Episode 19: The Trip Planner That Actually Books

Untangling Tourism Tech Episode 19, with Liz Ward and guests Daniel Blickling and Dhruv Sharma of Traveloris. Each line shows who is speaking and when. Times match the video. We removed filler words and fixed mis-heard names.

[00:02] Liz Ward: Hi. I’m Liz Ward, CEO of Tourism Tribe. Welcome to episode 19 of Untangling Tourism Tech. Welcome to our members. Welcome to guests. It’s lovely to have this opportunity to present to you a very special episode of the Untangling Tourism Tech podcast. In April 2026, I had the pleasure of hosting webinars with the team at Traveloris. Traveloris is a fantastic new AI-driven software solution for the tourism and travel industry. It is an innovative solution that allows destination marketing organisations, travel agencies and also operators who are looking to expand what they offer in terms of products and packages to consumers. It gives all of these types of organisations a very easy mechanism to instantly upgrade their service and booking capacity and ability to give very smart, customisable, interactive itineraries that are all bookable within the one session on their website.

[01:15] It is basically a widget that plugs into the website. It is very low cost. Instead of building something bespoke, it’s low risk. It’s very quick to implement. I’ve had the pleasure of working with the team at Traveloris and particularly the founder, Daniel Blickling, as a mentor to them since meeting Daniel back in Newcastle in October 2023 at the ART convention. I was so impressed with what Daniel was working on. I really wanted to follow that journey and support him and it’s been so impressive to see the milestones that they’ve achieved over the very recent times in 2026 with the implementations on tasmania.com and Cairns Reef Discovery Tours and they have several others in the pipeline as well.

[02:09] So I welcome you to have a listen to this podcast which is a recording of one of those webinars and then you can see, you can hear Daniel and his product manager, Dhruv Sharma, talking about the AI environment with myself as well as taking on a tour of the Traveloris solution.

[02:34] Enjoy.

[02:35] Welcome everybody. Welcome to Tourism Tribe clients and people that I haven’t met before. It’s our absolute pleasure and it’s my pleasure, Liz from Tourism Tribe, CEO and co-founder of Tourism Tribe to be able to host this webinar with some of my favourite industry colleagues being Daniel Blickling and Dhruv Sharma from Traveloris. Firstly, if you don’t know who Tourism Tribe is because you’ve joined this session through another avenue, then Tourism Tribe is a business that is really a team of people that is staying at the forefront as best as we can with AI and technology to be able to share that knowledge and turn that into skills and practical improvements that the tourism industry can make in their organisations and to their tourism businesses.

[03:31] And Tourism Tribe has existed for that purpose since 2015 and it’s a very exciting time at the moment, as you all know, with the incredible transformation we are seeing in the marketplace and with business technology and all sorts of industries being impacted because of artificial intelligence. Which leads me to introduce our two panellists today in this webinar. Firstly, I would very much like to introduce Daniel Blickling. Daniel, you’re the head of Traveloris, previously known as Traveller AI and some of the people I’ve spoken to over the years have come to hear about Traveller AI. But let me just read a few dot points out about Daniel. So your career has included Head of Innovation Technology for British Airways. You’ve worked overseas in the UK. You then founded Fusion Tech Consulting. You worked as Chief Technology Officer for the Rabobank startup.

[04:44] You founded Traveloris and that’s quite some time ago, but you’ve been working on it nonstop really seriously now for the last number of years. I first met you at ART, Australian Regional Tourism, an industry event in Newcastle in 2023, we decided. But I also heard from a very reliable source that you have also had a donut shop.

[05:18] Daniel Blickling: Yeah, a little project that was on the side.

[05:22] Liz Ward: And that was all off the back of being an aerospace avionics engineer.

[05:28] Daniel Blickling: Originally, but far from it now.

[05:31] Liz Ward: Yeah, great. Well, welcome, Daniel.

[05:33] Daniel Blickling: Thank you for having me.

[05:34] Liz Ward: This is such a great opportunity we have to get inside your head and hear all about the work that you’re doing.

[05:34] Daniel Blickling: Thanks, Liz.

[05:41] Liz Ward: Dhruv, Dhruv is the Product Manager for Traveloris. And just reading a few things about you, Dhruv, you have led the product design team at Telstra. And you’re responsible with that team for launching the eSIM capability for their product called Belong.

[06:03] Dhruv Sharma: That’s right.

[06:04] Liz Ward: Previous to that, for a long time, you were a strategy consultant with Boston Consulting Group across many industries, including banking and government. You’ve done a lot of teaching and you’re passionate about teaching the world in terms of design thinking and product design. So that’s an amazing area. And I know why Daniel loves working with you because of that design thinking and product design passion.

