The Hidden Cost of Your Travel Tech Stack with WeTravel

Your tour business probably doesn’t have a technology problem. It has a complexity problem.

Over time, many multi-day operators add tool after tool until marketing, CRM, itineraries, payments, supplier payouts, and traveler communications all live in different places. The result is more than frustration. It creates duplicate work, missed traveler details, messy handoffs, lower conversion, and less time spent on what actually grows a travel company: serving travelers.

In this Spotlight Episode, Dan sits down with Josh Chang, Chief Product Officer at WeTravel, to unpack what tech stack overload looks like for tour operators and why the industry is moving toward more integrated platforms. They explore the hidden leaks that quietly hurt operators, from abandoned checkouts and fragmented payment methods to itinerary changes that never flow cleanly to travelers or suppliers.

Josh also shares WeTravel’s end-to-end view of the operator workflow, covering everything from online presence, SEO, lead capture, CRM, itinerary creation, resource management, checkout, global payments, supplier payouts, FX, traveler information, and day-to-day operational outputs.

The conversation also explores AI for travel operators with a practical lens. Rather than replacing humans, the best use cases keep people in the loop, using AI like a chief of staff to draft responses, prepare itineraries and manifests, and give operators back valuable hours for the high-trust conversations that drive bookings.

Plus, don't miss WeTravel's fourth annual Travel Innovation Summit, taking place virtually on September 29–30, bringing together travel industry leaders to discuss the future of travel technology, operations, and growth. 

You can also catch up on WeTravel's latest innovations by watching their recent Product Release Webinar replay.

Learn more at wetravel.com.

The #1 B2B Travel Podcast Globally. Over 100 Episodes. Listeners in 125 countries. New Episodes Every Weds. 

https://www.traveltrendspodcast.com/

Transcript

Why Tech Stack Overload Hurts

SPEAKER_01 0:05

Hello everyone and welcome back to the Travel Trends Podcast. This is your host, Dan Christian, and today we have a special spotlight episode that is focused on something that pretty much every travel business struggles with, whether they realize it or not, and that is tech stack overload. Most operators don't wake up one day and decide that their business needs to run across seven different platforms, but over time, that's exactly what happens: a booking system here, a CRM there, a payments tool, spreadsheets, email marketing software, the operations tools they need to function as a business. And before you know it, you're spending more time managing systems than growing your business. And that is what today's conversation is all about. Joining me here in a moment is Josh Chang, the chief product officer at WeTravel. And Josh spends his days talking to travel operators of all sizes and helping them shape their product strategy in what is really one of the fastest growing areas of travel. WeTravel themselves has actually grown to nearly 400 team members globally, and they work with thousands of multi-day tour travel businesses around the world. One thing that Josh shared with me on this conversation that really stuck is that after a recent product demo, a prospective customer told the WeTravel team that they feel like they're spending too much time buried in the details of payments and administration instead of focusing on their customers and growing their business. And I'm sure that's a feeling that many operators listening to this can relate to. So in today's conversation, we're going to explore why so many travel businesses end up with fragmented systems and what that is actually costing them, why the industry is moving forward to much more integrated platforms, and how companies like WeTravel are helping operators simplify their operations while creating better travel experiences. We're also going to get into AI, a very important topic and something that all of our listeners know that I'm very keen to discuss. And what top performing operators are doing differently and where travel technology is headed next. And also, speaking of headed next, they have their big conference coming up on September 29th and 30th, 2026. So make sure you register for We Travel's fourth annual travel innovation summit. I've had the privilege to speak the last couple of years. It's an amazing conference and a fantastic opportunity here from industry leaders on what's shaping the future of travel, just like our podcast. So let's get into it, Josh.

Josh Chang’s Path Into Travel

SPEAKER_01 2:33

Welcome to Travel Trends. Great to have you on the podcast.

SPEAKER_00 2:36

Oh my God, Dan, so good to see you. I think last time we had a conversation was back at your AI summit. That was super fun, and a lot's happened in the industry in terms of multi-day, in the software industry, and like everything you and I've been doing. So it's great to catch up. I'm excited for this conversation.

SPEAKER_01 2:54

Yeah, I love that you were a part of that. Obviously, we're big fans of WeTravel, and I was very keen to bring this spotlight episode together, not only because of your involvement in multi-day, but also AI. You had a significant fundraise right around that time. So it was great to bring you into that conversation. And you guys will be back late October this year for our third version of our summit. But one of the things I wanted to bring you back on the podcast for is actually to get a better understanding of your background, where WeTravel is headed today, and obviously the problem that you solved, which is a very important one for an industry that I absolutely love, which is multi-day. And so, Josh, I want to start with your background, though, because you have a very impressive profile. And I'm sure many of the people at the WeTravel team, as soon as they had the opportunity to bring you on board, jumped at the opportunity because it's very rare that you have someone that's worked at Microsoft, Amazon, that has experience at Harvard, that worked at McKinsey and uh Uber as well. I mean, just to think about those uh large technology companies and where WeTravel is and where it's headed, and having you join us as the chief product officer. Tell us a little bit about your background first and what got you into travel. Oh man, way to make me blush.

SPEAKER_00 4:06

But I actually think I'm the one who's incredibly lucky to be in this position. And I think about it as like a combination of personal interests on one side coming together with a professional background. So it all like starts at a more personal level. I actually grew up and lived on four continents. So that includes um obviously the US. I lived in like, you know, both coasts and like a bit about Middle America as well. I lived in Korea, Brazil, UK, and now uh my family is in Amsterdam. So I always always like just appreciated being able to experience new places and make new friends. Uh and I think it's like a big part of us being humans together. Then professionally, as you alluded to it, I've been building business software for almost 20 years, starting at Microsoft back in 2008. And that was when we built the first Office 365, which is like one of the common like SaaS tools out there. And uh then I went on to build their first CRM product. And then like there are a few other companies, and back in 2013, I went to an MBA program to advance my career. And this is like when the personal interest starts to creep back in, where I realized that MBA students go on these things called international tracks. And it has educational and frankly like entertainment components as well. And uh they visit different companies abroad to learn how they do business, experience new culture, and like also, you know, enjoy time together with their classmates bonding. And some of them are run by professional tour operators, maybe uh some folks on your audience, and some are run by students as amateurs. So, as someone who grew up internationally, I just got excited about this concept and ran two international trips myself. It's about 50 people each, so about $100,000 in bookings each, excluding the flights. And that's like the first moment when I really got hooked on the concept of multi-day travel. And it was a quite custom, you know, uh trip in that sense. And it brought so much joy. I could physically see it in my classmates' eyes when we're on the trip. And now, like 10, 15 years later, we still talk about it when we meet up at reunions. And like, you know, people still remember uh the time we had, people still remember how I arranged the trip and also sold them the trips, right? And I remember also the absurd amount of work uh that went into making it happen. I used to go to bed at 3, 4 a.m. Um, and like that's given me so much respect for all the operators. And ever since then, I always wanted to like make it easier to deliver these kind of like bucket list experiences. And that's why when the right opportunity came along, and we traveled about two and a half years ago, for me to package all of those my past experiences and come help lead product development and content development so that operators can deliver those bucket list experiences easier and focus on that human experience. I just had to jump on that opportunity. So I feel like the professional experience gave me the capability to do it, but it's the personal interest that like gets me excited to wake up at 5:30 a.m. every day to like give the operators the features that's gonna help them.

SPEAKER_01 7:29

Yeah, well, that was clear from the moment we met that you have a very strong passion for travel and the industry itself, and I think that goes uh a long way, but you also then have the the background and the knowledge to really be able to back that up. And you mentioned obviously being based in Amsterdam. In my introduction, I highlighted that the company is based in Amsterdam and you've got more than 250 people that are uh you know across 50 countries. One of the things that's also unique and important about your background is the fact that you have a global perspective and so many multi-day tour operators, they're taking people from one source market and setting them to another destination market. And the number of companies that I have worked with in the multi-day tour space that have sent me a WeTravel link to be able to pay for my trip. And when I was heading to Galapagos, that was the first time that I really came across WeTravel. And obviously, I know a lot of your great colleagues that work at WeTravel and we've been in close contact over the years ever since. But one of the things I wanted to get into is your role.

What A CPO Really Does

SPEAKER_01 8:25

So, chief product officer now at WeTravel. And then I also want to give our listeners a bit more understanding about the business from your vantage point. But tell us a little bit about your role as a chief product officer.

