From Strategy to Action: How AI Can Align Teams & Drive Growth in Travel

In Episode 6 of the AI Compass Podcast, Hans Bernard Lagerweij, author of The Why Whisperer and founder of The Flying Dutchman Consultancy, shares powerful strategies for turning insights into growth. With over 25 years of global leadership experience in hospitality, adventure travel, and expedition cruises, Hans explains why 95% of strategies fail due to poor implementation—and how AI can help close the gap between leadership vision and team execution. 

Joined by hosts Jason Halberstadt (MyTrip.ai) and Jason Elkins, Hans reveals: 

• The 6C Model for strategy implementation
• How to involve your team in cost savings and revenue ideas during crises
• Using AI as a “Chief Listening Officer” to detect what’s said—and unsaid—in meetings
• Why strategy must be dynamic in today’s unstable travel landscape
• How to integrate AI to remove repetitive work and unlock human creativity
• Practical tools like the reverse elevator pitch and idea-generation frameworks

🎯 Who should listen: Tour operators, travel agency owners, hotel managers, and any leader navigating AI transformation in travel.

📚 Hans’ Book: The Why Whisperer – How to Motivate and Align Teams to Get Your Strategy Done.
LinkedIn – Hans Bernard Lagerweij
The Flying Dutchman Consultancy
 

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

Transcript

Jason Halberstadt (00:00)
Welcome to the AI Podcast for Travel Leaders.

I'm Jason Halberstadt, founder and CEO of MyTrip.ai.

And this is Jason Elkins.

Jason Elkins (00:07)
Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode. Jason, thank you so much. Excited to be here with you and also super excited today because We've got Hans Lagerweih and he is with the Flying Dutchman Consultancy and author of some books and just brings a lot of wealth of knowledge to the show. Hans, so happy to have you here. Did I pronounce your last name right?

Hans Bernard Lagerweij (00:28)
I think it's fantastic. I'm really impressed. I know, know. Jason, it's difficult name. So most people just call me Hans.

Jason Halberstadt (00:31)
Thank you.

Jason Elkins (00:31)
⁓ well.

Well, I will be the rest of the show, definitely, but I appreciate your kind words. You're very gracious. Hans, before we jump into the AI, the tech part that you came here to chat with, just give our listeners kind of a quick, how did you get into doing AI stuff in the travel field? Because I know you've you work with some other ⁓ industries out there as well, but what was it drew you into the travel part of it?

Jason Halberstadt (00:38)
Thank

Hans Bernard Lagerweij (01:03)
So interesting, if one thing is quite constant in my career, because actually I started off in fast-moving consumer goods, not in hospitality, it's just curiosity. So always asking why. Why does something work? Why does something not work? And when AI came up and when the first buzzwords came out, I really had to understand what it was about.

how it can work. And actually one way that I did it's now I think two years old or maybe even three years old. I wrote an article about the application or the future application of AI into cruise, in the cruise industry. And honestly, I didn't know ⁓ anything about the application at that time, but I did my work, I did my study, I did go through my learning time and experience. And in the end I was...

able to write that short article. And yeah, since then AI, I think AI is extremely powerful in analyzing ⁓ large amounts of data ⁓ and especially can give you insights faster. However, and that's also a little bit where what my book is about, only clear direction and aligned teams can turn these insights into

growth into what we want to achieve, double digit growth. yeah, analyzing big amounts of data.

Jason Elkins (02:34)
Very, cool. ⁓

And what was it about the travel stuff? Is that something from your background? Did travel draw you in or did you just see it as a good application for AI?

Hans Bernard Lagerweij (02:45)
No, no, correct. I have been working now in the hospitality industry since 2008 and I've managed several companies, mainly in either adventure travel or ⁓ adventure to operating and expedition cruise luxury cruise. So in that area, ⁓ I have my work experience.

Jason Elkins (03:04)
very good because a lot of our listeners are coming from that space so I just want to make sure that they understand that you came from that space as well and I'm gonna let you know you and Jason just kind of have a conversation and like I mentioned before I hit record I'm gonna be the proxy and if I start to get confused I'm gonna ask a couple questions assuming that maybe someone else listening is getting confused as well so you guys jump in I'm excited to hear what we what we're going to discuss today

Jason Halberstadt (03:05)
Great.

Sure. Sounds good. Yeah. So Hans, you recently published a book, no? Called The Why Whisperer. So tell us about that. There you go.

