standpoint, and we work with a few other groups of organic, but really it's advising the engineers of how to build the technology or build repeatable systems. That can be applied, not just on brand number one, but applied across all 300 brands. So that's what I mean, sort of, and definitely not implying that they're not bleak people.
They definitely are. They're super, super bright people, but it's more working on what's it about Michael Gerber, the E myth work on the business, not in the business? In the business, on the business, not in the business. And I think that's kind of key to what we've done over the years is always work on the business rather than in the business.
I mean, there's still lots of things you have to manually look at and, and course script. That's now the man feeding the dog and not touching the machine. Every now and then you have to do some repairs, but that's the goal. You want to get to that point that it's an automated factory capable of building the machine itself.
BB: Yes. And the machine for all the other marketers listening to this, which by the way, like 600 downloads in the last episode, which is pretty cool. That happened quicker than I expected. Thank you for everybody who's listening. I remember that correctly. I'll have to go check the stats. It could have been six and I just created it in my head.
Well, we'll say six, there's soon to be 6,000. Yeah. Soon to be 6,000. Yes. John who I'm sitting with right here, unlike some traditional marketers spending 10,000 a month on a paid search manager in house, John buys a nice glass of wine, sits down and generates hundreds of millions of dollars in bookings.
JL: It's literally a little pan to the right here, you have the little wine rack over there, but a lot of the stuff you can take advantage of the tool sets that are out there.
BB: What's the stack? Well, I mean, you guys have dialed in paid media. What is the paid media stack? What should it look like?
JL: I love paid search via Google or Bing, but this, it's really as Google, but we're sad because it's the cleanest platform for a person to raise their hand and says, I want this.
And you happen to be able to put something right in front of them. You have to have organic as part of it. Organic is our core, all of our network of sites goes out. How do you make sure you have organic? Of course, you, we have subscriptions to Semrush and Ahrefs and Majestic, and we use it all. We use as much data as we can.
From a tech staff standpoint, we are an AWS shop through and through. We use a lot of their tools that they've allowed us to accelerate and make sure we have great brands that. are fast from that perspective. We're just about to deploy some Klaviyo for some email marketing. We use customers on AI for things.
We use Hootsuite for some social marketing. We are heavy users of open AI and their API for content creation. We use Midjourney. We use DALI. We use, we built some proprietary tools for indexing. We built some proprietary tools for content creation. They call it the content kitchen. It's kind of cool. It's literally go up, create recipes and I want to use this model or that model in, in Outpops content.
We have proprietary tools that we've built around obviously the web hosting side of it.
BB: And like getting into Google ads, you're driving traffic across many, many sites to hundreds of thousands of hotels and vacation rentals. Do you do that? Like, is that something you'd use the offline ads editor for you doing that all in platform?
JL: We work closely with Google, I guess is the best way to look at it. So from a paid perspective and clarifying, we're not all paid. Uh, that's it. We do some paid, especially for it to jumpstart a brand, because how do you know you have the right response and messaging and before you, I'd love to have all organic, but sometimes you have to have that, that mix of paid and organic and social and email and all those things.
I'm a big believer in dynamic ads and the possibility of dynamic ads where you can actually. Put your message in front of foundationally, if you're nice to Google, Google's nice to you. And that applies to both organic and paid. If you create a well structured site that has proper schema markup, if you create a fast site, if you create a mobile first site, you can make sure that you are organically well positioned, but are also well positioned and paid.
And if you have that well structured site, you can really rely on the tools that Google provides through dynamic ads and dynamic based bidding, where you don't have to go out and create massive single word keyword campaigns. You can say, here's four assets. Here's a custom created asset library that matches the brand voice.
Go and create my ads and build ads, get that uploaded to the system. And those are your ads. And then Google. automates and optimizes the assets you have the best performing and really trusting the machine that it will make the right decisions. If you, especially if you optimize towards optimized decisions, maybe that's the way to sort of segment for people in the audience to understand is that if you listen to the data, the data often tells you what's going on and what we started doing many years ago now was trusting the data.
As opposed to trusting our instinct is the data is often right. So when we optimize an organic campaign or paid campaign or email or social. It wasn't trying to optimize towards revenue, it was trying to optimize towards the yes, no decision. So if you get a yes decision, you tell the machine, go give me more of that.