[06:30] You’ve taught a lot of ICT courses as well through a company called Human Factors International. And you have been the keynote at the Outlook conference last year. And this year you’ll be a judge for the Outlook Awards Design Awards. Your academic achievements are in electronic and communications engineering. So with the two engineers in the room, everyone will be glad that I’m here to balance that out. And is there anything quirky about your background, your career that you would like to share?

[07:08] Dhruv Sharma: So, I’ve got a very strict set of Indian parents who do not appreciate a lot of quirks in your career. So hence the engineering and always trying to overachieve whatever you do.

[07:24] Liz Ward: We’ll take that then.

[07:25] Thank you.

[07:26] Okay, so what is today about why we pulled together this presentation? Look, the webinar today is really about one primary thing, which is what AI is doing in terms of changing the travel purchase journey. And then what that means for the tourism industry, whether you are a destination marketing organisation or you have a travel agency. There are huge impacts, as you’re aware, otherwise you wouldn’t be here in this room. And we really want to unpack that and help you understand what those changes mean. But in doing that, what we’re going to do is identify some of the risks and opportunities for destination and travel websites, get behind the scenes on Traveloris, the platform, the technology platform, and then also think about what the industry significance is of the recent launches of the Traveloris AI travel planner in sites in both Cairns and Tasmania.

[08:32] Dhruv will be giving us a demo of one of those sites so that you can really see what the system does. And then what we’d like to end on are some practical next steps for your organisation. All of this comes from a place of me having a great belief in what Daniel and Dhruv were working on. Because when I met Daniel back in Newcastle at that ART conference, I went, wow, so you’re actually doing something and I could see that it was working even then to be able to bring together the capability that so many other technology platforms had promised but weren’t able to do. So we won’t lift that rabbit out of the hat yet. But I just want you to know that that’s why I have enjoyed supporting Daniel on his journey and being involved in how they take this to the market.

[09:34] So just to set the scene about how the travel purchase cycle is changing from answers to agents. And just before I do that, feel free, as we present information, if you have questions or comments, if you have questions, please use the Q&A function of Zoom because we’ll allow time at the back end for you to interrogate Dhruv and Daniel. And then if you just want to make some comments or share any other ideas you have, just use the chat mode to do that. So how is the travel purchase cycle changing? This is how we see it.

[10:08] We know that the consumer right now, because of AI and advancing mobile technologies and a whole lot of other technology that’s sitting supporting that, has got a totally different experience now when it comes to researching and planning and getting inspired for how to spend their time when they are travelling, when they are on holidays. And with a simple request put to their mobile device, they are able to get back very tailored and customised ideas that are presented as recommendations through AI websites, be that using Google and getting back an AI overview or whether that’s going into ChatGPT or Perplexity or another AI travel planner. All are offering the consumer a far more advanced experience in terms of returning of those ideas. And this is a diagram that I’ve been working with just to try to tell this story from my perspective.

[11:15] When I think back to the beginning of using the internet, having websites, having online booking was really the main trigger. So when online reservations capability came in about 25 years ago, since then for 25 years that user journey has remained pretty much the same. So it’s been linear and repetitive where the user went through looking at different websites, they were building their awareness, they’d go back doing their research, they’d have finally get to the consideration point and then have to move through the process of finding all of the details to be able to confirm that that’s the right price point, availability, et cetera, for them and then to be able to make that booking online. And we saw the stat repeatedly shared that up to 30 websites could be looked at for quite a significant itinerary.

[12:19] Roll that forward to 2026 and we saw that emerging over the last two years. But in 2026 in this world of answers and agent technology or being driven by AI, what we’re seeing is a vastly transformed user experience on this purchase journey. So we’ve got a single session, very conversational interactive experience for them. They get back a very personalised itinerary because they’ve been able to give a prompt that is full of personal requirements. We see the emergence of intelligent agents where that is going to move very quickly in terms of that booking being able to happen while they don’t even touch the keyboard. And yes, you can experiment with that in ChatGPT, you get limited functionality, but we can see agent technology everywhere else.

[13:16] But even without that, those personalised itineraries coming back at them and sounding very much like a recommendation are a vast improvement on what they had before. And then the next step is that integrated booking. And it’s that integrated booking piece that we haven’t seen happen yet, except, and that’s what’s so exciting now and why the timing is so great with the launch of Traveloris on these two prominent sites in Australia, in Cairns and Tasmania, is that that’s what Traveloris does. It brings together using AI technology, all those personal interactive conversational experience. Even if it’s not speaking, it’s still conversational in terms of the way the user is interacting and in being able to book it in that same single session.

