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In this episode of the Skift Travel Podcast, Sarah Kopit and Seth Borko explore how two powerful forces are reshaping how people decide where to travel. On one side is culture, with shows like The White Lotus turning hotels and destinations into global demand drivers. On the other is technology, as AI tools begin to change how travelers search, compare, and ultimately choose where to stay.
The conversation starts with Hyatt landing a major moment in the next season of The White Lotus, replacing Four Seasons and putting one of its properties in front of a global audience. That moment opens up a broader discussion about how exposure, branding, and even soft brand strategies play into growth and customer acquisition.
From there, the focus shifts to a more structural change. As AI becomes a starting point for travel planning, the traditional role of brands in search and discovery is being challenged. New research shows that platforms built to answer questions, not just sell rooms, are increasingly what travelers see first. Taken together, these shifts point to a bigger question for the industry.
If demand is being shaped by entertainment and filtered through AI, what role do travel brands actually play in influencing decisions?
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Watch This Episode Transcript of This ConversationThis transcript is generated by artificial intelligence.
The number of the week is four, as in it will not be four seasons for the four seasons on the White Lotus. Will, do we have a sound effect for that? You know, little drums, you know?
Can you say that four times fast?
So wait, wait, the fourth season of White Lotus will not be at the four seasons?
Will not have the four seasons, yes. So remind me, Seth, I can’t remember, we talk about the four seasons a lot, but I know you watch Terrible Reality TV, but do you watch Prestige TV as well?
We did learn on this podcast, I do watch Terrible Reality TV.
Yeah, is it only The Housewives or what?
Yeah, the four seasons will have to go to The Housewives for the next episode. No, I do watch some Prestige television, not as much as you do, Sarah. I’m not as prestigious as you are, but I do love The White Lotus and I have it.
I got The White Lotus and I’ve got The Pit, which is not filmed at a hotel, to my understanding.
Yes. Although it is interesting, when I was at Ahoa two weeks ago, that’s the big Asian-American hotel conference, HBO, and we’ll talk about this a little bit later.
But HBO had a huge booth there.
Really?
And featuring The Pit. And I actually stopped and I asked him, I’m like, why are you guys here? And I mean, I should have guessed.
Why were they there?
But I mean, he’s like, well, every hotel room has a TV.
Oh, the classic motel sign.
Cable, television, and a pool.
That’s right.
That’s like what you would advertise.
Yeah, but it was huge. Like it was a strikingly large booth, and it featured The Pit. That’s what made me think about it.
Like that was their big, the guy that was sitting behind it was dressed like a doctor.
You know what always gets me? And again, our hotel, your friends will be like, this is obvious. I go to hotel conferences and Nespresso as stans and it’s the same thing.
Yeah, not every hotel room has an espresso, but many do and they would like every hotel room to have an espresso. So those are these funny, these funny vendor things where I assume every vendor is just sheets and linens and house keep and stuff.
Exactly.
It’s not.
You’re going to have HPO, you’re going to have cable, you’re going to have.
Yeah.
I’m surprised Netflix, because I feel like the amenity du jour is bring your own stream in. I’m surprised Netflix doesn’t have a booth.
We go so far in the Kopit household to bring our own Apple TV.
No, you don’t.
We do. It’s like this big and it’s awesome.
See, that’s the benefit of trash television is I’m not so engaged with my prestige television that I need to travel with.
Yeah.
3:09
White Lotus Impact
So we kind of joke, but let’s talk a little bit about TV and the travel industry because it is massive. It is a massive, massive driver. So I think that every, let’s see, where has the White Lotus been?
And for one thing, I find it fascinating. I would love to write something or do something. And I’ve asked and HBO has turned me down every time.
I would love to know what the pitch meeting was like between either Mike White and HBO and The Four Seasons. Because like it’s a show where very terrible people like to do terrible things and do terrible things.
Not just murder, lots of other terrible things too, that make for a great television.
Well, it’s the old adage that no press is bad press, right? Like the only bad press is no press, and said another way, as in people can do all sorts of terrible things in your property.
