Mastering Travel SEO in the Age of AI: Google Overviews, ChatGPT & AEO Explained

In Episode 5 of the AI Compass Podcast, we sit down with AI strategist and hospitality expert Michael Goldrich from Vivander Advisors to explore how generative AI is reshaping visibility in search—and why tour operators, travel agencies, and hotels need to pivot now. Michael breaks down the concept of “Answer Engine Optimization” (AEO), the alligator graph of declining clicks, and how travel brands can survive (and thrive) in an AI-first search world.

Special Guests:

Michael J. Goldrich – AI strategist at Vivander Advisors

Jason Halberstadt – SEO expert, co-author of Who Took My Clicks?

Host: Jason Elkins

What You'll Learn:

What is the “alligator graph” in Google Analytics and what it means for you

Why keywords are being replaced by context-rich queries

How to get your brand cited in AI Overviews even if you’re not on page 1

The new metrics: Share of Answer (SOA) and Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)

Why FAQs and fresh content matter more than ever

How to plan, budget, and experiment with your digital presence in 2025

🔧 Bonus:
Michael shares tools and tips to start tracking your Share of Answer across AI engines like Google’s AI Overview, ChatGPT, and Perplexity.

📌 Connect with Michael: https://vivander.com – AI Literacy, Education & Solutions for Hospitality

🔔 Subscribe for more episodes on AI + travel marketing.

Book a FREE AI strategy call with host Jason Halberstadt at MyTrip.AI.

Transcript

Jason Elkins (00:01)
Welcome back everybody. Another episode of the AI Compass podcast for the travel leader. We've got my regular co-host Jason Halberstadt here with me, of course. And we've also got a special guest. We've got Michael Goldrich here. Michael is with Vivander Advisors. He's one of those tech guys and we look forward to jumping into a conversation with him. Jason, welcome back. I want to say hello to you real quick and then we're going to jump over to Michael.

Jason Halberstadt (00:29)
Yeah, thanks for everything, Jason.

Jason Elkins (00:32)
Hey,

Michael, just right before we push the record button, you're telling me, you're helping me pronounce the name of your business. And you had kind of an interesting story with how you came up with the name. most of us don't necessarily know what Vivander is. So let's start with that.

Michael J. Goldrich (00:34)
Yeah?

All right, so when I was picking a name is really, really hard, particularly if you're trying to get a domain name. And you also want something that's easy to spell that you, if you do spell it, you're gonna be like only the one or two other people on the internet with that. So I was going through every which way is chat GBT to try to come up with a name. And then I went through, like, why don't I just use like other languages?

And so I was putting in, what my business is all about. So it came in like some sort of derivative, I think of German, that said, the vendor was like living man. And I'm like, oh, well, that's sort of like what I want to do. Cause I'm creating these sort of at the time, creating these online 24 seven subject matter experts of these AI personas that can help you guide and create a single company into a huge company just by using this cognitive exoskeleton of these guys.

So that's how I came up with the name for Vander. And if you actually put it in the internet, ⁓ there's like, it's me plus a, there's a junkyard in Ohio.

Jason Halberstadt (01:55)
You

Jason Elkins (01:56)
So you don't have to worry about people

getting confused about which is which. So that's the big difference. Michael, what's the 30 second elevator pitch on what Vivander does? You covered some of it already in that description of how you came up with the name, but what should our listeners know about what you do? Who's your niche? Who do you typically work with?

Michael J. Goldrich (02:01)
Yeah, because I'm in New York. I'm not in Hawaii.

Jason Halberstadt (02:03)
You

Michael J. Goldrich (02:21)
Yeah.

So, um, so I'm, really focus on hospitality. I've been doing hospitality for the past 20, 25 years. And really what I've done is I grew up in the digital marketing space, but now there's this huge pivot to leverage this generative AI for both hoteliers as well as for their guests to trade a better experience. So that's what I'm doing. I'm helping hotels do that transformation, guide them. I am their advisor to see how to use this to drive more revenue.

to be more productive and ⁓ save costs when necessary.

