This week’s signals point to a bigger shift: travel demand is still strong, but the way people discover, evaluate, and act on that demand is getting more fragmented. Major events are driving movement. AI and prediction platforms are reshaping how people make decisions. And cultural moments are becoming travel infrastructure in disguise.

Spend enough time online and it's easy to believe the perfect vacation looks like Positano, Santorini, or Bali. But over the past few weeks, a different story has been showing up in the headlines.

When 90% of marketers use AI, it's tempting to assume we're witnessing the emergence of a massive competitive advantage. But when nearly everyone has access to the same tools, something interesting happens. The advantage shifts.

Last year, we introduced AI for Travel. Since then, AI has moved deeper into how travelers search, plan, and decide. It’s no longer just supporting inspiration. AI is now influencing more of the traveler journey—shaping what gets surfaced, how options are compared, and how quickly decisions are made. AI for Travel 2.0 is a focused update on what’s changed—and how destination marketing needs to adapt right now.

Google Just Changed the Rules on Paid Search. Here's What That Actually Means. Search advertising has operated on the same basic premise for two decades: you write the copy, set the bids, and control the message. Google announced last week that era is ending. At Google Marketing Live, the company unveiled two new ad formats for AI Mode—Conversational Discovery and Highlighted [...]

For the last two years, perhaps marketers have been asking the same question: “How do we optimize for AI search?"   Google just answered that question with unusual clarity. It is editorial. In its new guide on optimizing for generative AI features, Google repeatedly emphasizes something that should make every content marketer slightly uncomfortable: Non-commodity content. For years, SEO rewarded scale. [...]