As long as you get these nice long beautiful shots of the pool, and the destination, and the staff. People say, it’s just television, but that looks really nice. That was real.
I was going to say, as long as everything is beautiful.
I mean, in that show, everything is beautiful.
The people are beautiful, the scenery is beautiful, the rooms are beautiful, the food is beautiful. There just happens to be some murder.
Yeah. Schitt’s Creek, a different television show filmed in a motel, perhaps did not have as much competition to be the background of-
That’s true.
That’s true.
So season one was Hawaii.
Hawaii.
Season two was Sicily.
Yes.
Season three was Thailand.
Which last year, so I’m going to Bangkok tomorrow actually for Skift’s Global Forum East. And I remember there was a big issue last year, I took a couple of days afterwards to see Thailand, because I’d never been to Thailand.
And it was a big issue last year about where I was going to go to try to avoid the throngs of White Lotus travelers. I mean, that’s a thing.
Totally. Television is a huge driver of visitation. We know in our data, it’s a major source of inspiration.
Up there with family and friends is, I saw it on television. And I mean, it matters.
And especially when it’s luxury and when, I mean, I don’t want to talk trickle down, but to talk a little bit, I guess to talk a little bit, like I think there is a trickle down effect too, where like there are the ultra luxury and there are the
dedicated Four Seasons travelers who are going to come to the Four Seasons no matter what. But even for even the venerable Four Seasons needs to acquire customers. Even they need to acquire new customers. And this is a great way to do it.
But for the rest of us who maybe can’t afford the Four Seasons, it’s just an aspiration. There is a trickle down because they’re not the only resort in Thailand, they’re not the only resort in Hawaii.
And if you see these amazing things, it drives tourism and visitation and just buzz and talk and people talking about it and saying that you see last night’s episode and blah, blah, blah. But by the way, I think the hotels come up more than.
Yeah.
In some ways, in many of these, especially at the White Lotus, the hotel is a character in many ways.
Well, that’s the other thing. And I think that’s what really drives. When you do see TV shows really drive tourism, I have no research on this.
But I would think that it’s those places where it’s just what you said. The location, even the building, is another part of the character. That’s why there are Emily and Paris tours.
Paris is very much a character in that show, just like Sex and the City with New York. Like New York carries shoe closet or whatever on the Upper West Side. That is very much a part of the show.
6:59
Hyatt Secures White Lotus
But I fear, Seth, that we have buried the lead here. So you might ask, who is, where is season four of The Four Seasons going to be? So we always knew it was going to be in France.
So we knew it was going to be in France.
Not season four. We’re so obsessed with Four Seasons. Where will it be?
Four Seasons has lost the White Lotus contract.
Correct. Well, I guess. I mean, we don’t really know.
Like I said, I tried, Seth.
I tried, I tried, I tried.
I tried to write this story, but no one would talk to me. So I don’t know if it was a contract or what. But Hyatt is going to be one of the locations, or a Hyatt is going to be one of the locations.
And the other one is, let’s see. So the Hotel Martinez as part of the Unbound collection by Hyatt. And so I don’t speak French.
We’re not going to get that right.
As we, I was just going to say, I’m like reading it and I’m like, okay, am I going to try to say this out loud?
Probably not, because as we learned when we were talking about Air Canada, I do not speak French.
Well, you’ll have to read Sean’s.
The Arelles, I’ll pronounce it in the worst American.
Do it in the New York way.
The Arelles Chateau. Yeah. Basically, it will be filmed across two locations in the French Riviera set in the Cannes Film Festival speaking of highbrow.
Highbrow movies.
It’s Cannes.
Is it Cannes? See, I’m just, no, it’s an intent, it’s a bit, I’m sorry. I’m not uneducated.
I’m doing a bit where I’m intentionally mispronouncing all of the French names. Well, I think it’s a big scoop, honestly, for Hyatt and for the Cannes Hotel Market. I think it’s great.
Yeah. Is there Four Seasons in the French? There must be a Four Seasons in the French Riviera.
There isn’t a Four Seasons in the French Riviera for all of our friends at Four Seasons.
You should probably make that.
No, no, there is. There is.