Jason Elkins (02:55)
And I bet anybody that's listening to this might think, he works with hotels. Well, I'm a tour operator. do Galapagos tours. I do African safaris. So we're going to help stick around. If you think, we're just talking about hotels today, that's not the case. There's a lot of parallels between how hotels work with ⁓ direct to consumer or agencies and stuff like that. So on that note, I'm going to step back a little bit. And Jason and Michael are going to hash out some tech stuff. And I'll be here to answer.

not to answer necessarily the questions, but to ask some questions along the way. So Jason, what do you think? ⁓

Michael J. Goldrich (03:31)
Right,

Jason Halberstadt (03:31)
Yeah.

Michael J. Goldrich (03:32)
before Jason does, I mean, wanna hop on to what Jason number one, I don't know, do I number you guys? how do I, I'll just call you the Jasons. So, I'll call you the Jasons. So yeah, so for those guests, those tour operators, those travel agents that say, why do they have this hotel guy on? And I'm gonna tell you why, because hotels are about experience. We are selling an experience.

Jason Elkins (03:38)
Exactly. That's that's our stick.

Michael J. Goldrich (03:56)
And that is what you're doing as a tour operator. That is what you're doing as a travel agent. And we are doing the same thing, but the endpoint is a little bit different. But we're all selling the same thing. Exactly.

Jason Elkins (04:06)
Same challenges, same

product really in a sense. So very cool. I appreciate that clarification. So, all right, Jason, I know you had a list of things that we were gonna kind of discuss, Jason. So like, I know one of those visibility search, I wrote down in my notes, selling the experience. We're gonna discuss some of that and then maybe get into like tracking and budget. How do you make all this stuff actually work? So.

Jason Halberstadt (04:33)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. We're gonna get into visibility in this new world of AI that's kind of all kind of merging with search and social media and gonna try to come to hopefully some actionable ⁓ conclusions that you guys can take home and use in your business pretty quickly and easily, hopefully.

Some of it gets pretty technical. We'll try to not get too technical. ⁓ If we do, Jason, dig us out of the technical hole, please.

Jason Elkins (05:05)
I'll make sure you don't get too technical. ⁓

Michael J. Goldrich (05:08)
Right. This

is going to be the best 30 minutes you spent today.

Jason Elkins (05:12)
You

Jason Halberstadt (05:14)
For sure. sure. Great. And so, yeah, so our audience here, our listeners are primarily tour operators and travel agencies. And as I said, Michael, they sell experiences. Yeah. And it's all about the experience. But if people can't find your experience when they're looking for experience, they're never going to experience your experience. So.

Michael J. Goldrich (05:41)
100 % so there's there's this thing that if you look at how you Traditionally track success on digital marketing you look at your Google Analytics and everyone likes Google Analytics for because it's free and You use it and you have a couple of KPIs your KPIs are traffic impressions clicks and then sort of revenue

So, but now what people are starting to see on their Google Analytics, they call this the alligator graph. And it kind of looks like this a little bit, in which before impressions and clicks used to kind of track along sort of somewhat parallel-ish, but now it's sort of like this, where impressions are going up and clicks are going down. And the reason for that has to do with this new way

people are searching, there's a behavior has changed. Behavior is changing very quickly in terms of how people find information and even how we talk about it, searching for information, that's going to even sort of change because it used to be before November of 2022, people would search for an answer. Now people can get the answer. So that's a very, very important distinction.

for all your tour operators, for all your travel agents out there, before people used to search and then they'd find the right link to click or scroll some more, go to the next page, and then they'd go to that page to read and find their answer. Now they don't need to click to find the answer anymore because the top answers are synthesized into a summary in which people can read. And as a result, they're not

clicking and that's why you're getting this thing that looks like an alligator graph is because they're getting the answer. So in this whole, so the click economy that used to sort of exist because you would do your paid search, you try to rank for organic, ⁓ being the number one listing in, ⁓ organic no longer guarantees visibility. You're not guaranteed visibility. So

what you need to do, what you need to do, I'm pointing at you, is you need to make sure that you are providing the best answers for that experience. So if you're a tour operator, you wanna make sure that you are providing information about what that tour experience is and be very descriptive and we can get into moments a little bit in terms of how you need to.

reorchestrate your website and how people talk about you. But that is the dilemma and the opportunity that everyone has right now. And that's the whole visit. So now it is, you no longer want to rank. mean, certainly you want to rank, but the thing is, even if you're number one in the SEO rankings, when the AI overviews open up, you get pushed down below the fold.

