#207: Evidence
Narratives meet numbers. What OTA stocks are doing in the AI era, the case against AI job doom, job board conversion rates, the real cost of agentic search, and a prediction I made 20 months ago that just came true.
Travel Tech Essentialist
Connects travel to the broader forces shaping technology, capital, and human behavior.
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#206: Undertow
The surface reading of this World Cup, this M&A wave, this jobs data, is rarely the real one.
#205: Recommended
Hotel AI scores, LinkedIn's citation edge, and the pizza-flight trick.
Nuitée: The Invisible Infrastructure Behind the Next Era of Travel
How a bootstrapped, profitable API company is becoming the backbone for AI-driven travel distribution.
Travel Tech Essentialist #204: Interpretation
Interpretation runs through much of this issue. How we read a metric, a market, a consumer, or a framework determines what we build, how we compete, and what we believe to be true.
Travel Tech Essentialist #203: Paradox
Several things in this edition are not what they seem.
Travel Tech Essentialist #202: Gaps
A few stories in this newsletter are about gaps. What many predicted for Google hasn’t played out that way. Founders tend to lead with conviction, while hired leaders often play it safe. The most valuable travelers are not the ones most products are built for. And Airbnb’s formal loyalty score doesn’t line up with its NPS.
Travel Tech Essentialist #201: Signals
Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts. — William Bruce Cameron
Travel Tech Essentialist #200: Remarkable
Many travel companies grow by buying traffic. A few grow because customers do the work for them. This issue is about what creates that second kind of growth.
Travel Tech Essentialist #199: The Optimist's Edge
The world is more interesting than the headlines suggest, and the people who see that don't wait for consensus. The pessimists have been wrong about every transformative technology in history. They were wrong about the camera, the bicycle, books, manned flight, music, radio, the internet, and they’re wrong about AI. New technologies expand the world, and the gap between the catastrophist and the…