Yeah. Yeah. So I cannot wait though.
I’m so excited. I need a new show. But I will say, when I was on my way to Berlin, I don’t know how many of you watched the show Dark.
It is quite possibly, it’s a German show. It is quite possibly the best show that’s ever been on television. And so when I went from, let’s see, where did I fly into?
Frankfurt, and then I flew to Berlin. I was flying over the, like we took this little puddle jumper, very low to the ground, and I was flying over all the forests and looking out. And I knew that that’s where they filmed it.
And I was like, oh, can I see the caves? Can I see all the things?
And it did look, it looked remarkably like it.
I had read ahead of time because I’m like that, that was the place where my favorite show ever was filmed. So I got to see it from there.
Well, what I think is interesting about this Four Seasons News, one of the things that is interesting is obviously that the Four Seasons, I keep calling it the Four Seasons News, it’s White Lotus News, is that the Four Seasons has lost the contract.
They’ve become so synonymous. I love that Hyatt has won it. And I think it’s quite, well, Hyatt has been one of the hotels that’s won it.
And I think it’s quite interesting that the hotel is a part of Hyatt’s Unbound collection, which is a soft brand. So we’ve been talking a lot about me and you, Sarah, on Passive, so it’s about franchise, franchise agreements, franchise owners.
And the soft brand is an interest in one. It generally has lower franchise fees, less of these performance improvement plans, less strict oversight from HQ, and more about letting hoteliers do their things.
I think there’s been some debate on my team and amongst the industry about how effective these soft brands are. Are they just dilute in everything?
Especially in the lower end of soft brands, you can get some duds that don’t actually have to follow the brand standards. But this is an upper upscale.
So this is a nicer, more luxurious soft brand collection with higher standards for what property is going to end. So this is interesting that Hyatt has won this.
I can see why hotels would do it with their upscale, more unique properties. It essentially lets the hotelier or the hotel itself be more of itself, I suppose. But why would a hotel ever allow that on the lower end?
It’s about property growth, right?
I think that’s what it’s about.
It’s easier to grow the business.
Well, the hotel, they’re looking for net unit growth, right? They want to have net unit growth because that’s what drives more properties, means more franchise fees, means more revenue, means more shareholder returns.
It also means more geographic diversity, which is both good for the brand itself and good for diversification and also good for its network.
So I think loyalty is a big driver of this, where building a soft brand does mean that your properties are less distinctive, but it’s an easier way to get these independent hoteliers who maybe were pickier about joining a franchise network, to get
them to join your property so that you can grow your units, you can have geographic diversity and you can have a broader geographic appeal for your loyalty members. That’s why I think you would do it at the lower end, even though it is a greater risk
of dilution. But this is interesting because in a segue, we did get some fan email, which I love about last week’s episode, where we were talking about this exact topic. Subject line, hoteliers getting crushed.
I love it when you all write to us. It just makes my day. Whenever I open an email that is from one of you listeners, it’s usually the highlight of my day.
I’m not sure what that says about me, but nonetheless, if you write to me, I read all of your emails and I enjoy them.
Yeah, this is positive reinforcement that if you write to us with a controversial headline like hoteliers getting crushed, you will get airtime. But this hotelier was writing to us about your story, Sarah.
I know you can’t brag any praise, but you’re getting a lot of praise both online and in our inboxes for your story. It was a great story. I will brag on your behalf, Sarah.
Thank you. And they pointed out this geographic diversity thing. They said exactly this.
They actually called out, and I think we covered this on Skift, but they pointed out a hotel executive who at a recent hotel investment conference basically said, how great is it that we get to be geographically diversified?
And this is a topic that we touched on in the podcast last time. How great is it that we get to be geographically diversified?
How great is it that we get to add soft brands, luxury properties in the south of France into our soft brand and luxury properties all over the world?
And that means that when the Middle East gets hit or when European growth slows or when the World Cup fumbles the ball, I don’t know whatever the soccer metaphor is, we still get to grow.
Yeah, it doesn’t matter or it matters less. It matters less for us. And the point that this listener was making is like, well, I mean, we can’t do that as a hotelier.