SPEAKER_00 8:35

Yeah, sure. And and before I go to that, you said something about Galapagos. I love that commentary because back in 2017, my wife and I actually went to Galapagos Island with an Ecuadorian operator. And last year, she started using We Travel to run her trips. So it's very much like I was your customer, now you're my customer. How do we help you better situation? Like, even crazier, uh, she's actually a Dutch woman who's um, you know, moved to Ecuador. And like last time she was in the Netherlands visiting her family with her kids. Uh, I was able to invite her to our office, and then we actually got to connect. So I actually feel quite immersed in the industry now. And that's probably the best way to explain my role as chief product officer. I I think about like my number one job is how do I get as native with the industry as possible so that I can guide my team in building the software and the content that's gonna help uh travel operators actually create these life-changing trips, uh, which are their products, and then deliver them. And we sit behind the scenes. It's not about us. We're there as a tool so that um travel operators don't have to live 10 hours, 11 hours a day uh crouched in front of their laptop. Uh instead, we want the software to do the work for them. We want the AI to do the work for them so they can spend the time uh talking to the travelers, giving them what sense of what the trip's gonna be, and uh hopefully actually out there like running the trips and delivering that experience. So I think about my role as that. Um at a more practical level, we have um about like getting close to like 100 RD team members. And uh my job is to structure that organization into different components, and we can later talk about what are the 10 things that we travel uh can help travel operators with. But like you can imagine those hundred people uh structured into 10 different objectives, and uh my job is almost like allocation of like attention so that each of those things are moving in the right direction to actually create value for travel operators.

SPEAKER_01 10:44

That's great. I appreciate you sharing that because obviously, yeah, as you say, your chief product officer role is very closely tied to the business you're in and the problem that you solve. So I think actually it's probably a good starting point for our listeners, especially for those people that are not familiar with Reach WeTravel, aside from maybe what I shared in the introduction. I'm sure there are many of our listeners too that have gotten to know you guys uh throughout our uh summit and our podcast. But I would love having you here now and the opportunity to dive into it to actually give some context to WeTravel and from your vantage point, explain to us what WeTravel does and the problem you solve in the industry.

What WeTravel Builds And Why

SPEAKER_00 11:20

Yeah, absolutely. Um, the one liner is like WeTravel help travel operators grow their bookings, um, collect payments efficiently, as in not pay those hidden fees, and uh manage their trips. And it's it's a bit easier to like talk about WeTravel in terms of our history and evolution. People always like the narrative. And uh We travel now. Um it's funny, last time we talked, we were at about 250 people and we've now grown to close to 400 people. Um, and that's all in order to build hopefully the best one-stop shop software for travel operators. And then it's not just the software, it's the people behind it that make all of these operations happen. And it all started back in kind of mid to early 2010s, and that's when like multi-day industry, I believe, was like starting to sell really big ticket bucket list trips online, and at least like starting to collect payments online at that stage. And that's when we started making it easy to build one beautiful online trip pages, right? Because you're transitioning from printed papers to online pages to get the trips reviewed and actually uh sold. And then uh it ended up back then, like already looked better than Xpedia and Airbnb. And we also made it easy to collect payments around the world reliably, quickly without delays or things getting stuck. Um, and we made it easy to pay suppliers already back then as well. And it's not just the software, we started to build out a team of payment operations experts who would make sure that payments are going through uh smoothly. And if there's any issue, we actually have people who's there around the clock, around the world to help our travel operators manage those payments. If you have any disputes, our team will stand behind you and help you through that. And then around like 2020s, online presence has kind of have become table stakes, and multi-day businesses started to need to present their products in the most compelling way. And that's when we travel saw this like coming up already because we run these big surveys, we run interviews, we do trend reports, and because we were able to see that operators are picking up additional software to different to do different parts of their jobs, um, and many of them are starting to ask, hey, can we travel help me with this also? Because I already use you for payments. And that organically grew us to this now almost 400 people company that helped travel companies with not just the payments, but also this marketing and sales, also the trip operations, also finding and working with the suppliers and on and on.

SPEAKER_01 13:57

What's interesting about that, and given that one of the challenges that multi-day tour operators have is technology. It's one of the big industry uh challenges across travel in general, because most people that get into this space are not getting into it to solve technology problems. They're getting it into it because they want to offer a great guest experience. And to your point about the partners you end up working with, they've created these fantastic brands, these amazing itineraries, and they're very focused on their guests having the best possible experience. And then they need to figure out how they manage websites and having a reservation platform and how they collect payments, manage these bookings, pay partners, all things that I know that are core to your platform, but ultimately you also need to be able to sell and create beautiful itineraries. And so it's interesting to see the evolution, and I appreciate you walking us through that because you know people may be familiar with one aspect of the WeTravel platform, but not have a full perspective of all the problems it now solves, because it has become the operating system for multi-day tour businesses, and obviously that's you know part of the mission of WeTravel going forward. Tell us a little bit about the challenge for a lot of operators in this space, because as we kind of set the stage, many of our listeners are certainly tour operators, and that's a big part of my background, as you know. And so for me, I would always say on stage, unlike the OTAs, the online travel agencies, when I was at a focus right conference, and they would say things like, We're a technology company, not a travel company. And I would always get on stage and say, We're a travel company, not a technology company. I'm not confused about that because our first commitment is to the guest and their experience. But we travel very much is a technology company. And so tell us a little bit about what you've seen as the challenges in this fragmented space and where you think obviously we travel is solving for that. But let's

The Real Cost Of Fragmentation

SPEAKER_01 15:45

kind of set the stage for all of our listeners about the challenges and the costs of running a very fragmented business. And uh, I'll just finish my question by saying that Douglas Quinby, who many people know has been on our podcast, one of the co-founders of Arrival, recently did a report on multi-day as we were preparing for the arrival conference in Valencia. And his statement was multi-day is a mess and still is. So he highlighting the fact that this injury is still fragmented. So much of this uh activity is still offline. So there's still a huge up, there's still a huge problem to solve, I guess is the overall point. But yeah, tell us a little bit about the challenges you've seen with companies running on so many different platforms and how we got to where we are. Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 16:26

And uh there's a probably a multi-parse to this answer, and I want to break it down into like bicep chunks so that it all makes sense. And the top of the line is it's all about time and um fragmentation, as you said. Um, so I almost want to visualize what this looks like for the audience. There's so much time that goes into running these operator multi-day businesses uh that the outside world doesn't realize. And then the second thing is um all this work sounds adventurous, sounds beautiful, but in reality, so much of it is like people 11 hours a day crouched over their laptop, and I call it like the back pain problem. So uh let me maybe start by sharing my own experience. We can build up from there. Um, and I experienced like a milder version of this about 15 years ago running those student trips, right? Like for MBA students. And like the expectation of MBA students is they've all internationally traveled by the time they come to an MBA and they were like, ah, I can organize this. So they see the value in being able to travel together with classmates, but uh they don't quite realize how much effort that goes into arranging all of it. So that's the expectation. And on the reality side of it, um, I was calling off the beaten path restaurants, whether in like, you know, Chapada Jimantina in Brazil or different parts of Seoul at odd hours from uh my like dorm room in Boston. And the person I would get on the other side at the restaurant either doesn't speak English or is not the manager, right? Uh and and uh they're busy actually serving the lunch or dinner, and they just tell me to call back in about three hours. And I have to make one, two, three calls just to get to the right person. Um, and there's explaining what this group trip is, negotiating on the menu, figuring out the payment terms and the price in the local currency. And then back in 2013, it was a thing to have to explain what gluten-free meant. Because on a 50 people group, we definitely had gluten-free people. Um, and I would have to do that for about 14 restaurants for each of these trips. And the reason why I mentioned that is there is so much of the time that goes into arranging all of this. And while I was making those phone calls, I'm tracking all of these motions with a spreadsheet hunched over a laptop. So that's like the visual of the challenge that the operators are having. And the hard thing is, fast forward to today, that stuff hasn't gotten like actually easier because AI isn't gonna make those phone calls easier for me, right? I can probably have a little bit of like easier translation experience, but other than that, it's equally hard. And AI has also made expectations uh rise. So, like that that's like one part, and we can kind of call that uh time and expectation mismatch of like the effort that goes into making these trips happen. Does that resonate, Dan, before we kind of go into like the second part of the answer?