Hans Bernard Lagerweij (03:31)
Very good.

Yes. You heard this?

So interestingly, I wrote that book simply based on my 25 years of experience of working, working and living in seven different countries for several companies, ⁓ both fast moving consumer goods and hospitality. And what I've seen is that unfortunately strategy quite often fails. ⁓

Now in the last couple of years, I have my own growth strategy consultancy. And I also started off, yeah, I help you craft better growth strategies. And then I saw the same mistakes that I saw in my career that yes, you can craft brilliant strategies, but it is about the implementation, the alignment with your teams that's going to make a difference. And what I saw,

is strategies failing and the natural reaction to a strategy failing is like, we need to do more strategy. We need to do more analytics. We need to ⁓ think more creative about our strategy. Well, I would argue that 95 % of the strategies that fail, fail because of poor implementation. And that's what my book is about. is ⁓ actually a very practical guide. I want to keep it practical. It's full of checklists.

how to implement strategy how to implement purpose within your organization.

Jason Halberstadt (05:04)
Excellent. Excellent. So it's called the Y whisper, how to motivate and align teams that get your strategy done. yeah, fantastic. let's kind of start off with the current situation that the travel industry is in. A lot of disruption all over the place. we've got wars going around, political disruption, visa disruption.

And then we also on top of it, have AI that's kind of, yeah, it's causing, I think, owners of travel businesses to really analyze what their strategy is going forward. And so, yeah, what I'm saying is strategy is actually something that has to be extremely dynamic. It's not something that you just like make a big document and then hang it on the wall or something. It's, yeah, how would you actually even define?

Hans Bernard Lagerweij (05:51)
Yes.

Jason Halberstadt (06:02)
strategy these days.

Hans Bernard Lagerweij (06:04)
⁓ I love that question, Jason, because I as I said, I've been in the fast moving consumer goods industry and I have seen their strategies of, I'm not kidding, ⁓ 150 pages of PowerPoint. And I would argue that's not what strategy is about. Strategy is about direction for me. Where are we going in the next couple of years? But that where

that doesn't have to be defined in every little detail. I am discussing in my book the 6C model for strategy implementation. And one of the Cs is continuous improvement. A concept term that's often used and maybe also often abused. But I'm a big believer in it that your strategy, your vision should be central. Like, yes, I...

want with my company in this case, Dubai Adventures, I want to become the premier adventure activity, thrill activity supplier in Dubai and the area. So you set that vision, you craft a couple of strategies how to get there. But then with continuous improvement, together with your team, it's not just you as a leader.

You implement steps, evaluate them together, you see what the first results are and you adapt and you continue.

Jason Halberstadt (07:34)
Yeah, fantastic. And so it's somewhat of an iterative process, know. You're kind of reacting to the outside environment, the competitive environment, or in this case we're currently in kind of war environments and political environments. And so you have to kind of as a leader quickly set the strategy and

get on board, but then it's going to change. So how do you, yeah, how you always have your team marching towards a target that's kind of moving all the time.

Hans Bernard Lagerweij (08:13)
Yeah,

important. ⁓ I discussed that also in my book, a couple of important learnings. So flexibility doesn't mean that you change your direction every few months. I mean, you will confuse your team if you say like, we're going to be the premium ultra luxury supplier of experiences in Dubai. And in two months time, like you say, no, no, no, we actually

focusing on backpackers and adventure activities for backpackers, then your team will say, what are we doing here? But as I said, a generic direction is critical, is important. And the most important argument from my book is involve your teams. Everyone can contribute. And by the way, this is also place where AI can help. If you have a huge team, if you're, you know, and have a corporate company with 20,000 employees,

still everyone can make contributions to your strategy because you have an ability to analyze large set of data in seconds. And to give you one example, so at one time in my career, I was managing a turnaround, a company that was losing money and the logical strategy is cost savings. Now, what you can do as a leader,

maybe even together with the executive team, you lock yourself up in a room and brainstorm about cost savings. And then you choose the key ones and communicate that to the team, like these cost savings we're going to pursue. Or the alternative is you explain in, ⁓ and I use in my book, the elevator pitch as a ⁓ key instrument, you explain what's going on, why we need cost savings.

and you invite every one of the team, no exceptions, to at least provide with five ⁓ ideas on cost savings. And I've done that. And it is surprising what the amount of quality of ideas that you come back, seriously ideas that you would never get ⁓ in an executive team brainstorm.