And there's so much research from Pew and these other things that say that those number of clicks are dropping down like 65%, even if you're a top rank. So then you need to figure out how do you get to be cited, to be cited in that answer that people are reading. And they may never click you, but you want to be in that sort of response. There you go.

Jason Elkins (09:27)
Michael for the

I'm just curious for the people that aren't as familiar with the overview ⁓ kind of feature, I guess, if you want to call that on Google. So what I hear you saying is somebody goes and searches for something. Google throws up an summary and some people are not scrolling down because why would they? The answer is right at the top of the page. They don't have to click a bunch of links. But then in that overview summary.

there's citations. So Google might say, here's the answer to your question. And here's a couple places where we got the answer. And then the hope is that if your website is listed as one of those citations and that somebody might actually click it, is that right?

Michael J. Goldrich (10:13)
That is absolutely correct. they actually, there's data that says that when people click those links, those links actually convert really high because those people are very high intent. So that traffic that comes from those, those citations are high intent, more likely to convert. That's the data. But the thing is, what I'm talking about here is Google. So we have Google AI overview, which then can turn to AI mode, which we'll talk about in a second, which is sort of the,

the next iteration of the browser. And then the other two is sort of like perplexity and chachibt search slash gemini. So those are all the things. really we're talking about the Google experience where people are used to going there for answers, but these other things have also a capacity for searching work in a similar way.

Jason Halberstadt (11:04)
Yeah. Great. to kind of summarize this, the big changes are being a search engine where people go and search for something, click on links, find to an answer engine where they find the answers right there directly. When they get the answers, numbers that we're getting for the travel industry are around 70 % less clicks. So 70 % less clicks, but.

The clicks that you do get are higher quality. People have done deeper research. They're more qualified once they come to your site. that a fair statement? Yeah.

Michael J. Goldrich (11:43)
100 percent.

A

hundred percent. And the, the other thing in terms of we're talking about experience is how people go about discovering this experience. We call that, and I'm sure it's on the hotel side and I'm sure it's similar across all travel space is the customer journey. And the customer journey starts with sort of inspiration. Like I want to go to Africana safari say to like, you're inspired to do that for whatever reason. You saw a post on Instagram, you saw something on TV, like, I want to do that.

to then you research that this is the typical customer journey. So you get inspired somehow to you go to research it and you kind of do the consideration that you get further down the funnel to actually the decision.

So it starts out broad and kind of moves on that. And then each ways in terms of digital marketing, you target each one differently and you can track each one differently across different channels. And I imagine it's the same thing for the tour operators and even for travel agents as well. What's changed now is that customer journey has collapsed. And in terms of everything that happened in that one single answer, whereas the whole

experience of the journey can now be handled in a single answer where it's the inspiration, the research, and then the decision can almost be all bundled up in a single response.

Jason Elkins (13:14)
You know, the question that I just imagine people asking, because I'm I want to ask it. Is we talk about relevancy in search, so let's go back to before we had the ⁓ stuff and you know, when you're working with SEO, like the goal is to be relevant. So somebody searches for Safari Company Africa.

Jason Halberstadt (13:14)
Yeah.

Jason Elkins (13:33)
the top results were supposed to be relevant to that search. So if I'm an engineer at Google, I'm thinking, I'm going to design this AI thing and I just need to summarize the top two or three results that would normally come up in a search. So I guess the question I'm asking is the citations and the AI overview, aren't they just the top two or three organic results anyway?

Michael J. Goldrich (13:59)
⁓ Not necessarily, you know, I've heard something, it could be the top...