SPEAKER_01 19:36

Yeah, very much so. I just wanted to add something too to that, Josh, especially from my background experience, which has been largely multi-day, the travel corporation, G Adventures. And at G Adventures, we built a lot of our technology in-house. TTC, the travel corporation, you know, had built their own reservation platform, but worked with a number of different partners. Uh certainly in CRM, we'd moved over to Salesforce for many of the companies in the business. We worked with different payment providers. And, you know, when I talk about fragmentation, and obviously you know this very well, it's the fact that a lot of these uh tour operators, they started off with some way to manage their business, which was spreadsheets, and then they needed to find out you know how to have create a reservation platform. They obviously needed payment and booking tools, they needed to find a way to create itinerary builders, and many people might have gone out and tried to find a company that actually allowed them to build more beautiful itineraries, and they had CRM, and they're trying to figure out how they take that fragmented stack uh and tie it all together for a great user experience, which adds a whole other layer of complexity. And one thing that I saw that I think you'll appreciate as well, given, you know, you look at a company like the Travel Corporation and brands like Trafalgar and Insight and Kentiki, one of the things that we had to do, despite the fact we manage our websites, we manage our reservation platform, is that we actually had our travel directors. They go by different names, of course, they're a tour manager or a travel leader. Um, but one of the things they needed was the list of details of the incoming guests and things like you just mentioned about gluten-free dietary. And so one of the tour leaders who had some technical savvy built a robust spreadsheet to ingest information from guests, and it was so successful he started selling it to other tour leaders and built his own little SaaS business until the uh the team at headquarters realized wait a second, we need to bring this guy in and have him show us what he's built so we can build this into the main platform. But that just shows you how disintegrated um the platforms are today and how fragmented these are these tools are. So so yeah, so I think that sets the stage pretty well for the complexity of this space because one of the things obviously we want to talk about in a moment is how all of these tools are consolidating and you have providers that are trying to solve for more than one aspect. So people may know we travel is the payment option, but the reality is now they can use it for most of what they need to do to run their business. Um yeah, take us through the second part of that,

When More Tools Create Less Growth

SPEAKER_01 21:54

Josh.

SPEAKER_00 21:54

Yeah, absolutely. So um I probably talked to at this point like hundreds of operators and And I could probably give a like average range of number of tools that they'll name on those calls. And it goes something like six on the low end to more than 15 on the high end. And like some of the things that you listed are exactly what those are. Like people will need maybe Wix for website management, they'll have HubSpot for CRM. They'll use an itinerary building tool, maybe Canva, maybe something specific to multi-day. Then you have a booking platform. And then payments is where things get really interesting because it's not just one tool. Many companies use at least two tools for collecting payments because you have different currencies and you have different payment methods that require different tools. And you need a third tool just to collect payments from businesses, if you're DMC collecting from travel agencies, or if you are direct travel operators selling to churches, schools, businesses, right? So those are like you know bigger batch payments. And uh you might need another tool just to pay your suppliers or multiple tools, and it just kind of goes on and on and on. And it made sense over the last like 15 years for travel companies to pick up one tool after another, because you are hunched over the laptop spending so much time, you're trying to automate each piece. And it's almost like this curvature where initially the value is increasing, increasing, increasing, and then there's a diminishing return for the next tool number seven and eight. And then by the time you hit tool number eight, nine, ten, it's actually coming back down because the tool itself helps you, but it causes you to now have to synchronize information across 10 different tools. And now instead of having two tabs on your laptop, you have 20 tabs that you're just cycling through. And maybe your boss asks you, hey, like, why is this thing not the same data as this thing? Or like travelers surprised that, hey, why how come you didn't know about my um you know, vegetarian diet? Because that information lives in a different system than the expression you use to send that, send to the uh tour leader that then you talked about. So I think like that's where the industry is in most places today. And that's kind of what's motivated we travel over the past two years to expand ourselves uh from just payments and bookings to I kind of call this uh like booking and payments is in the middle. It'll always be our core. And then we're solving the left side of it, which is uh marketing, sales, and actually like driving towards the booking, and then the right side of it, which is you got the booking, now what? Right? Like the now what part is actually a lot of time, uh, such as collecting uh maybe um waivers for adventure trips or collecting those information about dietary restrictions, who's gonna be your roommate? And there's so many things to figure out that it just, as we discussed earlier, like just sucks up the time. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 24:46

Well, and so you get all the way down that uh flow, you've convinced a guest to take a trip with you, you've done the marketing, whether a brochure or website, you've paid on digital marketing, and then they're finally at the point of checkout. And we would typically see, you know, that uh, and I don't want to call it any one specific brand, but um across the industry, it might be less than a 1% conversion rate. And the people it wouldn't, and a stat that I could certainly share from my experience is that 90% of the people like drop off in the booking process. And so you know the people that start step one that finally get to whether it's a four-step process or more, you know, you're now left with 10% of the people. And one of the the final step is the payment uh process, which is whether their mailing address or the credit card detail. So this was often what operators were looking at it to try and just solve that one problem of payments. And this is the part that always intrigued me because you're trying to offer more payment options, you're trying to give people flexibility to have partial payments or just to collect an initial deposit. And that was always the chasm that you had to get your customer to cross that was always difficult. So many people would call in on the phone. They would, you know, that's a big factor. When you look at companies like Tor Radar, still 70% of the bookings occur offline. So people are speaking to someone over the phone and giving their credit card details because this is a high-touch product. And so the one question I wanted to ask you, given the background on WeTravel, just being focused initially on the payment side. So all of a sudden, in that example with a company, um, the operator that clearly both of us experience in the Galapagos, that were turning it over to WeTravel to make sure that the customer could book with uh confidence and the business could get paid and the whole process would flow. What does it look like when you just think about a platform as a payment solution? Because I think this is one of the things that I've also learned over my time, especially on uh paid performance marketing. You know, one of the things I'm sure you're very familiar with and many of our listeners too is an abandoned cart. You know, if people haven't converted, you know, how do you make sure that you can still either remark to them or message them again and bring them through the process? So what gets lost, I guess, is my ultimate question if you are just focused on the payment side and not having that integrated throughout your entire tech stack.

SPEAKER_00 26:58

Yeah, and I I may have like undersold we travel in a way on earlier parts because um we have always thought about it as we're like payment plus, where it's been about 10 years since we had this concept of abandoned card convergence. So because we're the booking and payment system, if a traveler, if operator is using WeTravel and then traveler is going through your WeTravel checkout and they drop off, we will automatically notify you, the operator, and also give uh reminder emails in an automated way to the traveler. And that's being able to, like, say, like you mentioned, hey, 90% drop off. Um, imagine being able to bring back 10, 20% of it back, and that can be a huge boost to the revenue. And that's what we've been able to see over the last 10 years of like our clients enjoying that extra revenue.

SPEAKER_01 27:47

Well, and that's where I guess that where the modern day operator is looking at this setup that they've configured over the last 10 or 20 years, however, they've been in business, and especially new operators are listening to this to avoid the pitfalls of the past when these consolidated solutions didn't exist. Because the reality is not only are they losing revenue, but it's obviously costing them time and it's it's obvious in it's costing them business. And so where do you see that they are losing business? Because I'm sure you have a really interesting vantage point, and depending on what you're able to share, Josh, in terms of you know, the conversion rate increases when someone moves over to WeTravel or what they're currently experiencing in the inefficiency of their setup. Um so obviously, costing revenue is probably one of the biggest concerns people have is that all of a sudden if they are if if they could increase their conversion rates, that could be really meaningful to their business. But the reality is they're losing out on business today if they are not if they are not optimizing towards uh having the right tech stack in place.

SPEAKER_00 28:42

Yeah, and it happens at many layers. One is like your checkout may not be converting, right? But it happens at the checkout, it happens at your website, it happens at you know any part of the funnel. And uh the the examples of like outstanding operators are, for example, we have Matteo, who runs Be in Italy, an amazing DMC in Italy. And he's been using WeTravel for the last couple years, and every single year he's been able to increase his sales by 50%. Because it's not just a checkout conversion. Uh, he's one of our um, you know, early user groups who's going to be in interviews with us while we're building the tools. So he's always trying the newest and the greatest, and that allows him to have that edge where he started with us with three team members and hasn't really grown his team, but he's been able to grow his business 50% at a time at share because he's getting that leverage across uh probably like about 10 different steps that his business requires. And we have Sandra from uh same wave in Australia, it's a surf shop who have presence in other continents as well. And she used to juggle the patchwork, as she would say, of PayPal for one type of payment, another tool for international payments, and many, many, many spreadsheets like I used to have. And uh she couldn't expand internationally, and now she's gonna expand to two other continents. So those are examples where it's not just the conversion, but this fragmentation actually means you you can't actually scale your business two times, five times, ten times. You gotta consolidate your tech stack in order to transform your business. Uh and like that's like a topic that I actually feel quite passionate about.