[14:10] And that’s what’s exciting to me because I’ve been waiting for those launches to occur to see the technology performing really well on these innovative clients, these clients that have moved quickly and seen how the advantage can be there for them. And that’s what it’s all about. So while Traveloris has achieved what other technologies can’t, that’s why I now want to move to a bit of a Q&A with Daniel and Dhruv so that they can show you themselves and talk about the experience. So I’ll just flip out of, I might leave this slide up actually, because this is a nice visual of the basics of Traveloris. But while that’s sitting there, what I’d like to do is move to some questions. And just very quickly, Daniel, for people who knew Traveloris as Traveller AI, where did the change to Traveloris come from?

[15:07] Daniel Blickling: Yes, our original name was actually Traveloris inspired by the Loris. And we used to be a B2C product. And about three years ago, we decided to make that shift and say, you know what, actually, let’s focus on B2B and enabling existing tourism organisations. And two weeks ago, we were ready to do a big media release. We thought Traveller AI is a very, very hard name to own. So Dhruv and I spent a week going through hundreds of names trying to figure out what can you get a trademark on? What can you have a domain on? What has travel in it? And then a few people came back and said, why don’t you bring back the Loris? Bring back Traveloris. And that’s how we went 180 degrees back to where we started, back to our roots and it’s now Traveloris.

[15:46] Liz Ward: Oh, you had a fondness for the Loris?

[15:49] Daniel Blickling: Yeah. And it’s, yeah, exactly. And it’s an animal that I really liked it. And I had a small section with it 13 years ago where it’s an endangered animal thought they’re awesome. And then I just thought, you know what, Traveloris, let’s bring it together. Two passions of mine.

[16:01] Liz Ward: Oh, yeah, it’s probably, it’s probably a nice connection there to other endangered species in technology world in the tourism industry too, I might just add. But just thinking out loud. So thank you for that. I think that’s interesting for people to know why the name change has occurred. So, you know, that’s, for those of us starting new businesses, trying to trademark that business name is so important if it’s not the name of your company. So it’s just a small sideline takeout there. So Dhruv, you’re, you’ve been driving the product design and the overseeing the development now for a year or so, I think you’ve been involved, maybe a year and a half.

[16:47] Dhruv Sharma: Almost two years now.

[16:48] Liz Ward: Almost two years. Okay, great. So you’ve really been the master of the new version and everything that we see now. So what would you say have been the greatest challenges in creating a B2B platform that can be plugged into a travel website or a destination website and create these itineraries and bookability?

[17:11] Dhruv Sharma: That’s a great question. And something that’s very personal to me as well, because I went through these challenges so hard. I will talk about two key challenges that I and my team, we had to go through. The first one is really telling our friend AI how complex a human being can be, right? Which is to train our AI to understand the complexities of human preferences and needs, and also making it understand the geographical differences. For two of our pilot clients, Tasmania is very different from Cairns, for example. So how do you really keep that logic in place for the AI and marry it with human preferences of whether it’s about routing, driving, that was really hard. And once we cracked it kept getting better and better. So that’s a good win and a big challenge that we overcome.

[18:09] The second part of it was actually what you spoke about just a few slides before, which was around the last mile of this funnel, which is getting the actual booking. So the complexity of talking to the booking partners and making sure, getting that live availability of tours and attractions and making sure while the user has this perfect itinerary, it is also bookable. Connecting that thread was really hard and I think we struggled with it for about three years now. And once we had the final answer, then we kept optimising it to reduce the time taken to do that. So now it’s in a place where it’s seamless, where you generate the itinerary and you also book it. So both the challenge is very complex, but it was a great win for us when we were able to do that.

[19:02] Liz Ward: Yeah, that’s fantastic. And as I said, for me, that was one of the most exciting things was the promise of that being able to get the booking done in that same session with multiple products. So, you know, different experience and attraction products and accommodation is coming and that’s really exciting because so many promised that over the last 25 years and just couldn’t achieve it. So well done. I think this is a really great spot for me to give you the reins on the webinar actually and to show the audience how it works.

[19:02] Dhruv Sharma: Definitely.

[19:39] Liz Ward: So I’ll stop sharing and let you share screen.

[19:42] Dhruv Sharma: That’s great. I think what we will do is I will go to one of our client’s live site and give a demo from there because I really love going to Cairns. What a lovely weather as well. I’m going to start with going to Cairns Discovery Tours. So this is one of our pilot clients, cairnsdiscoverytours.com. We also worked on this website as a part of their integration. So what you see here is this lovely site, but all of these are actually Traveloris attractions coming from Traveloris. So what we have is something called a booking widget. What that does is for every attraction, you’re able to just click on the attraction, get all the relevant details coming from the relevant booking partner, and you can actually look at live availability and get that booking done right away through the site.

[20:44] This was the first segue to getting our clients onboarded on our trip planner. Once this was done, then we moved to our trip planner where multiple of these tours can be fit into an itinerary and also bookable. So if I just go here, plan your trip, it starts with asking our humans what do they really want in this trip. So it would usually go with arrival and departure. So let’s say I’m going to actually make a trip for myself. Let’s say I want to go for this long weekend over here for four days. I’m going with me and my partner. And the fun part is our each client can define what kind of interests and categories can be presented to these customers.