10 sort of listings, but then you also have data about airlines and hotels and maybe tour operators that they actually, these sites pull from about 20 sites predominantly, whether these big sort of reputable sites in terms of constantly influencing the answers. So whether it's Wikipedia, whether it's Reddit, whether it's the OTAs or what have you. there is a little bit of that.

sort of summarization, but also the answer comes up differently, like because the way it used to be is the top result was based off the keywords. That's how search engines work off the keywords.

Keywords are go away now. Now it's more of a question. Right. So it is. So it's no longer in the prompts. The behavior is changing. So like in the past, and the Google, it taught you to be very brief and then you would search and scroll, search and scroll. But this, and when people first went to, like chat, GPT and they did a, cause it looks so similar, right? The, the context window looks so much like the little area where you

Jason Elkins (14:56)
Okay.

Michael J. Goldrich (15:21)
kind of type in your stuff, that people didn't get a very good response. They thought it was very general, very vague, wasn't very useful because people were using these generative AI engines similar to the ways that Google taught them in terms of being brief. But actually you have to be, do the opposite and you have to give more context. And while people call it like prompt engineering, I think that's a misnomer. And now people need to think about context engineering. You just give it context. And if you give it the proper context, it's going to give you the

great

answer. And in terms of what you're saying is, know, aren't you going to be the first, second or third result? But yes, but it's, you're going to have, it's harder to target that specifically because it's like, think long tail. You're giving context. I want to go to New York city. I want to be near Bryant park and I want to be walking distance to Broadway and it should have a lounge.

for coffee that has a rooftop view.

Jason Elkins (16:21)
Okay, so the

big question is the tour operator who right now believes or he just does or he or she let's say their website ranks on the fourth page of Google right now.

and we're having this conversation and they're thinking, know what, I'm on the fourth page, I've never gotten close to the first page, what's the point because Google's probably just looking at the first few results anyway. So my question is, somebody that's on the fourth page with a normal organic search, could they show up as a citation in the overview and is that why it's important that we're having this conversation?

Michael J. Goldrich (16:55)
Oh, a

hundred percent. we're gonna talk, Jason's gonna talk about schema here in a second, but it all has to do with does your site answer questions? So if you're answering the question, like say, go back to the safari example. I wanna go on a safari with my family in Africa and see elephants and or whatever.

and you have that, like, you want to go on a safari and see elephants with your family? Then you do that. And so you need to rethink your website in terms of think of Alexa versus Hemingway.

You know what, you don't want to be verbose and have great prose narrative. Granted, that's great for branding, but you wanna have chunks of information. You wanna have answers in the first part. So you wanna have the question in terms of how you have your website set up. And we can talk about title tags and schema, and that's way too technical for anybody here, but you wanna be able to think FAQs.

but you wanna have your site designed to FAQs to really pinpoint ⁓ the question that people have.

and then answer that question. So here's the thing. So I had a friend of mine who ⁓ introduced the chat bot onto their hotel website and someone went on said, I wanna book this hotel. And the thing is it wasn't able to book the hotel through the chat bot because it was looking through all the language, but nowhere does it say to book our hotel, click this link. Because you just have a little book button. So you need to be very clear and say, to book this tour experience, come here.

You can't just assume. Don't assume. You gotta be clear. You gotta be very prescriptive and you gotta be descriptive. To book this experience, see elephants in the safari, this is what you do. And then if you do all of that, there's a good chance that someone is...

does a question and there's a citation and they need a link to how to book a trip for the safaris that that citation might show up. And so, and the thing is, and we'll talk about this another thing is it can't just be you talking about this stuff. Like you can't just be you talking on your website about this great experience of tours. You have to think in terms of a hub and spoke model. So the hub is what you control.

But then you want other people, whether it's in social media, it's on Reddit, it's on the press and PR in terms of travel magazines, talking about that, echoing what you're talking about with your brand name and have it relate back to you to kind of parrot what you're saying because the more of the occurrences of your experience with a specific detail that's mentioned elsewhere, it'll be seen as an overall summary

memorization of, yeah, it was here. Yeah, it was here. Yeah, it's here. Okay, this is a good citation.