Jason Halberstadt (10:28)
Excellent, Yeah, maybe we can play through this example that actually we used on the last episode of the podcast. We kind of made up this fake ⁓ company. I think we called it Dubai Adventure Inc. that does parachuting. recently, we had the situation of war starting up between Iran, Israel, and even the United States.

So for a company like that, they would probably be having to deal with maybe their airplanes can't fly, or ⁓ at least they're going to have fewer tourists. so yeah, let's run through this area and say if there are two planes they have and there are two guides, there are two pilots they need to now cut down to half and then make all these structural ⁓ cost cutting because yeah, they're

their income is going to dramatically be cut into a small fraction because of war. with this scenario, how would you take your methodology from the book and apply it so that this team can move forward in the current situation?

Hans Bernard Lagerweij (11:44)
Yeah, a couple of things because you never know how long the situation takes. In this case, the war was a very short war. man, do we all remember still COVID? That took a little bit longer than most of us expected. ⁓ But the key thing here again is communication and involvement. So if your business suddenly stops because the tourists are not traveling into Dubai, yes.

cost savings, but here again involve your team with generating ideas of cost savings. However, you could also look at it positively. So, okay, we are missing these revenues from the tourists, but are there any other revenue opportunities? Could we develop ideas, revenue ideas, focusing on locals and brainstorm then again with your team?

the sales team, the marketing team altogether, ⁓ what would be new revenue targets? And do we need a different program? Do we need a different approach there? Or alternatively, can we relocate our assets? And this is of course a difficult one ⁓ to an area that is less affected by what's going ⁓ on.

And I don't know, but for example, Saudi Arabia, definitely a super growing market, ⁓ important domestic market actually, that outbound market that that's developing. So ⁓ Dubai is close by, could we develop that on the short term? But the key argument here is, you

involve your team in generating those ideas and keep them regularly up to date with what's going on because uncertainty and non-communication is probably the biggest demotivator out there.

Jason Elkins (13:48)
So what I hear you saying, Hans, is it's not just about maybe your team members will give you a bunch of ideas that you can implement, but they'll also feel like they're participating in it instead of feeling like the bosses are off in the room with the door locked, coming up deciding how they're going to lay us off and how they're going to, you know, whatever, take care of themselves as opposed to coming to the team and saying, hey, obviously there's a situation. Obviously we don't have

Hans Bernard Lagerweij (14:02)
Yes.

Jason Elkins (14:18)
of clients coming in, we'd like to involve you in helping us figure out a way to make this work. And who knows, just like in COVID, maybe it's like, well, why don't we start doing delivery food service? know, a lot of restaurants started doing new stuff or they put a tent outside and started serving people on the sidewalk. And, you know, maybe it was an employee that came up with that idea. But if nothing else, at least the people, your stakeholders who you're probably gonna want.

to still be working for you when the situation resolves itself, they feel involved, right?

Hans Bernard Lagerweij (14:51)
Yes, yes. So your role basically changes to become Chief Listener Officer, but also what I would like to say Chief ⁓ Orchestra Officer, because you cannot just say, hey, we have a problem, this is the problem. Please give me all your ideas that you have, because that sounds desperate. That sounds like you as a leader completely lost it. But together with your executive team, can again, you can have generic directions.

and then involve your team in those directions. So if the direction is cost savings, what are the cost saving ideas? If your direction is alternative revenue opportunities, people can help and brainstorm and contribute on generating new revenue ⁓ ideas. And then that's why I'm talking about Chief Orchestra Officer.

Companies, we are not a democracy. So if you have those beautiful ideas, it is in the end ⁓ your task as a leader with your leadership team to select the best ones. Of course, you can as a company-wide vote on it, but ⁓ especially in these crisis situations, you need to move forward quickly. It's not a democracy where we can just...

you know, all contribute, wait and vote and see. ⁓ Chief Listener Officer, I like that term, but it is more than listening, it is orchestrating.

Jason Halberstadt (16:22)
⁓ Great. so, yeah, maybe we could run through some techniques like, I assume, having a physical meeting where you have everybody in an office with a whiteboard would be an amazing way to go about this. Or maybe over Zoom and an Excel spreadsheet. Yeah, can you share some of your techniques for orchestra?