[21:38] So for Cairns, because it’s a fairly small region that Tasmania is, Cairns decided they want to limit their categories to just these ones because these are the most popular. So I would definitely want to do Great Barrier Reef. I would love to do Kuranda. I may not have a lot of time to do all of these, but I’ll probably pick up city sights in between while I’m there. So at the back end, what’s happening is the AI is picking up all of this information and generating an itinerary already. And what’s something that we do here is just get the basic information from travellers. So this is then available to our clients on their Traveloris dashboard where they can see who are the people who have actually used the trip planner and what kind of itineraries have they generated.

[22:27] That becomes a part of our data and insights dashboard where you can see what is more preferred by travellers. And at this point, what our AI is doing is looking at all the booking platforms, the partners, looking at live availability of different bookable attractions and tours and putting the itinerary together. So what you see here is actually all available and ready to book. And over here, as you can see in every itinerary, the way it’s structured is you’ve got some recommendations for coffee and breakfast to start with. Then you’ve got recommendations of free time attractions. These are just free things that they can do. And then on every day you would see a tour, which is directly coming from booking partners for that particular category. Because I selected Cairns city sights, it’s given me a Cairns river cruise as a tour.

[23:25] One thing that was really important for us while generating these itineraries was making sure that it’s not, “Hey, on day one, these are the five things you’re doing. Book this, book this, book this.” Instead, what we kept it is very flexible. Each day you would mostly have one bookable tour and rest of it is all free. This is all free. And then there are some dinner options as well for the travellers to look at and explore and they can update it and look into it as well. Something that is really important that some of our clients really appreciate is the ability to swap different tours, which is if I have a Green Island Great Barrier Reef adventure tour for nine hours, I can go to view other options and I can choose different tours to swap it with.

[24:12] I can say, “Oh, actually I don’t want that tour. I want Ocean Spirit cruise.” So I will just swap it with that and it just gets updated on my itinerary. So it’s very easy to customise your itinerary. And once I’m happy with this, I just simply go review and confirm. And at this point, it’ll show me that I have these four different tours which are ready to book. Just for convenience, for the demo, I’m going to remove it to just two. And if I start booking, what you’ll see is now at this point, what we do is we do a final check on availability, making sure all the tours that I’ve selected are available to book. This one’s available. It’s got 12 seats right now. I will add all the relevant details here. This is optional.

[25:04] It has already picked up my details from the first form that I filled. So I filled all of this already. So this is now ready to book. For the second one, I’ll just add all the details. I don’t need to provide that. These are all optional. That’s fine. So now that I have given all the information required to make the booking, I’ll just hit confirm and pay. And at this point, I can make the payment for all my tours in the itinerary in one go, which is at this case, I’m not going to make the payment just yet. I’ve got a lot of work to do, so I can’t go to Cairns just yet.

[25:44] So once this is done, what we do is we send an email to the traveller with their whole itinerary and also the details of each tour and their confirmation for individual tours as well. So they have access to all the free stuff to do, all the restaurants and cafes to visit, and the bookable tours that they booked in one unit. So this is one of our products, which is our Traveloris AI Trip Planner.

[26:15] Liz Ward: Amazing. Thank you, Dhruv. It is so great to see it live. I think the clients you’ve worked with in tasmania.com and Cairns Reef Discovery Tours, they’ve both been fabulous first major launch sites, haven’t they? You’ve worked with some other ones as well, but they have really been like partners in terms of making sure that everything worked exactly as they knew it needed to for their customer and to get the data out of it and their backend processes. So congratulations to them as well as clients for being the first movers as they are in this space. So yeah, that’s wonderful. Thank you. Daniel, who would you say, now that people have got a bit of an impression of what Traveloris does, the technology, who would you say are your closest competitors?

[27:11] Daniel Blickling: The one that probably had me the most worried were LLMs. So the likes of ChatGPT, Claude, because the concern really was what if they could do booking? Because if they were able to build the itinerary and do the fulfillment, then we had a big problem. But recently with the ChatGPT announcement that they’re no longer going to do fulfillment and to be honest, I always in the back of my mind wasn’t sure how they could do it. Having gone through the process of how painful it is to connect up to with the help of Koba and Rezdy, Livn and to connect up to 25 plus booking channels was extremely difficult. And then getting that supply also very difficult. But yeah, the LLMs were my biggest concerns.