Jason Elkins (19:57)
Jason, you've been working SEO, you're like an SEO expert for many, many years. And I've been seeing things come through, ⁓ SEO is dead, da da da da da da. But when I listen to Michael, it sounds a lot like SEO to me. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.

Jason Halberstadt (20:15)
Yeah,

there's definitely a lot of similarities. ⁓ Yeah, in essence, it's still people searching for information. It's just they have different tools they can use now, and people are kind of changing their behavior. So going back to the safari example, yeah, there's still going to be a lot of people that will go into Google, and they'll say, ⁓ African safari sea elephants. Yeah, and they'll get a.

Actually, in that case, what they would probably get in Google, rather than getting an AI overview, is a bunch of ads. Why? Because that keyword that has Africa, safari, and even one other qualifier to see elephants, that's a very, very highly valuable click.

for companies that have safaris at Sea Elephants. And for Google, who's the one that decides whether they put ads or AI summaries, they can see, if somebody does that query, they're going to show ads because they're going to get $5 to $10 for each click that people made. And that is Google's number one source of revenue.

is through Google Ads. And so we're really kind of in a transition period now where Google really understands that people prefer the conversational method of AI overviews or AI mode, but they're also protecting this multi-billion dollar business model. And so I think not really all is lost. SEO is not totally dead.

But it's largely dead for non-commercial queries. Google still wants you to click on the blue links as long as they're ads and they're getting paid $5 or $10 per click. They will gladly show those before any AA overviews. But then if your query was a

and safari seeing elephants with a toddler, yeah, then you know there may not be too many ads that are actually would actually satisfy the intent. So Google may decide to then show in our view of ⁓ where they've searched different sites and maybe found a specific trip that is acceptable or good for toddlers. Yeah. And so I think...

There's actually, in that example, there's a couple of important lessons. One is that ⁓ query and these conversational queries tend to be long tail or edge cases. So they're very, very specific things that, yeah, maybe there's not a web page or definitely not an ad that is Safari tours with elephants for toddlers. that's when you get into the conversation.

with AI, that's what AI has really brought a lot of value to people. What we're seeing from the numbers of different studies that people are really, really enjoying the process of planning their trips using Chappie Tea and using interactive conversation. ⁓ so yeah, those will definitely be growing for the long tail, the people that have these special needs that want

the perfect trick just for them.

Jason Elkins (23:53)
When I hear you say long tail, I mean for our listeners that don't know, correct me if I'm wrong, but long tail basically means a very specific search with a lot more search parameters. Is that a good way to summarize what a long tail means when you're saying that?

Jason Halberstadt (24:09)
Yeah, that's usually is the case. What the long tail really comes from is that Africa safari is a highly searched for term. So there's a lot of people that search for Africa safari. There's fewer people that search for Africa safaris with elephants, and there's even fewer that search for toddlers and safaris and elephants. And so that's the concept of long tail.

Jason Elkins (24:33)
It sounds very similar because

in this business, you know, we talk a lot about our niches, you know, the riches is in the niches or whatever and like to niche down. So it sounds very similar to let's say, for example, I own a safari company in Africa and I don't necessarily want to rebuild my model to be with elephants and toddlers, but I might want to because that might be a little too niche down.

But I might want to at least make sure my website addresses some of those niche type of things so that when somebody does search for it, that I show up in a citation and an overview in that valuable spot. Is that right? Am I hearing that right?

Jason Halberstadt (25:14)
Yeah,

yeah, think general advice to people that run travel websites for tours and all is that the content that before used to get a lot of traffic for it, like what's the best time to take an Africa safari and see elephants? Those are all done, by over, overviews, AI overviews, and that's gonna be answered by AI. But yeah, the more commercial things, and,

that they're still going to be on Google Results, and they're also going to be on AI. And so how do you both get in results and be in AI is that you answer the questions that all these little niche clients that you may have. You may not only have with toddlers, you may have in a wheelchair for a deaf person. ⁓ So you really need to think of the questions for all your.

different personas that could be potentially taking your trip and proactively answer their questions. ⁓