Hans Bernard Lagerweij (16:44)
Yes,

so the first technique that I discuss in my book is the reverse elevator pitch or reverse elevator speech. And funny enough, if you're familiar with the elevator pitch, you know, as a young professional, I was told, if you ever have the opportunity to be in the elevator with the CEO, ⁓ pitch your idea in two to three minutes. yeah, the elevator pitch has always been about

pitching ideas two to three minutes upwards. And in my book, I talk about the reverse elevator pitch because now I say you as leader, as a CEO, you have to pitch your idea or in this case, it could also be your problem and with that a certain directions in two to three minutes to your team. You don't want to bore them with your 150 page PowerPoint. And believe me, I've seen

people doing that. ⁓ So ⁓ you start off with that because the elevator pitch is so powerful if done well. is basically storytelling. It's talking about the issue. It's talking about possible solution areas and it's talking about why it needs to happen, why it is actually exciting and what the question or the task for the team is.

That elevator pitch, I think, is essential ⁓ as a starting gun. ⁓ And yeah, preferably you would do that in an all-team meeting, ⁓ preferably face-to-face. But of course, nowadays with remote work, you can do that virtually as well. then next steps. And it depends here also on, of course, the size of your business. I think this...

⁓ Business that we talked about, Dubai, adventures, ⁓ skydiving will not have 20,000 employees. So, you know, let's keep it pragmatic, practical. In this case, cost saving ideas. Ask everyone to provide five cost saving ideas. In the past, so when the first time I did it, we did a very traditional with an ID box.

a box in the office where you can put your piece of paper with your ideas in. ⁓ But of course, nowadays, plenty of... You've got actually ⁓ professional ID generation brainstorming software, but it also doesn't have to be that complex. It can be ⁓ a shared document on a Google Drive where team members are logging their ideas.

Jason Halberstadt (19:34)
All right.

Jason Elkins (19:34)
I'm curious,

Hans, so when we look at the AI slant to this, I was imagining maybe you've got a remote team, you come on, do this team meeting on a Zoom call, and I think anybody that's been doing Zoom lately knows that there's apps that will sit there and kind of note take and can you use a tool like that to kind of judge the consensus, come up with a list of ideas? Is that a useful tool that someone that's listening to this might use?

Hans Bernard Lagerweij (19:40)
Yes.

Yes, and what is beautiful, I have seen ⁓ now technologies, AI technologies, where it's not only analyzed what's being said, but that also reads what's not being said. And of course, this is just starting, but I'm really excited about that development because sometimes in these meetings, it's more important to analyze emotions. ⁓

non-verbal communications and as I said the things that are not said then what's actually being stated.

Jason Elkins (20:38)
You know, when you say that, think of, you know, I've been in corporate groups, meetings, whatever, and it's always helpful to have that one person in the room that's sitting back watching, and then at the end of the meeting, we'll look over and say, Susan, I see the look on your face. You've got some concerns about what we're talking about. Tell me what's going on. And whatever Susan drops into the room is probably the most useful thing that's come out of it. And that's what's pretty cool. That's exciting.

Hans Bernard Lagerweij (21:07)
Yes.

Yeah, yeah, yes, yes, definitely. And when we talk about AI, ⁓ we should never forget as leaders that we are generally very exciting about the possibilities and where this is going. But that might not be the case with your team. ⁓ Honestly, AI gives a lot of uncertainty. ⁓ Team members are afraid of it. Am I being replaced?

And what we need to stress as leaders, and we can use the same methods as strategy implementation, involve the teams with AI, explain them why it's so exciting, explain them that this is not going to replace them, no, it's going to make their jobs more exciting because

it will hopefully take over some of the boring tasks. And so you have more time for the tasks that only humans can do, like creativity, like human connections, like purposeful communication. yeah, one thing that we need to stress, AI is not the finish line. It's the starting gun for actually human interaction and human alignment.

Jason Halberstadt (22:27)
Yeah, absolutely.

Jason Elkins (22:29)
You know, Jason,

I remember in some conversations with you, we talked about AI assistance and stuff like that. And as I'm listening to Hans, I'm thinking, you know, if you have your strategy fairly well fleshed out, not 150 page, you know, PowerPoint or whatever, but you've got kind of this kind of a strategy built into an into your system. And you've got an employee that's like trying to come up with ideas for their daily routine or their weekly or their tactics maybe. And they can refer to that assistant who already knows the

strategy and say, hey, I'm not clear on the strategy. I've got these three ideas for social media campaigns, whatever. And can you help me figure out which one of these tactics is best for the strategy that's been outlined by our leadership team? So that's an example where if I was a staff member, I feel like that's great. can go ask the AI instead of ask my boss. I don't know. What do you think, Hans?