[27:54] Liz Ward: And that was quite recent, wasn’t it? That was only a couple of months ago with ChatGPT put out a media release to say, look, there’s lots of other categories that we can enable purchasing from purchasing within ChatGPT. And you’re starting to see that now. So you’re saying businesses that have got products connected through Shopify, for example, they’re starting to roll that out. But they pulled away from travel saying we’re going to leave that to the apps that are built for ChatGPT. So the likes of the OTAs, online travel agencies and their apps to deal with that. And if you do use agent mode in ChatGPT to experiment to let the agent do the booking for you, that presently is a very, very clunky experience. But it’s good to do it just to see how it works.

[28:46] But it’s totally different to what you’ve been able to achieve. So you said that it was quite painful. Was it just persistence? Was that what it was? Time and persistence in setting up all of those Res supply relationships, channel manager relationships?

[29:04] Daniel Blickling: The hardest part with it, we sort of said, you know what, it’ll take us three months. We can do it in three months, three years later. We are now where we are. So the hardest part were all the edge cases and all the different booking systems having different rules, different ways of booking, handling it. And then we also wanted a shopping cart that worked across all those systems. And we didn’t want a 15 minute timeout, which they all do. So we had to build really smart caching behind it. And even when we went live, there was a month or two of some just really tough things coming through that we just couldn’t anticipate. As simple as some ticketing systems don’t offer family prices, you have to be smart enough to handle that yourself. And it was all those edge cases. That was the hard part.

[29:49] Getting the supply because we’re B2B, our clients help us with that. So in Cairns, for example, they have very strong, same with Tasmania.com, they’ve got very strong relationships with their suppliers. So getting that supply isn’t quite so difficult. It is a bit time consuming. But the hard part was those edge cases because the last thing you want to do is ruin someone’s holiday with a bad booking. And we’ve had that where we’ve had bookings go wrong and we accidentally sent a visitor to the owner’s house of the company. Like these things happen at the start and trying to get around all those edge cases. Luckily, we’ve pretty much gotten rid of 99% of them. There’s always a few that pop up, but that was the hard part.

[30:27] Liz Ward: That’s great. So when you think about a destination marketing organisation, their website, the fact that these are widgets, that’s very powerful because for me, I look at it and I go, well, that’s quite a low risk major. It enables a major shift into meeting the consumer where they are at in terms of wanting personalised itineraries and the convenience of being able to have one single itinerary booked, you know, or a multi product itinerary booked in one single transaction that really meets customer needs. But the fact that it’s a widget that can be plugged in, that’s quite a low risk technology investment then for the destination marketing organisation or travel agency, but they can tailor and brand and control the content that is in there, which is powerful.

[31:22] Daniel Blickling: Absolutely. And just to add into that a little bit, that was something that that was a difficult journey to go on as well because both Tasmania.com and Cairns, when we first started, it was APIs, it was difficult integration, so we’ve really had to streamline that because we saw the need for a plug and play solution where, for example, if you have WordPress, it’s a simple plugin, connects up to Traveloris and you’re up and running.

[31:42] Liz Ward: Nice. That’s good. It’s got to be easy, right?

[31:42] Daniel Blickling: Absolutely.

[31:47] Liz Ward: I think that we should maybe pull away from Traveloris a little bit for a bit. You can always come back to it. And it’s lots of questions. But just thinking about AI generally, you’ve both been working with AI nonstop for the last few years. But let’s think about our audience and think about, say, destination marketing organisations who are in the audience. And we know that they are losing traffic to large language models because users, 70 per cent of users on average, are not clicking on a website after they get that recommended itinerary out of an LLM. So what do you think, Daniel? What sort of advice would you give to a destination marketing organisation at the present time?

[32:34] Daniel Blickling: Yeah, that’s a really interesting question. So there’s two things that sort of keep jumping out to me. The first one is make sure your website’s the one that’s appearing in the searches. So focus on sort of SEO for AI. So when people search for what to do in Brisbane, your site needs to come up. That’s number one. You’re still not going to get that traffic because these people are doing research information. But the second thing is when they do click through to your website, they have a very high intent. They have done their research. They have read the content. They’re now on your website not to do more research, but to action their intent. They want to book. They don’t want to then jump to lots of other websites to start booking. They go into your site wanting to do something.

[33:17] So in many ways there’s this fear of LLMs, but actually they’re a marketing tool. And it’s about how do you utilise that to get the traffic to your site and then convert that traffic.

[33:31] Liz Ward: I like that. So you look at the LLM and the fact that the destination and locations in the destination and products in the destination are actually coming up in that itinerary or AI overview. That’s a KPI being met, isn’t it? If they are the quality source that’s driving that, that’s another thing to think about as well. And I think also, if I can add to that, there’s the opportunity is when you think about even both of those travel clients that you’ve got there, they are local specialists. They operate, they live in those locations, their staff have tremendous local knowledge. That is an amazing asset now for AI search optimisation. And that really needs to be leveraged. An OTA that is head office in San Francisco cannot match that in terms of that local knowledge and being the best source of truth on that content.