Like we are by definition, like stuck in one location. Like we have to absorb all of the, you know, whatever the badness, whatever the dumpster fire that is going on in the world, it is for them to pick up the pieces. So.
Yeah.
Unless they sell out to Blackstone or BlackRock, geographically diversified real estate investment trust. We have more to discuss. We have more to discuss this episode.
And actually, I think one of the other interesting stories, speaking of all these topics, these are in the news and on our minds, beyond just White Lotus, search and discovery, which is the core function of a brand.
That’s why an independent hotel year would work with a large brand, is search and discovery. The big brands are great for marketing, for advertising, for mindshare.
Hyatt is able to strike a deal with HBO and get the Hyatt Unbound collection on the White Lotus, and hopefully that should flow through to all Hyatt Unbounds, and ultimately to all Hyatt properties.
It should elevate the status of Hyatt as a whole, as a global brand, and make them more discoverable. One would hope.
15:30
AI Search Dominance
But the top of the funnel is shifting rapidly, and the brands are up there, Google is up there, the online travel agencies are up there, and increasingly, of course, the topic, not even du jour, the topic of the year, AI, and AI is up there changing
discoverability. And maybe let’s talk about this one a little bit, Sarah. Adriana Lee, our intrepid tech reporter out of San Francisco, who has a great job covering AI and travel, has a piece on a new study.
Ironically, the lead does start with a Hyatt hotel. The lead literally says, we didn’t plan this. Ask an AI agent about a Hyatt hotel, and the source it cites most isn’t Hyatt.
It’s nerd wallet at 13.6 percent of citations, more than Hyatt’s own websites at 10.3 percent.
So this story is that Adriana’s reporting on, it’s a recent study that basically looks at AI visibility and who is showing up when you search for hotels and properties, and who is showing up. What do you make of this one, Sarah?
I mean, it’s just so fascinating. Like, I wonder what the thing that I immediately thought is, what is nerd wallets AI strategy? Because they must have one that is working.
Can I tell you, can I play devil’s advocate to you a little bit?
Sure, sure.
I think they got lucky.
I think they had an SEO strategy, and their SEO strategy happened to work for AI.
All companies had an SEO strategy for the last 10 years, at least.
I don’t know.
They weren’t all equally good at it, I suppose, is what I would say. They all have the strategy.
That was my main question. Like, the thing that is, like we know a few things about GEO as I’ve been calling it, and I will call it until somebody tells me we’ve decided on another term for it.
The thing that always, you know, we know that if you tell like authoritative stories, if you have like real organic questions that, you know, you are basically have the content in the back end of your website, that when somebody asks that question of
Claude or Chachi PT., that you’re going to be to be surfaced. So you have some of that, like storytelling, authentic storytelling on the back end. But to Adriana’s point and to this, like, why on earth would Nerd Wallet truly come up before Hyatt?
You know, and so it is just such a mystery. And then for anybody who has read up on AI and, you know, I do, we talked about it before, but I do recommend the New Yorker’s piece on Sam Altman, just to get a little like kind of background.
I mean, that’s more of a personal story about the people of AI, but the people who make these models are very public about the fact that they don’t really even know how they work. I mean, what do you do with that, right?
Like, if you’re a marketer or you’re a brand, like, that’s why I want to know what Nerd Wallet did, what they do.
Well, so let me say something interesting. So this study that Adriana is reporting on was done by a company called, and it’s not even French, I’m gonna get the pronunciation wrong, Limmy or Limey, L-I-M-Y.
It’s an Andreessen Horowitz back startup, and they do this sort of stuff. And they found Nerd Wallet and read it. Now, if I can humbly say so, not so humbly say so, I’m not a Midwestern, so I’ll brag to myself a little bit, Sarah.
The Yorker.
We did a very, very similar study on skiff research.
Very similar. And we came to the same conclusions. We came to them six months ago.
They still hold, but that’s okay. I’m not in competition. But we did a study with, I actually came with them almost a year ago, with Dune 7 and SEMrush.
So these were our partners in the study. I like to thank them every time I bring up this study. It wasn’t paid.