Jason Halberstadt (23:24)
Yeah.

Hans Bernard Lagerweij (23:27)
Yeah, yeah, mean, let's, ⁓ you know, let's support our teams to be edgy with it and experiment with it. And also as leaders, don't have, we should not be afraid. AI doesn't replace leadership. No, not at all. It demands maybe better leadership and different leadership, but it will not replace us as leaders.

Jason Halberstadt (23:51)
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, a lot of times, I talk with lot of CEOs and lot of executives that, yeah, they make meetings with me because they see AI is coming up and they're not sure exactly what their strategy in the taxi should be behind it. And so a lot of times what we recommend is actually holding a meeting with your staff to identify the things that

people don't like to do. what if you could give the things you could give to AI that you hate, the repetitive things, all the copy and paste. And so yeah, maybe you could walk through how could we say apply that using your methodology.

Hans Bernard Lagerweij (24:38)
So a very good suggestion, Jason. So I remember one time in one of the companies that I worked for that. one of this, one step back, one of the beautiful questions that I really love to ask as a leader is what's holding you back? So what is holding you back from contributing more to our plan, to our strategy, to our future? And I asked that at the time to the sales team and the sales team

came back with a very consistent answer. It is like, we spending a lot of time on tasks and on things and on admin that have nothing to do with ⁓ selling and connecting with a customer. And this was unfortunately before AI actually. but at that time we had ⁓ a, so we sat together, we brainstormed, actually we first,

asked every salesperson to have a detailed log of, okay, how do they spend their time in a week? And then we discussed that ⁓ in a brainstorm. And then we moved on, okay, these tasks, these repetitive tasks, what can we do to ⁓ cut time there? Not to cut people, but to create more time actually selling, bringing in the revenue. And at that time,

It was a better Q &A on the website. It was automating tasks in a reservation system. But nowadays, with the power of AI, one part of your ⁓ idea generation session is, OK, what of these repetitive tasks, what of these time consuming tasks that maybe need to be done, but absolutely don't add any value?

how can we just take them away and let AI drive that part of the work.

Jason Elkins (26:40)
That's very cool and as you mentioned time and we've kind of made a pledge to our listeners that we're going to keep these in bite-sized nuggets and so what we need to do Hans we need to come back definitely and have more conversations with you but for the the sake of what we have left do you have two or three just kind of like man I wish somebody would have told me this sooner I mean I know AI changes because it's newly developing but what do you think our listeners if you can leave them two or three little nuggets that get the juices flowing and

will help them take some sort of action to go out and implement some of this stuff, what would they be?

Hans Bernard Lagerweij (27:15)
Well, let's go back to how we started and the essence of my book. For me, the biggest gap, the biggest AI gap isn't technical. It's not a technical discussion. It is the gap between the boardroom and the daily work without teams. And ⁓ AI can help to bridge that gap, but AI

if not well implemented, if teams are not engaged with it, could also increase actually that gap with more fear, more uncertainty. that's why I would say, ⁓ your strategy, your plan also with AI is as good as your people believing in it. So that's, I think, a starting point on

alignment with daily activities.

Jason Elkins (28:19)
Right. And the other one is read your book, right? Of course. So why whisper? For those that are just listening, he's shown me the screen a few times, so I've got it down. So it's in my mind. I'm going to go buy it. Jason's probably already read it. And Jason, is there anything else real quick that you want to touch on that we missed?

Hans Bernard Lagerweij (28:24)
Of course, here it is. The Y whisper.

Jason Halberstadt (28:25)
Thank

Hans Bernard Lagerweij (28:37)
Yes.

Jason Halberstadt (28:44)
No, I think we've got as much as could in a half an hour. And ⁓ yeah, thanks so much, Hans, for all your wisdom and insights. We really appreciate it.

Jason Elkins (28:50)
Very cool. It's so much, it's, yeah.

Hans Bernard Lagerweij (28:53)
Thank you very much, Jason. All right, good luck. All right, bye.

Jason Elkins (28:53)
Such a treat, Hans. Thank you so much.

We'll see you guys soon. Bye bye. Thanks.

Jason Halberstadt (28:57)
All right. All right.

Bye bye.