[34:37] So I think that’s an amazing opportunity for us to harness that. That’s great. Can I go to you Dhruv? Just thinking about use of AI within an organisation, can you share how you’ve used AI in the work that you’ve done with Traveloris?

[34:57] Dhruv Sharma: Sure. I feel like one of the core products, the AI Trip Planner is one of the big things that where we do use a lot of AI and just piggybacking off your conversation with Daniel around the travel clients, usually when we start to build AI for them, we do these workshops where we really tap into their local expertise and then train our AI and keep making our own AI stronger and stronger with that local knowledge. So that’s one of the big ways where we are integrating AI in the system. But other than that, there are other secondary use cases, for example, one of the products that we built an AI model, which we call content standardiser.

[35:41] So when we get all these attractions and tours from different partners, sometimes these descriptions or highlights are not in a way where we would take it directly to client side. So what our content standardiser does is just cleans it up, puts it in a nice format and then it’s good to go. So that’s really cool. One of the recent ones, every time we launch our product in the market, we do a lot of testing. So for that testing, we are leveraging a lot of AI tools because it kind of synthesises it super quickly. And it’s just very convenient for note taking and just answering the right set of questions with the end users. So these are some of the examples that I can think of other than our core AI product.

[36:32] Liz Ward: And I’m hearing in there a real union between human knowledge, that sort of local grounded knowledge and customer service and user experience with the AI, which is where the magic happens at the moment, isn’t it? Well, while the robot robots don’t have our empathy and experience as yet, there’s this opportunity right now to, you know, to really work with both humans and technology, which is great. So Dhruv, what about the future? Where are you heading? Your product manager? What does the product roadmap look like for Traveloris?

[37:16] Dhruv Sharma: Well, we’ve got a great product roadmap right now. We are so excited about a lot of features. My backlog keeps growing almost every day. We wake up with so much inspiration and our clients actually play a big role in it, where when we work with our clients, a lot of ideas come through and, you know, to how do we tap into the immense knowledge that they have about the industry and based on that, thinking about features. But two of the key ones that I really am looking forward to is one is accommodation, because right now when the itineraries are generated, you have restaurants, you have cafes, you have free stuff and you have the bookable stuff. One thing that I would really seal the deal would be getting accommodation in there. So your accommodation is also included in there.

[38:05] I’m really looking forward to that, which is very soon. Yeah, that’s on the roadmap. And pretty soon. The second one is actually for our clients, which is right now we’ve got a lot of data around where their travellers are booking, what kind of attractions are getting booked more, what’s the average basket size looking like. So all this data is sitting in the data and insights dashboard. Now to complement that, we are developing a chat agent where they can literally ask, so what was my top selling tours in March? And it’s just a chat interface to get all the insights, which is easy. And this is something that came up from our clients where in real world, they actually have those questions. So we just thought of building something which answers these questions really quickly.

[38:58] So yeah, these are the two of my favourite ones to look forward to.

[39:01] Liz Ward: I love that. That’s fantastic. Daniel, I’m just thinking just kind of think strategically again and you’re the man who’s given up his life for the last so many years as a startup. And I know you’re really happy with where things are at. What would you say genuinely sets Traveloris apart from other trip planners? There’s plenty of other trip planners out there that can go and use.

[39:34] Daniel Blickling: I think we’ve touched on it a few times already. And it’s the one thing we’re the most proud of is the booking. That’s the number one thing we’ve, yeah, we’ve touched on it a lot. The second thing is that capturing that local knowledge. So we’ve done a lot in our system to take that local knowledge into consideration because not every region is the same. And I think you already see that with say ChatGPT. I mean, it’s an incredible tool, but when you plan a trip for a destination that you’re very well aware of and know really well, you generally get itineraries where you go, hang on, that doesn’t make sense. And that’s where we really wanted to differentiate the itineraries because ultimately where this idea came from was solving my own problem, which is I hate planning trips, but I like having a trip planned.

[40:18] And what Dhruv’s built in the last two years has really started solving this problem for me. So I’m being a little bit selfish and saying, you know what I built Traveloris because I don’t want to plan trips for me. And it’s solving my problem.

[40:31] Liz Ward: It’s yeah, that’s great. Thank you. I think that makes it clear. I was going to, I think what I’d like to do now is there’s a few questions in our Q&A, and I think given we’re talking about the product, this is the right time to do them. And then we can, we can come out and make some closing comments and give people some, a mechanism to be able to have some one-on-one time with you. But we’ve got a question from Viv. Her question is in providing your details before the itinerary is generated, is there a dropout rate? So where does the dropout tend to occur? Could be another way of answering that question.

[41:16] Daniel Blickling: Dhruv do you want to take, cause we discussed this a lot.