SPEAKER_01 30:26

Well, and the other thing that's also unique to a multi-day tour experience for guests is that there can be changes along the way to an itinerary. And when the uh there was a partner that actually had built a app for Trafalgar, and I had the chance to road test it before it went out, and the app that was built was unfortunately not fit for purpose, and I that was clear to me right away because the app had some cool features around being able to build out journals or be able to check the weather, which clearly you don't need an app to do. But at the same time, they uh the they missed a very important piece of functionality, which is the itinerary itself and the day-to-day change of that itinerary. So the itinerary that existed within the app was the itinerary that's on the website. And that is obviously what and everyone who's traveled in multi-day knows that those activities can change by virtue of weather, by virtue of uh uh the partnerships on the ground. And that's why you need a great tour guide to make sure that they're essentially the ones that are managing that experience for their guests. And the thing that shocked me, Josh, because I was looking at the app, and then at the beginning of each morning, I would get a piece of paper under the door of the hotel, and I would look at that plan for the day compared to what was on my phone. I was like, this is different. And so um, one of the things that they needed to figure out was how to integrate changes to the itinerary because you know, routes close or there's unexpected events that come up. And this is a this to me was a great example of like how flawed the process was um when things were so disconnected. And so ultimately, really, you were just relying on giving the information to the guide and the guide telling their guests, but guests want to have the digital tools, they want to be connected, they want to understand what's happening. And it it seemed crazy to me, and this is only going back about five years, Josh, that this is kind of the reality for guests. I mean, things have evolved a lot since then. But tell us I think that's a good use case, but um, like sudden disruptions like a root closure, like how do you make sure that uh you know I guess the flip side of that is that if you have a fully connected system, you're gonna be able to manage that. But I know that's a big weakness of disconnected systems today. So is that something that you guys have come up against with uh some of your existing clients?

SPEAKER_00 32:32

Yeah, absolutely. And like that, that example, I probably have 20 other ones that have motivated some of our work as well. And what you described is essentially as a tour operator, tour guide, um, I know there's a root closure, and but I can't physically go update 20 different systems in time before the guests wake up. So I'm actually bypassing all of these digital tools that we're paying for, and then choosing to just print a piece of paper and then slip it under the door, right? Uh so it's actually a shame. And um, that's why we see clients like Matteo, who are having the fastest growth rates, be able to connect these otherwise fragmented systems. So that guide, next time that happens, and if they're using uh running the business the way Mateo does, would be able to simply update the itinerary on his side, and it'll update across all of the views and systems down to what the suppliers are getting communicated to. Um and the travelers in the morning would just wake up, log into the app, and they'll be able to see, okay, like I guess this is our route today. And then they may not even realize there was a root closure.

SPEAKER_01 33:40

Yeah. Well, and this is where it definitely seems like 2026 and beyond, we're at an inflection point for the industry in terms of customers' expectation from technology and tour operators choosing the right partners. And I think the consolidation is a very important one because unfortunately there are a lot of tour operators out there that are listening to this, realizing that that is their reality of their situation. And it's still very challenging to operate a business like that. The good news overall is that that there now is solutions in place that can alleviate a lot of that stress, uh, uh, help them drive more revenue, and most importantly, and just run a more efficient business. So if that is where we find ourselves, what do you think is driving that shift? Obviously, we've hit on some of the problems, but what do you think is happening now that's enabling these tour operators to be able to find a platform, you know, like We Travel to be able to solve all their business needs as opposed to just one use case?

SPEAKER_00 34:31

I actually find it to be like a natural evolution of all these hospitality industries and their tech stack. Um, for example, I used to work in restaurant technology. Um, and back then, and and I actually worked inside of a restaurant as a line cook uh in one of my past backgrounds that's not on LinkedIn as well. Uh and what I what I noticed is restaurants were originally all pen and paper and cash register, right? And then they'll pick up a POS, they'll pick up an ordering system, they'll pick up a ticketing system. And over time, each of them saves time, but it just gets expensive, and the fragmentation means order came in, but doesn't show up in the kitchen. And it's just like a total chaos where wrong dish gets served. And companies like Toast would then come around to consolidate the tech stack. So now the restaurants can just use one thing and they know it's all interconnected. And restaurant, given the volume of restaurant businesses out there, were an earlier phase. They probably went through this transition about 10 years ago. And now I'm seeing multi-day travel go through the same transition with companies like WeTravel being on the forefront of making that happen.

SPEAKER_01 35:38

Well, and let's talk about what that actually looks like because I have a tour operator I work closely with on the travel trends advisory side, and I was really uh shocked. And uh, when they uh came on board when I was reviewing all their platforms, one of the decisions they had made around a CRM tool and a reservation platform, they worked with a I'm not gonna call out the specific company, but I'm just gonna highlight this ex example as a cautionary tale, which is they have worked with a lot of DMCs, but they have not worked with an operator like them before, and they kind of sold them on the idea that they could build a solution for them. But obviously that technology platform was also trying to build for them, knowing that they can sell it to many other people. And they thought, you know, you'll be first and you'll come on the journey with us. And six months later, the platform is still not integrated, they still have not been able to connect uh their systems, the bookings are still not live, and they're incredibly frustrated and it's negatively impacting their business. And I, you know, it was I felt terrible for them once I understood. And then it would become, well, how do you unpack this and how do we quickly switch to another provider? And it's like you've invested we've sunk so much money into this already, and you're having that that difficult decision. So let's talk about an ideal scenario where you have marketing, sales, payments, and operations all live in one place. And from your view, you know, why that's so important for all of the kind of the trip management to live in a single system. So, what is what does a best case scenario look like and when it works optimally? What are some of the benefits that you've seen?

SPEAKER_00 37:02

Yeah, and like, you know, like not to be too like proud, um, but that this is exactly the future WeTravel is building towards. So is it okay if I start to kind of like break it down in terms of how I personally see it and then go a little bit into WeTravel?

SPEAKER_01 37:16

Yeah, I think that would be really helpful for our listeners. So, you know, you mentioned before about the 10 steps. So for sure, break it down.

SPEAKER_00 37:22

Let's do that.