They gave us the data for free. That’s why I thank them. Anyone who wants to give me free data, please let me know.
And we did the same study, and we looked at Google’s AI mode. This study looked across ChatGPT and other platforms, so it’s more comprehensive.
But we looked at AI mode, and we found the website most frequently cited for flight-related search AI overviews, and number one by a country mile was NerdWallet. We found NerdWallet too.
I mean, Reddit I get.
No, it’s not Reddit. Well, NerdWallet, in flights, we got NerdWallet, Wikipedia, and then we got American Airlines, and then TravelNesure, and then Quora.
For hotels, we got TripAdvisor, our friends at TripAdvisor, Wikipedia, Kayak, booking.com, and Reddit.
So these aggregators and these journalists, user-generated content like Wikipedia, like Reddit, these new sites like NerdWallet, I don’t want to insult NerdWallet, but calling it a new site might be a bit of a stretch, but you get it.
And then these aggregators like Kayak, and Booking, and TripAdvisor are coming up far more frequently than brands.
Because I think Adriana says this, actually quotes one of the Lyme, I’m going to call them Lyme, one of the Lyme executives who says, airlines and hotels built websites to sell tickets and rooms not to answer questions.
So the websites that are set up to answer questions, which are the aggregators and the platforms and the journalistic and the user-generated content, they are set up to answer questions.
The AI is searching that they’re saying, oh, that’s a question, that’s an answer. Let me pull that in. And then the people who just transact are getting left behind.
I think that’s what it seems to be.
I mean, they just haven’t caught up yet, which is being left behind, meaning like, if I were their marketing director, I would have… I don’t think it needs to be forward-facing. But like, you can put some data in there.
You can answer some questions. Take all the questions you get. I mean, you think about these companies, especially, because they all have bots now.
They all have online chat situations where… I mean, they almost never work. They never answer your question.
You always have to call and talk to a person. It’s always very frustrating. But they do have the questions.
Yeah.
They could take those questions and kind of pump them into the back end and give themselves some metadata for the computer to crawl.
I wouldn’t expect anyway. I’m not a computer scientist.
I do think part of it is that they’re talking… These other platforms have the ability to talk comprehensively. Nerd Wallet does a lot of stuff.
That is the top five US airlines rank, the best credit cards to travel to South America to, the best economy bookings on trips to Mexico. And they rank multiple sources, which is the sort of thing that I think is going to rank as authoritative.
Whereas Hotel Brand A or Airline Brand B only talks about Hotel Brand A and B. They don’t talk about their competitors. And I think that’s partially what’s happening here.
I wonder if they’ll change.
I wonder if the brands will change that. Like I wonder if they will, or if it’s a bit of a wag the dog situation.
Like, I wonder if we will get to a point sooner rather than later, where the brands are like, all right, like in order to rank, we have to do some of these things that previously would be unthinkable.
You know, like mention our competitors or something like that, in order to kind of feed the beast. I don’t know, I’m just kind of spitballing here.
No, I think you’re right. I mean, I think there’s a part of it that’s also, is this what customers actually want? Do they actually want top five rankings, or do they just want the best brand to show up in their search results?
Well, let’s use ourselves, Seth.
I am a big, like I do this.
I’m sure you do this too.
Like, you know, I was trying to figure out for spring break, I don’t know, I just went so cold here. I just wanted to get away and go to Mexico for like four days with my tween children who are infinitely difficult to please at this moment.
Parents of teenagers, please write me support emails. I take those as well. They don’t have to be travel related.
Just, you know, a little encouragement. So, you know, that I will say, you know, what’s the best all-inclusive resort in Mexico for tweens and teens? I believe I have typed that into Claude more than once.
And I, but see, I don’t want it to send me to Reddit or to, God forbid, NerdWallet. I want it to answer my question, you know? Like, if I wanted to go to Reddit and look in search that I would have done so, that’s my beef with that.
No, I agree with you.
And this, I think this also speaks to the, the narrowing of the funnel, which is that people expect answers and personalization.
24:38
Traveler AI Comfort
Can we pull up a chart from actually some research? I was looking at this. This is maybe not going to be a recurrence segment, but it is this week’s chart of the week.
