AI will kill the travel writing star; and, tell me where to go

Hi there friends, I hope you’re all well. This week’s newsletter comes to you from under a thatched roof at a safari lodge in northern Kenya. I’m here with Intrepid Travel to experience a new product they’re launching, trying to bring more tourists to a part of the world that could definitely use the injection of money that tourism brings. Being here and seeing this new idea, not to mention connecting with all the people who have helped it come to fruition, has got me thinking about that human element of travel, and the danger we’re in that it will disappear. AI will kill the travel writing star – and it will also, eventually, make your travel experience worse. On the upside, I also have a teaser for a truly amazing new food tour I’m going to launch right here on the Food + Travel Edit next week, and details of a bespoke, AI-free travel service I already provide. Thanks again for your support!

There’s something that AI, or artificial intelligence, can’t do.

It can’t review a new experience. It can’t describe a thing that hasn’t existed until now.

An AI bot can’t review a new restaurant; it can’t profile a new hotel. Claude or ChatGPT or whatever you use can’t visit a new attraction. It can’t test out a new airport.

AI works by scraping the internet and using what already exists to create something new, tailored to whatever it is you need. So if you’re looking for, say, a hotel to stay in in Tokyo, AI can scour all of the stories that have already been written, all of the Google reviews and TripAdvisor rants and everything else that’s out there, and come up with its own list of options for you.

It’s built to steal, in other words. Its very design relies on other people going out there and seeing things, doing things, coming up with ideas and opinions and sharing them, and then it scrapes them all up and spits out something that appears original.

You might think you don’t use AI much, if at all, particularly when it comes to travel, but I can guarantee you do.

Every time you do a Google search you’re using AI – Google now uses its own AI engine, Gemini, to summarise what it deems as the best information out there on the internet, which it then arranges at the top of the page, before you get into any of the websites that actually produced the content it is scraping.

(The best hotels in Tokyo according to Gemini, btw, are Aman, Hoshinoya and the Ritz Carlton, which is a very limited snapshot of the options available in that city.)

NEW TOUR!

Guys, I have huge news. I’m about to launch a new food tour with World Expeditions, and it’s an absolute cracker. We will be visiting a new country in a very familiar continent, eating some of the most famous food on the planet, and hiking in some of the most incredibly beautiful mountains you can imagine. As readers of the Food + Travel Edit you will be the first to hear the details – stay tuned for an announcement next week.

There are ways to use AI to your advantage when it comes to researching and booking travel. You can get the likes of Claude, Gemini and ChatGPT to keep an eye out for cheap flights, to suggest alternative ways to get to your destination, or even to suggest alternative destinations that might be cheaper or quieter or just more enjoyable. And that’s just the beginning really.

It’s tempting to write AI off as not being intelligent at all, to pick up the small errors or hallucinations it makes and dismiss the whole thing as useless, but I don’t think that’s the case. AI is an extremely powerful tool for travellers. That list of Tokyo hotels might be very limited and not at all to my taste or budget, but if you put in a few more prompts and preferences in, you will get much closer to what you need.

But here’s the problem.

AI is theft on a grand scale. It’s theft of the work of people like me and millions of other creators whose knowledge and experience is being used to form the opinions and the expertise of the bots that now spit out all this information.

No one asked me if I would like to participate in this system, and no one ever will. AI has just appeared, and if it can go rogue and hack government agencies and its creators will not face jail time or fines or sanctions, but rather be rewarded with enticements, then you can understand that the fate of a lowly travel writer will not enter into anyone’s thinking.

And so my work, my knowledge and expertise, will continue to be stolen. OpenAI and Anthropic will not pay me or anyone like me a single cent to scrape my content and serve it up as something that appears new for the profit of a business that produces nothing truly original of its own.

I’m not writing this purely self-indulgently. Because although it is me who is going to suffer long-term, it’s also you. It’s every traveller out there. It’s every person out there.

AI is going to put creators out of business. It will continue scraping our work, becoming smarter and more efficient, faster and more accurate, as it is already doing every second of every minute of every hour of every day. Tick, tick, tick. It gets better.

Creators won’t survive it. Already, they’re disappearing. I just spoke to a British journalist who told me that a major newspaper in the UK has disbanded its huge suite of hotel reviews, has given up on the idea of reviewing hotels altogether, because there aren’t enough people reading. They’re all just using the Gemini summary on their Google searches, which scrapes the paper’s content and presents it as its own.

You’re seeing the problem. With no left reading websites and publications, there’s no one left to write for. With no one left to write for, we stop writing. We stop reviewing. We stop going out and seeing the world and reporting back on the new things we find.

AI can only scrape what already exists. And if nothing new is being produced by actual people, people like me, then AI will only present information that stops at a certain point in time, that becomes less and less informed the fewer of us there are to write stories and feed the engine.

There will come a tipping point where AI starts becoming less useful for the likes of travel planning, rather than becoming perpetually better. And when it does, there will be no writers or creators left to fill the void.  

What we do about this, I don’t know. Creatives aren’t powerful enough to take on AI companies. Governments are so obsessed with attracting those companies to invest that they’re doing nothing to try to compensate the creatives whose work is being stolen to make the whole engine move.

This story didn’t start out as a sales pitch – it wasn’t my intention – but what we creators are left to do is appeal directly to people like you, the reader, to pitch in and help us survive, to preserve real voices and real human opinions even when the replacement is so easy and efficient to access.  

The content you read in my newsletters is original and real. It’s my thoughts and opinions, developed over two decades as a writer and four decades as a traveller of the world. It is content produced by someone who can visit that new hotel, who can review that new restaurant, who can find new things and create something that hasn’t existed before.

And that has to mean something.

TELL ME WHERE TO GO

Creatives like me often have a problem with self-promotion – it feels icky, I can’t explain it – so I haven’t really written about this before, but this seems like as good a time as any. As well as writing stories and leading tours, I also run a travel advice service, called Tell Me Where to Go. This is a bespoke service in which I can help you plan your next holiday, calling on all that human experience and expertise to help you get the absolute best out of your next trip. These services begin with a basic half-hour chat to discuss your plans and run through options, to full, in-depth itinerary planning, to even getting everything booked for you. You can click here to learn more – and I can guarantee, no AI will be involved.

THINGS I’M LOVING THIS WEEK

• I’ve been to Tokyo so many times it’s tempting to feel like I’ve done it all – but sword fighting on the roof of a skyscraper? Now that’s something new.
• Nepal needs you. This call-out from World Expeditions CEO Sue Badyari to visit Nepal again, to help the country rebuild from its recent flooding disaster with tourism dollars, was a timely reminder.
• Some great ideas here for foodie travel experiences in Europe.

THINGS I’M NOT LOVING

• I’ve seen some things on Jetstar flights in the past, but… not these things.
• Shuttle buses from Western Sydney International to Sydney CBD are going to cost $55 one way. So probably more than your flight.