Michael J. Goldrich (26:18)
Exactly. So

you should think about your website is having two audiences now. You have humans, so you want to make sure your website is clear for that, but also for AI. And so the AI should be able to get through and clearly understand what is the information that is provided and chunk it up. And there's the other thing that the AI cares about when it's looking at your site is recency. So I want, so you have to keep your content fresh. So one of the things I thought about, like when this generative AI came

I thought man this is going to be really bad for marketers because it can do a lot of the stuff that marketers do it can create a lot of the content but with this answer engine optimization this AEO and this generative engine optimization this GEO ⁓

There's just so much that you have to do. You have to feed this monster and you have to constantly feed it and understand to get to the long tail, to answer every kind of permutation of different questions. So you want to show up. You want other people to be talking about you in a similar way that you're talking about yourself. It's a lot of work to do that to appear.

Jason Halberstadt (27:28)
Yeah, it's so much work. I think that actually those companies that use AI to help them identify all of the questions of all the different types of clients they may have and then write the questions and the answers, the FAQs for those. Yeah, that's a great job for AI.

Jason Elkins (27:48)
I'm imagining,

I'm imagining, ⁓ you know, somebody listening to this that owns a tour operation business and they're probably feeling kind of like, my gosh, overwhelmed. And ⁓ not that you guys are making it sound overwhelming, but there's a lot of stuff that the typical tour operator that's doing 15 different things when you're like, okay, you need to create all this new content. I heard Michael say, you know, I don't remember exactly what words you used, but it just sounded overwhelming to me. And

Which is like, okay, so what really do do these tour operators do do they really sit down and start building out more? FAQ pages do that. How did they connect with somebody? Find somebody to help them through this process. Obviously, we've got you know two guys here on the show that could help with that But what general information is actionable that somebody can take right now to get ahead of this?

Michael J. Goldrich (28:40)
So I

would do two things. So I would...

Continue tracking your KPIs that you do now, but you need to start tracking new KPIs, because you want to see if you're showing up in these AI engine, and that's called Share of Answer, SOA. Some of them call it Share of Model, but I'll call it Share of Answer, and how there's some new tools that are available that basically what they do is they have a typical prompt, like a typical question that people might have, and they'll hit the engines every day. ⁓

And then ⁓ over time, they'll see how many times is your brand mentioned in these responses. So then you get your share of answer ⁓ response, then your number. So then once you have that, then you can think, okay.

what do I need to do, think about it, what do I need to do to show up more or maybe you're totally invisible? And then at that point you kind of think, okay, you come up with a plan, ⁓ what can you do short term, medium term and long term? Because this is not a short race, this is a marathon that is gonna never end.

So you need to run sort of, this is the year I feel, this year and next year is the year of experimentation, because we're not exactly sure what is or isn't gonna work exactly, because the engines keep changing, and how they're doing this stuff keeps changing. So you gotta kind of do what you're doing in the past, because you don't wanna stop doing that.

Jason Halberstadt (29:56)
Yeah.

Michael J. Goldrich (30:17)
but you also need to layer in the new stuff and start to learn. You really have to learn to see how are you showing up, how are these systems playing, so you probably have to pay a little bit more, at least for this year and next year, until you learn to say, okay, I need to do this, I don't need to do that, but I think that you're doing yourself a disservice against your competition to just say, okay, I'm just gonna wait and see, and you might be totally invisible and you might see that alligator chart

could end up like this and you might end up with even less clicks ⁓ and you know not showing up at all. you so I think this is the year of experimentation and testing.

Jason Halberstadt (31:00)
Yes.

Jason Elkins (31:02)
Who does that

Jason Halberstadt (31:02)
Absolutely.

Jason Elkins (31:03)
for you though, Jason? Because this is important. Somebody listening to this is like, I have no idea what you just said, Michael. It sounds important. ⁓ I know I should be doing it. Is this something? Do I go to Google and start asking Google questions? Like, how do I do this? What type of person, you know? Should I be looking for to help me with this? Should I get an intern from college? Should I hire somebody like Jason? What do I actually do?

Jason Halberstadt (31:05)
Yeah.