[41:19] Dhruv Sharma: Yeah, I can take that. So something that we are capturing right now is post the itinerary, right? After those quick Q&A that you have there, we capture the first name, last name and the email. Earlier we also had the phone number. So using first principles, we said, no, there’s no way that will you know, that will go forward. We need to get that drop off, but the bare minimum, which is just an email allows us to reduce that drop off rate much further. In terms of data, all of this sits inside Traveloris’ data dashboard. So you can actually see how many people have actually just created itineraries versus how many people have actually booked.

[42:00] So you can all track that over there, but at a principle level, definitely the more fields you ask on that page, the more drop off you will observe, but just having the name and email has been very good for our clients. And they’re seeing a lot of people playing with the tool and generating itineraries with that.

[42:22] Daniel Blickling: To add to that as well, I think what we were really trying to figure out is we need to know this information because we have to save itineraries. So a large selling point to the customers by giving us your name, your email, we can actually email you itineraries and save it. And we wanted to make it at a point where they’ve answered enough questions that they’re quite invested. And the stats so far is from people opening and starting booking flows to bookings around 85%.

[42:47] Liz Ward: Oh, that’s good to know that number. That’s great. It’s very high. A second question here. Can you also set up free stuff in the timeline along with your tours so you can see a complete itinerary? Well, I think that does happen, doesn’t it, Dhruv?

[43:06] Dhruv Sharma: That’s right. That’s already in there.

[43:07] Liz Ward: I’ll just explain that again, how that free stuff gets in there.

[43:11] Dhruv Sharma: Yeah. So when we do our workshops with clients, we often ask them, are there any specific free attractions would you like to add? We have a long list of free stuff. So we would combine that within the itinerary. And based on, for example, if you’re in Tasmania, it is called multi-city. So if you’re in Hobart, you’ll have free stuff for Hobart. If you’re in Coles Bay that day, you’ll see free stuff around Coles Bay. So depending upon where you are, what categories you’ve selected, you’ll see free stuff for that particular thing. And it’s all stored in Traveloris’ admin portal where you can actually manage all the free stuff available.

[43:51] Liz Ward: That’s fantastic. Thank you. I have got a question here from Kat. Lots of people prefer to trust word of mouth rather than AI. I dare say that word of mouth is still our number one performer in terms of recommendations. How do you think this will play out in the future? Do you see AI becoming more of a trusted source? Does Traveloris take into consideration reviews or just what’s available on the day in the area?

[44:23] Daniel Blickling: That’s a good question because… Oh, do you want to go, Dhruv?

[44:25] Dhruv Sharma: No, no, no. I was just about to say, I can take the second part of the question because I have the admin portal right in front of me. So I can show a bit of how we rank attractions. But you go first.

[44:36] Daniel Blickling: With the word of mouth, but I think something that’s a very, very strong selling point is that visitors trust those local sites. With Cairns Discovery Tours, having a branded website that’s run by a local creates a lot of trust. So it’s not exact word of mouth, but it plays off that a lot more. People don’t fully trust ChatGPT because they’re not sure where it comes from. So a big selling point is using local brands and leaning onto those local brands.

[45:06] Liz Ward: Local brands and being able to get assistance. If a visitor information centre were part of that workflow and could come in and provide additional assistance, that would be great as well. But let’s just think about reviews. Dhruv, you wanted to say something about review data?

[45:26] Dhruv Sharma: Yeah. I actually wanted to show something to everybody. I’ll just pull that up here. So before I just share that, how we do this is that you have this itinerary that’s getting built up. One part of it is availability, which is you’ve got, let’s say, 10 tours available. But our AI prioritises these tours based on what our client’s knowledge is, which is where the local expertise comes in. And how we do that is, this is just weightages, which is sitting on Traveloris’ operating admin portal, where if I look for Daintree, for example, you can actually set a score on what gets shown. So if I’ve selected Daintree Rainforest and if I have two of these tours at 100, the AI will prioritise these two in your itinerary because this has actually come from our partners.

[46:23] They know that these are the better tours to sell and they can just navigate the itineraries that way. So while availability is one part of the problem, the local expertise and the trust also weighs too much, which is why we have the flexibility of prioritising certain tours of others.

[46:44] Liz Ward: And that’s because you’re B2B and you’re working with a client who’s on the ground who knows which are the good businesses or the ones who are their partners, their trusted partners. We know that the AI search engines really qualify, they use reviews and social content as points of validation, data points of validation. So you go a step beyond that in that you’re using that local expertise and knowledge to be able to curate. So that’s it’s a different offering. It’s a different offering.

[47:21] Daniel Blickling: Yeah, to add to that, and I think that one of the earlier questions I kind of touched on that is, it’s very important to us that the AI doesn’t go out to the web to pull attractions because it has a habit of hallucinating and making things up and sending people to places that shouldn’t be. So it can only use attractions for attractions and bookable attractions that are in our system. And it is in our pipeline because we know how important it is using Google reviews is how do we combine and integrate Google reviews just so that people can see what is the review for an attraction and research a little bit more. So that is something that’s in our pipeline to combine that data as well.