The 10-Step Integrated Operating System

SPEAKER_00 37:23

Awesome. So, like the 10 steps for me that we are like basically about completing now is starts with what we call presence. So that's step one. That means a great website that you build on top of WeTravel, or we actually build for you that is SEO optimized. You get the traffic from Google, but then you also get noticed by ChatGPTs and Cloud and Gemini of the world. And uh, we're also piloting, managing, you know, paid ads, social blogs, whatnot for travel companies. So that gives you the presence to drive the traffic, right? Um, and the next step two is the CRM. And the CRM, then as you're telling in the cautionary tale, really needs to be able to understand the full context of the traveler that's giving you an inquiry. And step three is what I call trip planning and proposal. And that's the good old itinerary, the proposal. What's the library behind it that powers all of that? And um, just like CRM has the connectivity issue, most operators that I talk to use actually different systems for itinerary versus quoting. That means entering the same information in two different places, just so you can have the visuals and descriptions versus the financials. So that's three. Step four is resource management. Um so if you have guides, if you have hotel nights, if you have equipments, you need to make sure that you're not overselling them so that it doesn't get chaotic and you can actually deliver those experiences. That's like first four steps. And combined, I think about that as like marketing, sales, and like that side of the story. And that's really, really powerful and fully interconnected in WeTravel Now. The next bucket is the booking and payments. So step five is where you have conversion optimized checkout that's also going to remind if anybody drops off and it allows you to collect payments. And this is actually a significant thing because if you're you know getting payments from uh travelers all over the world, you need to be able to uh have them pay in their preferred payment method. I'm in the Netherlands right now. In the Netherlands, 60% of the payments online are done through a payment method called IDEAL. It's a form of instant uh direct debit payment method, and everybody uses that and not credit card. It can be a surprise for anybody else. Oh, it's a Western country, how come they're not using a credit card? So it's like very cultural, very specific. And if your travel checkout page doesn't offer Ideal, they're just gonna bounce. And no amount of reminder is gonna get them back. So that's a key thing. And once you've got traveler payments, it's a step five. Step six is how do you pay your suppliers? And every supplier wants to get paid in a different way. And with WeTravel, that's also becoming one-stop shop where you have the fund coming into WeTravel. You can, it's your money, you can fully control it, and you can pay out using a virtual credit card. This is how, for example, Booking.com and Expedia pay hotel partners, and hotel partners are used to receiving this, and now travel companies can have the kind of tools that the big guys used to have by using WeTravel. You can also pay through wire transfer or international transfer. And finally, you can onboard your suppliers into WeTravel and you can send a Venmo style like in-network payment that's instant-free across any currencies. So that's six. Seven is across all of this, you have to think about the currency mechanics. You can be an American company who's receiving American travelers and sending them to parts of Latin America. Then you have suppliers in Latin America. How do you pay them? How do you do currency exchange? And you could be an American company receiving travelers from Europe. They want to pay in euro. How do you make sure that they're not going to be screwed over by your payment company with the two, three percent markups and then hidden 2% cross-border fees on top, which adds up to 5% easily on top of credit card processing fee? That's sick. So if you if you add um five, six, and seven, that's big in booking and payments. Then the final step is actually getting ready for that trip. Now that you've sold and collected the money and paid the suppliers, it's like, what now a moment? Okay, you're running an adventurous trip, maybe to Galapagos Islands. You gotta collect that uh waiver signature. And the traditional method is travel companies would export a spreadsheet and then make DocuSign links for each of them and then have to email them individually and chase them. It takes about 10 hours if you include all the chasing that you have to do. Instead, it's all automated in WeTravel. And same thing if you need to collect any dietary information, uh, what seat they want on the flight, and on and on and on. So we call that traveler information collection. And when you've got all that, step nine um uh is how do you combine all that into a manifest or rooming list or flight list and give it to your suppliers so that they have it. Um and um after all that, um, you want to uh be able to manage all of that in one place. So uh many organizers may be using Monday.com or other things for project management, and that can be done within WeTravel as like a final uh bow uh to bring it all together. So that's kind of like the 10-step process I think about. And what I envision is in the future, you can use WeTravel for any of those 10 steps, or you can bring, oh, I actually really like my Salesforce.com as CRM system because I spent $50,000 customizing it, but I want to use WeTravel for everything else. Then how do I do that? And that's where we want to make sure, and we are making sure that our system is interoperable with any other systems out there that you want to use, and we have the partnership in place to help you essentially bring other systems on board so that even when you want to use WeTravel and something else, it's again not fragmented and combined together.

SPEAKER_01 43:11

What's really interesting about that, that 10-step process that you just shared, and I do have two very specific questions on that that I'd like to road test with you based on my experience working with a number of operators. But when I'm onboarding a new partner with our travel trends advisory, we kind of go through a deep dive in the first couple of weeks and look at all aspects of their business, including technology, marketing, distribution, and look at where we can provide the biggest impact. And these are the two questions I'm keen to ask you about because there are two things that I keep coming up against. One of them is the payment side, um, but the back of house specifically that you mentioned. And then also on the traveler facing side, with making sure that you're optimizing every lead that comes in. And so uh there's just so I got two questions on this one because uh and and then I also want to get into AI and we want to talk about where the industry is headed. But So let's talk about the back of house for a moment. Paying suppliers, managing partners, handling logistics. Something that people have heard me on our podcast, another podcast, talking about multi-day is the complexity of being able to take currency in one market. So Americans traveling to Europe, for example, taking money in USD and then paying suppliers in Euros. And one of the things that tour operators need to be very mindful of is that they need to be uh they need to prevent themselves from being exposed by currency changes. So a lot of times we were hedging currency and then also leveraging the fact that we had time between collecting money and then also paying suppliers so you could make money on foreign exchange and interest rates. And this is actually where we generate significant profits and only once you get to a certain point of scale. But this highlights, and I've had a number of people come into us asking more about how they can move in that direction. Most companies are not at the scale where that is is going to be that meaningful, but they can get there over time. So when you look at the back of house side, paying suppliers, managing partners, tell us a little bit more about how much functionality exists within WeTravel for tour operators to be able to utilize that that part of the platform.

Supplier Payments FX And Partner Hub

SPEAKER_00 45:12

Yeah. This is a good time to start to get like really specific. So based on our 2026 like trends report, 21% of operators said finding and managing reliable local partners was one of their biggest operational challenges. And again, I want to get like native as you know possible as CPO to drive our roadmap. And based on these results, what we've now built is the following You need to find a supplier. You can do that on WeTravel because we have what's called partner hub. And if you are a travel company now sending somebody to Galapagos Island for the first time, you can simply go to partner hub instead of WeTravel, search uh for Galapagos or filter by Galapagos, and you'll be able to find well-vetted, proven uh suppliers who've been on WeTravel for a long time, the DMCs. They can be like one layer of what people call suppliers. And a supplier could also be a hotel, a transfer company, a guide, right? Uh you can find them on our partner hub as well. And we now also have a pilot version of a booking marketplace. So um hotels in almost every country, uh, millions of properties, you are able to just simply search, find, and uh be uh make commissionable bookings. So you can do all that finding of the vetted suppliers and book them on WeTravel. So it's like one step, right? And then second step is how do you actually pay them? And this is where the three things I mentioned as the payment methods earlier for payout come in really handy. If you're booking a hotel, they're used to receiving a credit card as a form of payment, and your traveler has paid you into we travel. Normally, what you would have to do is let's say the traveler paid you in euros, your company operating US dollars, and the supplier needs to get paid in Mexican pesos. It's a total nightmare. Instead, instead of Wii travel, you can simply take that euro payment and you can convert directly to Mexican pesos. And uh we have we don't have to make um significant margin on this type of FX conversion because that's not where we want to be strong at. So you will be able to get um conversion rates that you cannot find anywhere else, which is cheaper than any bank, which cheaper than transfer wise or wise if you've used it before. So now you have Mexican fund, uh PASO fund, and you can use that to one, uh simply send a wire transfer to that uh hotel. Or two, since they're used to it, you can issue a credit card just for that particular transaction, dedicated to that particular transaction, you can use that to pay the supplier. Uh, or three, if the supplier is open to onboarding onto we travel, you can send them an instant free transfer, in which case the supplier gets the money instantly just like credit card, but at the same time, they don't have to pay the credit card processing fee. So they actually end up getting more money, which can end up being a good economics for the supplier and you as the operator as well. So uh just to kind of recap, you can find the suppliers who are vetted and proven within WeTravel, and you can also pay them in a one-stop shop manner without having to take the fund out across two different bank accounts just to try to optimize uh exchange rate conversion, but all of that is available for you within WeTravel at rates that you cannot find anywhere else.

SPEAKER_01 48:32

Yeah, that's a great use case because, and this is where I wanted to throw a couple different scenarios at you because these are not edge cases, and these are core to running your business. But oftentimes these are things you're coming up against regularly that you don't necessarily have an automated workflow for. Um and here's here's another one, Josh, that I'm also keen to ask you. We had uh on my global team, uh, we had three different regional teams, so in Sydney and London and uh uh LA. And in LA, uh, part of my team, I had a fantastic team member, Chris Francisco, that was basically responsible for CRM and data. One of the things that we applied across the group was trying to increase our conversion rates by much more effectively managing our leads. And this is for anyone who's worked on CRM fully understands where I'm going with this, is that you know you're trying to figure out your lead nurturing when someone comes in and how frequently you communicate with them, especially if you've onboarded something like Salesforce or HubSwap before, you'll get best practices that are generic, but it's very unique to the travel industry and specifically multi day tour when you try and figure out what is the frequency with which you should communicate with them, you know, in the first 24 hours, three days, five days to convert that lead. And we had a very well-defined system and process for doing that. What we would typically do is give them some sort of incentive to sign up for our newsletter or to be able to get a quote request, and we would be trying to optimize to get to about 20% conversion rate for quote requests. Oftentimes it could be 10 to 20. And we would look at what partners were doing, and sometimes they were much more aggressive in their approach and uh and ultimately more successful with the customer, and we had continue to learn from that. And one of the things along those lines, too, Josh, is that we would used to go out and do what we called win back campaigns. So we'd have a list of leads that had gone cold or maybe had booked with us in the past, or we because we and and most people, just to be clear, you were managing either a prospect list or you're managing a repeat guest list, and you have two different journeys for them, as you well know, but just sharing this more broadly for everyone, because this is literally a use case. Every time we bring in a new partner on the advisor side, this is something that we go into detail and it amazes me every time I haven't seen a perfect configuration, and obviously it's difficult to get to full optimization. But my point is saying that most organizations literally someone comes in, they send them an email, maybe one or two, and if they don't book, like that lead goes cold. And so this is a this to me is always an immediate opportunity for uh follow-ups to increase booking. So with we travel, not thinking about you guys just as a payment solution, if you guys are actually helping on the traveler-facing side, what does that look like? And again, I think it's helpful you for you to be specific because many people listening to this, they want to hear that problem, how that problem could be solved.