If you get a no decision, you tell the machine, give me less of that. And I think that as a background, as long as you're optimizing for those decisions, you can create a loop in the business. What we have that drives our business, we call it the content traveler data lake, where you have any type of content, it could be all of our inventory partners, our content, all of our blogs that we create our content. And an image would create us content, and a social post would create us content. But content attracts travelers. You can bring in travelers organically, through paid, through email, through other channels. But the more content you have, the more travelers you will attract. The more travelers you have, the more data you get. And because those, if you optimize, Um, for the yes style decisions, then you can get more content around the yeses and less content around the noes, you get more content being created. So content brings you travelers, travelers give you data, data gives you more content.
And that loop, as long as you feed in more content, more travelers, and more data, the loop gets faster and faster and faster. And that's kind of been the core of the businesses that we have, um, our content traveler data loop, and now through generative technologies, the data actually is creating the content.
Which is allowing that loop to go much, much faster, because now if we get a booking today from a traveler who's coming from Japan to go to Whistler, maybe the engine will say, let's go and create more content for Japanese travelers to Whistler, because we've managed to go up a level. If we identify a new location that we've not built out content for, but we've just received a booking for somewhere in the Bahamas of a certain island or a certain bay. Maybe it adds that keyword of that bay to our list of domain names we should go and build a microsite targeted to a unique bay in the islands because we just earned a thousand dollars commission. But that data gives us. Content travels more travelers, travels gives us more data.
And that's core.
BB: Okay. So I think that's a great ending spot, the data loop, given that I've absorbed more of your time than I initially asked for going on by a couple of minutes now, but thanks in part to our long conversation prior to this, just catching up. Anything else you want to share?
JL: I guess for your listeners, it's from a marketing perspective, it just start.
I think it's, there'd probably be people that listen to you who are students and trying to figure out what they want to do. They'll be people who are part of DMOs or OTAs. We're living in an amazing time in which we have all these technologies available to us and we're playing in a really fun industry that is travel to start, so whether you're going to start your own brands, whether you're going to go out and build a travel blog, cause you want to document your journeys as you travel across Europe or. Just start, you can get them in front of customers, you can get them to raise their hands. Once they raise their hands, you can bring them more of what you want.
And I think really as marketers, our job is to try to match up the two sides of the market. Those who want what those who have and give people more of what they want to those who want. And the closer you can do that, they win, your customers win. And everybody wins if you can match up people with what they want in the best industry of the planet.
So I guess those are the last words I would have.
BB: Yeah, ending with the word planet is definitely a good way to end the interview. Very, very high level there. As is to be expected with you, John. Thank you so much. Last question. Where are you traveling next?
JL: I have three trips booked. I have two, basically three trips, all part of the different parts of the life compass.
So I have a trip coming up with my wife. We're doing bucket list trip down to Vegas to go to see U2sphere and see a Cirque show. Then I have a self discovery with other founders and other tech founders but I'm skiing in Salt Lake, that's the end of February. And then I have a work trip. We're heading out to Bangladesh, we're with a bunch of engineers and probably a stop off in Dubai on the way.
So three different parts of your life compass and got three different trips coming up. I am headed to Salt Lake in two days. I will keep all of the snow very, very fluffy for you.
JL: You're going on a cruise soon too, right? Yes, the Propellic team, by the way, for anybody who's considering applying for roles, we have four of them open right now.
And the Propellic team is going on our annual company retreat, which this year, for the second year in a row, is a cruise to the Bahamas, which I think is pretty darn cool.
JL: Hopefully you get to swim with the pigs.
BB: You know what, actually, believe it or not, the original swimming pig tours, Daniel Key Vacations is a client of ours.
The original one.
JL: That's awesome.
BB: We actually bought a couple of extra rooms because we didn't know exactly how many people we'd have on our team at the time, and my parents are joining us. They're not allowed to interact with, as much as I love them, no interaction with the rest of the team. They're going to be doing the Swimming Pigs tour.
JL: Well, and for anybody who's listening, who's not working with your current team, your team is awesome. Full marks to them. They're, they're professional. They're fun. A great team to work with.
BB: So I'm glad we're doing that as well. Thank you, John. The mutual admiration committee shall continue later.
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