[47:57] Liz Ward: That’s great. Hopefully that helped to answer that question. Having said that, I think reviews have, you know, right now they are more important than they’ve ever been to be able to get genuine reviews and to be able to deliver on that service because ultimately just like the basis of Kat’s question, it is the delivery of service and word of mouth be that through reviews and or personally that is going to be an absolute qualifier for businesses. So that hasn’t changed. In fact, it’s become more important because of the way that AI searches. There was another question as well, which I’ve just messaged the person individually because it was specifically about their requirements.

[48:41] But if I can generalise it and say that this person has got a travel business that is a membership model based on a membership model with loads and loads of products, both accommodation and tours and activities, has a booking engine on there. Could Traveloris for the AI travel planner sit beside that easily if they’ve got their own booking engine? Have you had, have you thought about that scenario? Have you had that scenario before?

[49:16] Daniel Blickling: In theory, yes, we can do it because it’s an API connection. We have, I think, a client in Western Australia who does something very, very similar, wants to do something similar. It would basically be an API connection, which same as we use for current booking systems.

[49:34] Liz Ward: Yeah, great. And I’ll explain to this person how they can speak with you directly in just one second.

[49:41] Daniel Blickling: Yeah, no problem.

[49:43] Liz Ward: All right. I haven’t got any other questions in there to answer. I’m just going to share my screen again and we can just, I think, start to wrap it up. She said she’s going to share her screen and then she’s just looking for her screen. All good. Give me a moment. Feel free. Have you got the slides there, Dhruv? Do you want to just pop that? Do you want to just share them for me? I think that browser wants me to log in again right now, which is annoying, so I’ll let you do that.

[50:34] Dhruv Sharma: Yeah.

[50:34] Liz Ward: I’m going to pull up the slides right here. So I was just going to explain to people just a couple of things. Thanks. If you just want to go to slide show there. Just a couple of things that we’ve been working on, just in case you’re not aware of them. So some helpful free tools for the industry for where we’re at at the moment with AI. So on the first of April, no joke, we launched the first of our AI and tourism playbooks. So it’s a comprehensive guide, but it’s really practical to say what tools you can use now and where is the travel purchase cycle at.

[51:37] So it is like tried and tested kind of different tools that people are using so that you’ve got a bit of a guide on what you could be using to help you through this particular phase that we’re in at the moment with AI for the travel industry. So that’s available to everybody for free. And we’ll just keep updating that. We even declare how we used AI in the process of that. But I in making that, but honestly, it is all grounded in our current interactions with tourism operators and destination marketing organisations and what is working for them. If you just go to the next slide, please, Dhruv. And this is part of our story in Tourism Tribe on AI transformation is with the technology as it is at the moment and the ability to be able to produce really nice websites and apps very quickly.

[52:33] If you’ve got the right inputs going into it, we’ve been able to go through that transformation ourselves. And we’ve created a Tourism Tribe app, a web app. So my.tourismtribe.com because we’ve had so many clients over the years say to us, if we could just keep you in our back pocket, that would be, can I have your team in my back pocket? That’d be great. So is it great? We would have loved to have done that years ago, but we would have been mortgaging a lot of things to do that. Daniel knows about this, but now with AI development technology, doing a simple app that is focused is very achievable. So we’ve put that together, called it Pocket Rocket. And so it’s like all of our free tools are available in there, including an AI website audit.

[53:20] So there’s a basic website AI audit when you sign up on the app that happens automatically and you get your results and you get lots of pointers on what you can do to improve the visibility, the search visibility of your website. So I just wanted to catch everybody up on that so that they know that they’re available. And if you could just go, Dhruv, to the next slide, this is about how to speak with Daniel and Dhruv. So if you would like to have a one-on-one with these guys and be able to go through your situation, ask more questions, see more of the backend of the technology or play more with the front end of it, then book a time with Daniel. Or maybe Dhruv will show up as well. You never know if you’re lucky.

[54:14] Yeah, that’s right. So I’ll leave that up on screen and just ask, are there any comments or questions? Did people find that useful? What are they thinking? I’d love to see some comments in the chat. All right. Well, I would like to thank everybody for attending. Really appreciate your interest. And highly recommend having a chat to these guys and just seeing how you might be able to take advantage of Traveloris and I’m also available to answer any questions at any time as well. Thank you so much, Daniel and Dhruv. Love what you’re doing. You’re an amazing team and it’s a privilege to be able to do some work with you.

[55:04] Daniel Blickling: Thank you very much, Liz.

[55:07] Dhruv Sharma: Thank you so much.

[55:08] Thanks, everyone.