Faster Lead Response With AI Drafts

SPEAKER_00 51:11

Yeah, yeah. And and just to set it up, Dan, um what are you seeing as like the time to respond that you would like classify as excellent these days for that inquiry coming in?

SPEAKER_01 51:22

Yeah, so and and again, you may have different um um approaches here, but one of the things, because it's not a you know, when you're purchasing tickets to a concert and you're trying to make sure you get that purchase within an hour, the the whole idea is to try and make sure if you haven't got that booking within 24 hours, you've probably lost that sale. With the multi-day tour, people are looking for three months or six months. There's a lot more lead time. And so typically we try and make sure we'd message them in 24 hours or three days and five days. And so we would nurture that lead over a more extended period of time rather than hurrying them up with a sense of urgency to try and get them over the line, because then obviously a lead can go cold on you. So that was one thing that we had learned was to kind of pace it out and then get them into a regular sequence. Um, but even things, Josh, if they've looked up a specific uh destination, how do we communicate to them about Italy versus just saying you know something generic about the business? So again, that's where the how much knowledge you have on the customer, what they were searching for, what they've expressed interest in, or what they've booked in the past. So that's why I would love to know what exists in the WeTravel platform because I've never experienced WeTravel as a marketer to be able to understand what is available in the platform.

SPEAKER_00 52:32

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. And um when when I like survey the industry, um, I think it makes sense that the nurture you have about three to five day and sometimes longer window. But that first response is super critical and the expectation has risen. We used to say 24 hours to respond, and now in a lot of cases, it's two hours because the traveler is probably like contacting multiple travel companies, and whoever comes back quickly just kind of like earns that initial attention. And here's what that looks like on WeTravel if you use those four things I talked about that are now stronger on WeTravel than any other system you can find outside. Um, and it all starts with the website, the presence. So uh we build custom websites that are uh optimized for traffic. So you're getting that traffic inside the website will be a contactless form. Um, or uh it can also be a conversational chat as well. And in the contactless form, you can have any type of questions that in case you want to use that to qualify, right? And then when the traveler submits that form, it shows up immediately in your CRM. And you may remember back in the days, there was this whole like ding ding, you've got an email, right? Like we actually have the ding ding, you've got a new fresh lead. Um, so you know immediately. And when you click on it and go inside of your WeTravel, um, and and by the way, we send you the email. So like from your phone, you'll see that you got a new lead, you click it and you're inside a we travel system where we show you everything about that lead in one place. If that lead is actually a return traveler who's been with you two years ago, we'll show you what was the last time, what last trip she's been on, she's been on, what they booked, how they like the itinerary, on and on and on, so that you can respond more thoughtfully. That's not all. It's not just you who see the full contact about that traveler and the inquiry. It's actually WeTravel's AI. Because this AI isn't just the ChatGPT outside, um, it has information about all of your trips, which trips are available and have spots open. It knows about your cancellation policy, it knows about your brand, it knows about the traveler's information, what they've done with you in the past, and it would have already drafted the first response by the time you come in to take a look at that lead. So you go from now, before you're on your phone, right? Like you need to now come back to the office three hours later, do a bunch of research just to be able to get back to that lead. But instead, you got the email on your phone, you log in to eTravel, and we've already drafted the email. You just read, edit a couple things, and click send. And now the response is not just in two hours, probably in minutes, giving you a significant advantage to start to warm up that lead and nurture it.

SPEAKER_01 55:19

Well, I'm glad you brought up AI because that's absolutely something I wanted to make sure we got into. I'm many of our listeners were delighted as soon as you said that, because but just to add a bit of context to where I've seen AI now coming into play, that much more importantly, is when you have all data living in one place. Because all of a sudden, to your point there, all of a sudden you the AI can help make connections that otherwise would have been very manual before about a traveler history, payments, uh, knowing where they are in the booking process and being able to make recommendations for you. And I just have returned back from a conference in Las Vegas uh that was very focused on resorts and timeshares. And one of the companies that uh that I spoke to, they've literally their whole business model now is trying to make sure they are uh meeting the need of uh of having one holistic view of the customer and using and and the robust uh options that AI now uh offers to their clients to be able to connect those dots. And it was like this is and this to me is very much the future, not only in terms of like leveraging AI, but having everything in one place. So I'm very keen to ask you about that because it sounds like you guys have already made some real progress there. And I know obviously you're a part of our AI summit, which was now you know several months ago and then coming up again. So tell us a little bit about how what become what your capabilities are enhanced by then having AI being able to leverage all that data in one place. Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 56:42

So um the story that I just told ended at like responding to the traveler with that first response. But behind the scenes, uh, we're now actually having our AI draft that itinerated proposal as well. So think about it. Like now AI is uh helping you across the entire marketing and sales, where we are using AI to optimize your website, right? We can have an AI chat uh that helps capture the lead. And if you don't like AI chat, you can have a contact form as well. Lead comes in, email is drafted, and behind the scene, because AI knows what are the products that you have, what kind of itinerary you like to uh draft, what what's your voice, and knows preferences of this particular traveler, if it's a return traveler, would have drafted a full seven-day itinerary or 13-day itinerary behind the scenes. And you can also review and just send it. So all of this just gets faster. So think about AI as a thing that helps you across the marketing and sales lifecycle. And once you got that booking, um, on now what moment, uh, how you prepare the trip, for example, uh, a lot of times that you may have a larger group trip that you need to create a rooming list for, a flight list to give it to the transfer driver. And instead of you having to do all of that work manually in a spreadsheet, our AI would have fully drafted it. You can just go review, edit, and send it as well. So those are examples of the AI capabilities that we have and are building to give that time back to you as the operator so that you can focus more of your time on actually talking to the travelers and giving them that great experience.

SPEAKER_01 58:20

Well, as you know, from our last summit to our next one, I mean we you know the last two years have been very focused on uh generative AI, and now the topic has certainly shifted to agentic AI for all the right reasons. The idea that something doesn't just create content, it actually acts on your behalf. And obviously the AI is acting on your behalf here to be able to make decisions and make recommendations. And so one uh what one more specific question on AI, and then I want to get some best practices from clients that you are, you know, your high-performing operators that I'm sure be really interesting to our listeners. But on AI, and we'll definitely continue this topic at our conference later this year, but most people do think of AI as Chat GPT and it's just layering that in somewhere, and uh that seems to be the use cases. And part of the reason we did the whole idea of demos at our conference was to, and you did one, um, was to showcase how it is actually being used. So I would love to hear from your vantage point what you're seeing travelers are expecting today based on the fact that you know they they are expecting travel operators to have some level of AI integration, and chatbots is probably the first and best example of how people are interacting with companies in AI. You were giving some great examples there around all the back end that all of a sudden um can be improved dramatically to serve a customer better. So it's it's it's uh somewhat invisible to the customer, they're not interacting with the AI, or they don't realize they are, um, but they're just getting a better customer experience. What would you say are probably some of the best use cases of AI right now in your platform?