You

Yeah, good question. The reality is it's very dynamic. It's changing so quickly. And as Michael said, experimentation is the key. I totally agree. is the era of experimentation. So the first thing you need to do is get prepared to run your own experiments. So as Michael said, measurement. ⁓ Experiments generally use the scientific method. So you have a hypothesis.

hypothesis is that if I put FAQs about all the different types of travelers that will be going on my African safari on my itinerary page, that I will start getting that ⁓ appear more in AI and in search engines. So what you do is you make your FAQ, you measure your visibility before, and then you wait a few weeks or with

With AI, with large language models, you may have to wait even longer to get in. Because large language models only update every several months or even years. And so it's really building a culture, I think, of experimentation.

Your own because each product each company is different It's gonna react differently and then staying on top of trends like actually reading our ebook that we recently published covers a lot of these techniques and yeah, I guess following this podcast and ⁓ Yeah, keeping up with experts like Michael as well

Jason Elkins (33:03)
Well, I love that you mentioned the

ebook because we've made a pledge to our listeners to try and keep this about half an hour. And anybody that's been listening to this is like, OK, well, what's the next step? Where it's a good resource. So Jason, we're going to have a link to the ebook right in the show notes, I believe. so it sounds like somebody can go there and learn more about this. And then, of course, reach out to you and your team to have a conversation for what this looks like for each individual case, because everybody's.

We're all kind of in the same boat, but we all have our own unique needs and technical abilities and stuff like that as well. ⁓ is there anything, any kind of parting shots that we need to make before we wrap it up?

Michael J. Goldrich (33:48)
The only thing is budgeting. So budgeting, think that you need to budget what you've done in the past for marketing plus a little bit more. I think budget for tools.

maybe budget for someone to help you kind of understand and set up at least the initial dashboards that you need to look at. But I think you should, I know like a hotelist, I'm sure tour operators, I'm sure travel agents, you try to keep your budget similar to what you did last year and maybe just do a little bit more, but things are different. And so you need to learn.

And the only way you learn is you have to unfortunately invest a little bit to know, to take advantage of this. So you can choose not to, you can choose not to invest and just do what you did in the past year. And I think what you're going to do is your competition is going to steal your share. And, and if you invest and take the initiative, you could steal your competition share, which I think is what everyone wants to do.

Jason Elkins (34:51)
Right, and I suspect some folks are thinking, or I just get out of marketing completely and I work with OTAs, you know, online travel agencies, right? Yeah, I get that, it's a challenge.

Michael J. Goldrich (34:59)
Yeah, but then you're then you're giving up a big piece of your share, right? You're like giving up, I know the

hotel side, you're giving up what, like 20 %? So, I mean, that doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

Jason Elkins (35:12)
All right, Jason, what do you want to say before we go?

Jason Halberstadt (35:16)
No, I think we've got a good overview. ⁓ Maybe Michael, could you maybe tell us where we can find you? People can find you on the web and how they could read your books and interact with you.

Michael J. Goldrich (35:26)
⁓ definitely. So Michael

Goldrich, you can follow me or connect with me on LinkedIn, or you can go to Vivander Advisors. Vivander, remember, the only two of us, don't pick the one in Ohio, which is the junkyard. No, you want to pick the one in New York, and it's all about AI literacy. I offer three approaches. I'm all about thought leadership, all about education, and then thought solutions all around AI.

Jason Elkins (35:53)
Very cool. Well, I'm fortunate enough to be sitting here with two guys that really know this business very well. And anybody that's listening to this that ⁓ that feels like, wow, this is something that's important. I would encourage you definitely to to reach out to either one. And I know, Jason, we you always offer our listeners an opportunity to jump on a call, a free call and have a conversation. So thank you so much, gentlemen. Appreciate it. Fascinating conversation.

Jason Halberstadt (35:54)
Fantastic.

Michael J. Goldrich (36:19)
⁓ so much fun. Let's do it again.

Jason Halberstadt (36:20)
Thank you guys. That was. Absolutely.

Jason Elkins (36:22)
All right, absolutely.

Jason Halberstadt (36:23)
We'll be in touch for sure.

Jason Elkins (36:24)
Bye, guys.