I don’t know if I’m going to be doing this every week, but we did this study. This was a global study of about 830 global travelers. And we asked them to rank a bunch of different channels.
If you’re watching this on YouTube or visual, you’ll see it. If you’re listening, we gave them a bunch of different options.
We said you can book directly with a supplier, you can book with a package tour, with a travel agent, with a loyalty partner, with an online travel agency, or with an AI or a chatbot. So we gave them those options.
And then we basically told them to rank on a scale of 1 through 5, are you very uncomfortable to very comfortable, how comfortable are you? So 1 through 5, and then we netted them out, sort of like a net promoter score.
We said everyone who’s very comfortable minus everyone who is very uncomfortable. And what we found unsurprisingly was that people were the most comfortable with booking with direct suppliers.
If you book with Hyatt and you’ve stayed with a Hyatt before, you have a high level of comfort and trust and familiarity with that brand. Package tours and travel agents were the next highest.
Again, these are real companies with real faces behind them. You feel comfortable about your customer service. There’s probably also a lot of repeat visitation.
Yeah.
Shockingly, loyalty partner port portals through credit card companies were next, almost at the same level as travel agent and significantly higher than online travel agencies.
So I’m going to give you some numbers. For our listeners, I’m trying to go slowly, but direct was 49 percent, package tour was 37 percent, travel agent was 34 percent, and loyalty portal was 31 percent. OTAs were only 20 percent net comfort.
People were more than twice as comfortable booking with direct than they were with OTAs. However, however, they are still positive.
The only channel with a net negative number where more people were less comfortable, I’m afraid, more people were less comfortable than they were, more comfortable. The only thing where there was net people said, I actually don’t like this channel.
Net more was AI. That was negative seven percent. On balance, more people were uncomfortable with AI than were comfortable with AI.
And so I think when we’re having these conversations and we’re seeing these studies.
Did you ask why?
We did ask why. Accuracy is the big one.
Okay.
Yeah. Reference and people just want to be, I think people are worried about accuracy. Also, these are very expensive purchases.
Travel is one of the most expensive things that you will spend your money on in any given year. And time. You know what?
If you, let’s say a trip costs 2,000 bucks, which is an average trip and it’s expensive. $2,000 is a lot for the average American. It could be even easily could be more, could easily be 5,000.
Let’s call it 5,000.
It depends upon if you’re going scuba diving.
Depends if you’re going scuba diving or not. Well, let’s call it fine. Let’s call it 2,000.
Yeah.
Let’s say a trip costs 2,000.
There are dresses that cost 2,000. There easily are. There’s jewelry that easily costs 2,000.
If you buy a dress or a suit, I mean, we’ll make it gender. We’ll make it a suit or a dress or a watch. Easily 2,000.
A nice suit can cost you 2,000. If you don’t like it, just return it. Just return it.
Charge it back. Return it. Within 30 days, you can let them know you don’t like it and they’ll fix it for you.
The average American gets something like 10, the entry level job gets like 10 vacation days a year or less, actually. The average American gets only a handful of vacation days. I don’t have the exact number in front of me.
It’s a single-digit, low double-digit number of vacation days. If you take a big trip, that’s a seven-day trip, that is probably all or most of your vacation days. And if you mess that up, guess what?
You can’t return it.
Nope.
And so the level of trust, like you can’t return your time. That’s the key takeaway to me. You can’t return your time.
And so it needs to be right.
I wonder if how behavior, because right now, we’ve talked about this a lot with AgenTech AI. I would never let AI book my trip for me.
But I certainly, I wouldn’t say I have a negative experience with it when I do research, because I’m just doing research. I’m not spending money through it.
So I’m a little bit surprised at those findings because personally, I have a better experience doing research with AI than I do with Kayak. Sorry, Kayak. It’s true.
I’m just doing research. Well, I’m not booking through them.
I hate to say this, but meta-search isn’t where the money is and it hasn’t been in a while.
Yeah.
Like if they’re just going to disrupt meta-search, that’s not.
Touche, yeah.