AI That Helps Without Replacing Humans

SPEAKER_00 59:46

Uh okay. So best use cases that I see so far are all human in the loop use cases, where instead of putting AI to talk to the traveler on its own all day long, uh, the travelers who are paying $8,000, uh, by the way, the luxury trip based on our survey has gone up dramatically in like average ticket prices, and that causes expectations to go up. Then the traveler paying $8,000 want to talk to human, want to talk to the destination expert, like want to get to know you and be able to trust you. And to meet that expectation, you need more time on that phone call with that traveler. And that's where AI that sits behind as if you have a chief of staff who does everything for you, so that it's all prepared in front of you, so that you can go have that great conversation, has been the best use case. And that's why our uh the email draft use case we talked about the ding ding, you got a lead. We could have had that AI send that email already. We chose not to. Even though we're allowing you to upload your writing sample so that AI even writes like you, we still don't want it to just send it because you may read that email and decide, I don't want to send this email. Instead, I'm gonna make a phone call to the traveler, even though they just dropped in a lead. I'm like, oh, you just left the lead uh, you know, filled out a contact for us form three minutes ago. I saw it. I think you love this trip, and you can just give them a call, right? Like, think about what difference that makes in the emotion of the person receiving that call. So that's how I think about the AI's best use cases. And you can say the same thing about itinerary. We could have had the AI actually draft and send that itinerary, but you probably want to put that special human touch on top. And you might even want to go get on a Zoom call and like present that itinerary live. And that's why we think about AI as your chief of staff is the best use case. And I have so many opinions about uh whether how that's different from just using Chat GPT that we can talk more about at the uh summit that you'll be running again. Uh and we also have our uh industry summit coming up uh in late September to have more of those conversations as well.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:52

Well it's interesting to use that example because I always finish my presentations on AI, which I end up you know doing a number of keynotes on as when this industry that's a background in technology and is embracing AI, obviously that's a lot what uh travel companies want to hear from us. And I just did a three-part series of the Virtuoso conferences, and I always finish with the the human touch and the whole idea that you know uh technology plus the human connection and really using the technology in the background. So for me, I'm I guess I'm very aligned with what you just shared, because if you can then give the operator and a good example of this, there's a company called Impulse Travel based in Colombia. They use WeTravel and they um uh I'm I sit on their board and they were recently visiting us in Toronto, and on the very last night uh that they were here, they presented an itinerary to our family of a trip, uh coming trip to take uh my wife and our two kids to uh for spring break in uh Colombia, and they presented it on our TV screen um and took us through the itinerary, and then that we were watching YouTube videos of some of the different places we could go. We're all getting excited because we're having a human to human interaction, being able to understand an itinerary, a destination, and looking at like and so like uh the family's all pumped this is our next big trip as a family. So that that I just I wanted to highlight that because that is exact a great example of how do you get how do you get a customer, how do you keep a customer? Um, because you're then very committed to that trip and you've you've now set it in your mind that this is what you want to do next. And so uh empowering operators to be able to do that is really important. And so um, as we talk about technology, not losing the human touch is literally the end of my presentation. So along these lines, given you've got a lot of high performing operators that work with WeTravel, and you you know, you've built this integrated stack, you're unlocking opportunities around AI. What are you seeing some of the best operators? And this is where I want to finish with some of the best practices that our listeners can take away. What are you seeing that some of those high performing operators do differently?

SPEAKER_00 1:03:44

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So um we just had our industry webinar for all the spring releases, and we got great feedback and um information about how people are using AI because we had about a thousand plus uh live attendance and about two thousand afterwards as well. That was just uh about a month ago. And um, we've also run all these surveys and operator innovation days with a small group, and that's kind of given us a sense of like four tiers of best, like more naive practices to the best practices, what I would call it. Uh so at the bottom is we see how people get studied with AI as all right, I am finally using ChatGPT, I need to write an email, and um I start typing in ChatGPT and it'll edit for me. So that's like step one, right? And uh the thing with step one is if you over-rely on just ChatGPT by itself, where you're pasting things into ChatGPT or Cloud or Gemini, you're gonna end up with the cringe bunch of M-dashes of old like famous AI words, and people will know that it sounds robotic in a way, um, too embellished per se. So that's like step one. Then you graduate from there to step two, where you start to train ChatGPT with your own writing samples. And it starts to sound like you. It sounds more human. But the problem is still missing the context because it only knows what you paste into it. So it's like having an intern, right? Like a college high school intern where you send two emails to college high school intern and they have the context of those emails and they can write another email. Then step three is, and this is where most of I would say like advanced operators are at. They have ChatGPT, Cloud, and maybe a couple other applications that have AI layered in, and you're trying to get them more contact, you're trying to get them to talk to each other. So you could have cloud that's connected to HubSpot, that's connected to uh maybe MailChimp, right? Like that's that's a decent step to be at because it has like a little more context about the lead. Uh, but here's an interesting story. So Cloud or Chat GPT will like mix up things. For example, in Europe, a date is written month, sorry, like day, month, year in that order. Okay. You're already smiling because you know this, right? And in the US, it's month, day, year, like right. So if you see, if Claude sees one slash 12 slash 2026, is it January or is it December?

SPEAKER_01 1:06:13

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:13

It's not sure. And in travel, this can be a total disaster. Whether the booking is in January versus December, it's like just a completely different. And transfer driver will be confused and on and on and on. And if you're at this step three, you are getting leverage, but it also is a double-edged sword that comes with a lot of danger. That's why I love seeing uh, you know, clients like Matteo, who are the best performers, getting to the final step four. And honestly, there are only like a handful out there who's fully doing this is finding that all in one system, um, integrating everything else that you still need into it, and then customizing that system to really work for you. And once you reach that staff, you've developed that chief of staff for you that has full context of your business and it'll feel like you have extra staff. Um, so that's what I love to see more of the operators get to over the next six months. And hopefully, instead of like 80% being at tier one, like, you know, step one and two, I want to see like 50% at step four.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:12

Well, and given you have those partners that are uh more sophisticated and advanced utilizing your platform and kind of pushing even what your team is then doing, because they're obviously you're continuing to evolve your platform based on client needs.

Metrics Wins And A Reset Plan

SPEAKER_01 1:07:25

One of the things I'm also keen to understand, you know, uh going back to when we were talking just about payments and the uh decreased drop-off rate or increased conversion rate, that's one obviously very important way to measure success. But I'm very curious to know when it comes to you know being fully integrated, if you have any uh stats or you know, if you've seen some interesting data or patterns on how it's impacting their overall performance.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:48

Uh we had one client whose name I probably shouldn't mention because their stats are like totally wild. Over the last two years, their business has grown 4,000%. Not 400%, 4,000. I'm like, I'm wild. I'm like, I I wish I was there in your business. So this is like an extreme case where um the 10 steps I talked about that WeTravel can help you with, they use every single one of the 10. And they were probably the first adapters for more than half of them. So that was one example. Um, I think Matteo's example is more achievable where he's able to grow 50% year over year. I think Sandra's example of in two years being able to expand to two additional continents because she's getting that time back and is able to have that bird's eye view of the business and every single traveler. Uh so I hope like these numbers are aspirational. Um, and um I think like that can, you know, hopefully get people excited to think strategically about your tech stack rather than, oh man, I hate paying for DocuSign. It's coming up for renewal. Let me just flip that with another system. No, no, if you're if you have DocuSign that you want to flip, you probably are also using Google Forms for travel information, and you probably have PayPal and three other payment systems. And why not take a step back when you have that week when you're not actually out there running the trip? Audit your tech stack and have some conversations that can help you dramatically give your time back, not 5%, um, but 50% of your time back. Um, and that's the vision we have. That's what we've been delivering for all of these names that I mentioned on this call. And I hope we can do that for many others on your audience.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:24

Well, I'm sure many of them are now coming to understand the importance and the opportunity here. But the reality is, you know, as you know, many of them are small or mid-sized operators. And so um, when you talk about scaling, everyone wants to grow their business. And but there's you know very few large players in this space. Most are small to medium sized. And so that's one last question I just wanted to ask you on this topic is that for those in that uh category, what would you say is the biggest unlock they would get from moving to a system like WeTravel?