That’s not a-
It’s the only French word I know.
Touche. Yeah. I mean, I think for AI to-
I mean, well, if AI disrupts Google, obviously, there is plenty of money. I guess there is plenty of money in meta-search. It’s just all concentrated in Google.
But if AI is just going to disrupt the kayak and tripadvisor and Trivago, I don’t think the Travelers 3 has too much to worry about. If it is just- if it replaces Google, I mean, that’s huge.
But ultimately, you just need to figure out how to- just like how you had to learn Google, how to market on Google 10 years ago, you just need to learn that again. If it replaces booking channels and transactions, that’s a new paradigm altogether.
One is the travel vertical meta-search is not a huge pool of dollars anymore. The horizontal meta-search Google is a huge pool of dollars, but it’s effectively just a new paradigm that you have to learn.
And if it disrupts the actual bookings and OTAs and transaction side of things, that is a new era, a shift in travel life.
30:59
Winners and Losers
So should we do some winners and losers?
Yeah.
Let’s do some winners and losers.
My winner this week, we’ve already talked about, is Hyatt. For their upcoming glorious appearance on The White Lotus. Like, where will a person die?
We always see it in the first episode. What part of the property? Very curious.
We wrote a nice little story about how Hyatt is rolling out ChatGPT across all of its enterprise corporate teams.
Yeah.
Does that make them a loser or a winner, though?
Are they both a winner and a loser?
I was just going to say, I don’t know.
I’m not sure about that one, Seth.
I’m going to go with The White Lotus every time on the winner.
Yeah.
Who do you think is our loser of the week?
I actually think it’s pretty cool that they’re rolling out AI Enterprise. I think that’s pretty neat and I’m curious to see how it goes. So I’m going to call them a winner for that.
Yeah.
I would agree, especially. Just in our own lives, for example, we have an enterprise subscription to Cloud here at Skift, and it’s been difficult for me to kind of go to the Skift version of Cloud because my Cloud, Sarah’s Cloud, knows me so well.
Like isn’t that weird? And I had to start over with a Cloud that didn’t know me very well.
It’s like a breakup.
Right. When you’ve got an enterprise subscription where you’re sharing in between, with a massive company where you’re sharing information in between teams, I mean, it’s a massive upside.
Just incredible upside to what you’re able to do in the information that you’re able to get and store and use and utilize and leverage. Or at least I suspect it is. The stuff’s so new.
Yeah.
No, I know. Well, I’m going to call my winner Hyatt as well. I like this AI rollout.
I think that’s pretty cool. I’m going to call my, I mean, we don’t like to name specific brands. And I worry we’ve named too many specific brands.
It’s okay. Who’s our loser this week? Do we have some losers?
Keeping with this White Lotus theme, do I dare say the Four Seasons lose into Hyatt for their French Riviera property?
We could go there. But I mean, can the Four Seasons really ever be a loser? I don’t know.
I don’t know. That remains to be seen. If I were the Four Seasons, I wouldn’t be, you know, I don’t think that’s true.
That’s a true loser.
It’s still an amazing brand. And I think that their property in the French Riviera will be doing just fine with or without HBO’s business.
We can go check it out. Do the pod from there, as we always say. We’ll see.
We’ll see just just how unhappy they are.
We’ll go on a site visit.
Yeah, yeah. We won’t commit murders, but we’re willing to commit some crimes to get to a Four Seasons property. How about that?
There you go.
You heard it. You heard it here first. All right.
So that’s it for this week. Travel Decisions, they’re happening all over the place, online, on the chatbots, in the LLMs, on TV. That’s where it’s all going on.
All right, everybody, thank you so much for listening. And we will, oh, actually, I should say, I will not see you next week because I am going to be upside down in time in Bangkok. So Seth is going to be here with a co-host.
So I’ll see everybody in weeks.
We’ll see you next week. Sarah, enjoy the trip. Enjoy the Skift Asia Forum.
I am so excited for it. It’s one of my favorite events of the year. So you’ll have to let us know how it was when you get back.
Safe travels.
Absolutely. Okay. Thanks.
Bye everybody.
Bye everyone.