SPEAKER_00 1:09:54

It's a combination of time savings, would be the first. Second, you would actually save cost, and the cost can be from that um, you know, currency conversion cost that we talked about earlier, where you would get the best rates when we travel. It can be payment collection cost, it can also be supplier payout cost. Um, and it can also be because you're able to not have to pay for DocuSign or HubSpot. And third, but most importantly, you start to see your sales and bookings grow. That's not going to happen overnight because you have to get used to the system. So I to answer your question, I don't think it'll be the first thing you see. But once your process starts to adapt to take advantage of, oh, my website drives the lead straight into an AI that drafted the email and itinerary for me. Once you get used to having that chief of staff, then your sales will start to take off. So it took, you know, uh, Matteo and Sandra and others a year to fully get used to it and fully take advantage. But once it kicks in, you're seeing 50% year-over-year sales growth uh in an aspirational cases. And um I I think um, and Matteo's uh business uh when he started with us were just three people. So it's very much that small to medium size uh business category, and you will be able to uh have a shot at those kind of aspirational outcomes.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:09

Yeah, that's great. That's no, that's and I'm sure many people are gonna have questions. I want to make sure that people can connect to you and the team uh after this. But one last question on a professional note, and I've got one on a personal note too, because I know you got young kids and you're an avid traveler. But the um uh for operators who are listening to this that feel overwhelmed, and I think that's the the majority, uh, given their current technical stack and how it's configured and all the challenges they have. So for someone who's in that situation, what would be the first recommendation you would have for them?

SPEAKER_00 1:11:40

Um I'm not I'm not a good therapist, but I'm gonna take a best shot at it. Um so first recommendation would actually be like, don't feel bad. Uh it's actually quite normal. And I actually get this question quite often. And like, you know, I'm I'm kind of like rolling off of like tons of conversations and this um like um you know mini gatherings that we've been doing, and like this question comes up so often, which makes me feel this is what the majority are feeling, and that's okay, that's normal, and it's a good thing. That means there's something there that's bothering you, and there's something there that's gonna motivate you to help grow your business. Um, and hopefully then you can take that feeling of overwhelm and transition to a feeling of hope. Because the reason why you're feeling this way is because the tech environment for you is changing. There's so much more tooling and like power available for you with these AIs. And even we travel like two, three, four, five years ago, couldn't have helped you with all of the 10 steps. But now I'm here confident in saying that come talk to us, we'll help you out with all 10 steps, whether that means marketing and sales that can help you get more sales, managing your booking and payments, or managing the downstream stuff. And uh as we talked about earlier, like as you start to transition to hope, like maybe like take a step back and be strategic. Don't just like do a little thing because that's not gonna actually dramatically give you more time back. And if it's a tool number 11, it's actually gonna take more time away. And also, um, maybe you ask for the advice, but like advice on like what not to do. Um, you wanna be a bit careful with, hey, vibe coding is a bit of a fad now. Like you can vibe code one personal productivity tool, but you can't really vibe code like 10 steps that's gonna be like business critical because you don't want that lead to one day leak. You don't want that uh payment to be dropped, or you you wanna be careful with um vibe code or smaller software shops who's trying to overextend themselves too much. Because if you have 10 engineers trying to do two, three, four of these things, then uh you rely quite a bit on them. And um, what if something goes wrong? They're not gonna be around 3 a.m. at night or on a Saturday when a traveler's on the phone with you, angry, yelling at you, and then you try to get in touch with your tech provider and they're not available because they don't have the coverage. So um when you're taking that strategic step back, think about uh technology vendors as strategic partners. And that's why at WeTravel, we've invested in the human side of things where we have uh, you know, 400 people company, 100 people in RD who, and we actually have 24-7 on-call across our engineers. So if anything happens for our clients over the weekend, we will jump online to take care of you. And my actually Slack and WhatsApp goes off if something bad happens. And it's never gone off in the last year, which I'm very happy with. Um and you want to have that security. So just to recap, I think it's normal, don't feel bad, uh, transition to hope and take that strategic step back and hopefully uh take a bet on your own business and uh your ability to uh manage this change.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:50

I love that. I mean that's what I said. You said sound like a therapist when you say um near first thing is normalize the situation, which is you know, you're absolutely you're absolutely right because people come in and they're like, is it me? And it's like, no, it's the industry and it's the challenges of the world that we're in. It's not you. It's and you're you know, you're not alone is the first thing you need to know for sure. Um but I also love what you said there about transitioning to hope. I'm gonna start using that. That's a new line that you've just uh shared with me that I think is gonna be um a recurring recurring theme. It might even be the title of this episode, uh, transitioning to hope. Um let's just make sure all of our listeners, and I'm gonna ask you a personal question, but it seems um more fitting now given what you just shared and the fact that you might get a Slack message. So for those people who have been really inspired by our conversation and want to connect with the WeTravel team or even reach out to yourself, Josh, what would be the best ways for them to do that?

SPEAKER_00 1:15:43

Um the easiest way would be just go to LinkedIn, look for Josh Chang. It's Chang with the A. Um, and you probably need to also type in WeTravel. So Josh Chang WeTravel will probably get you, you know, um the answer. Like you'll be able to find me that way. And if that doesn't work, maybe Josh Chang Amsterdam might work as well, um, since there are a few other Josh Chang's around the world. Fantastic.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:06

And I'll I'll make sure that uh in the outro in a moment that people all also know some of the upcoming events and other initiatives that you uh reference, so people want to connect with you and the team. But um, on a personal level, Josh, you've got two young kids, and uh, you know, you live in a beautiful part of the world, and clearly you can travel a lot from there. But well, what is next for you with your uh personal travels or what what's the next multi-day tour family experience that you're doing?

SPEAKER_00 1:16:28

Oh, we're actually going down to um Spain, uh starting in Barcelona, but driving up and down the coast. Um, and uh we're gonna do um a little bit of like grandparents, so my wife's uh um you know, dad and uh family will come in. And uh we're we're there for one, uh it's a nice getaway, and two, a very much uh free child care. So my wife and uh can have a little bit of time away. And that's like my truly honest answer to end this talk.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:56

Oh, that's awesome. Oh, that's great. Well, I hope you guys have an amazing trip. I obviously uh thoroughly enjoy working with uh the We Travel team. I think you guys uh have a very unique position in this industry and a very important one. And I say that because I'm a big advocate for multi-day tour travel, as all of our listeners know. I think there's a big blue ocean here for us to continue to grow this category. So the more that we see multi-day tour companies having success, generating more booking, spending more on marketing, the more people who are going to take this style of travel that is much more sustainable, much more culturally fulfilling and meaningful. And as you know, one of the big focuses for us over the course of this year has been talking about transformative travel. And I truly believe that's what multi-day tour offers. And so I was so delighted to see when we travel had raised our last round to see that it was solving uh multi-day and AI. And I was like, oh my God, I never thought in my lifetime I would see that level of investment in this category. And so I'm thrilled for the WeTravel team. I'm thrilled for our industry, and obviously it's a great pleasure to have this time with you today, Josh. So thanks for joining us and thanks for sharing as many valuable insights as you have.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:01

Dan, I loved it. Thank you so much for making the time. Um, excited to continue to have these chats. And I hope, you know, for the listeners out there, it's a great time to be running multi-day business. You guys deliver so much value. Uh, I've been on some of your trips, and I hope you continue to do the amazing work that you do with more hope.

Where To Learn More And Closing

SPEAKER_01 1:18:21

And that's a wrap for today's spotlight episode with We Travel and the Chief Product Officer, Josh Chang. Thanks again, Josh, for joining us for this conversation. I think one of the biggest takeaways from today's conversation is that most travel businesses don't have a technology problem. They really have a complexity problem. And that's the reality of over the years, operators have just been adding tools to solve individual challenges, but those tools don't always work well together. And the result is a lot more manual work, duplicate processes, less visibility, and ultimately less time spent doing the things that actually drive growth. What Josh and the team at WeTravel are building is really exciting and helping operators get back to focusing on travelers instead of managing these many disconnected systems. If you want to learn more about WeTravel, you should check out WeTravel.com. We actually have a great product release from their latest webinar that we'll drop a link into our show notes so you can view that on YouTube. And if you're listening before September 29th and 30th, make sure that you do register for WeTravel's fourth annual travel innovation summit. As I mentioned at the beginning, it's an amazing opportunity to hear from industry leaders and learn what's shaping the future of travel. I've had the privilege to speak at the conference the last two years, and I highly encourage everyone to check it out. And as always, if you enjoyed this episode, make sure you're subscribed on the streaming platform of your choice. And we do post clips and highlights on all our social channels, which you can find on YouTube, Instagram, and LinkedIn at Travel Trends Podcast. And if you are interested in more spotlight episodes, check out traveltrendspodcast.comslash spotlights. Thanks again for joining us for this conversation. And until next time, safe travels.