Travel Tech Essentialist #149: Execution
"Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth." — Mike Tyson
Many stories in this newsletter touch upon the power of execution. I hope you enjoy it.
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0. The most clicked link in the previous newsletter
The most clicked link in Travel Tech Essentialist #148 was the YouTube video featuring the anti-ad by Visit Oslo.
1. Best places to visit
Chip Conley is an entrepreneur and founder of Joie de Vivre Hospitality, which transformed a single boutique hotel into the second-largest boutique hotel brand in the USA. He then became Airbnb’s Head of Global Hospitality and Strategy, where he mentored Brian Chesky. Chip recently visited Iceland during what he felt was the best possible time to visit. This led him to ask himself if there are perfect times to be in certain places. He wrote a post on his line-up of the best places to visit by month.
If you have any suggestions on great places to visit at certain times of the year, please share them by replying to this newsletter or in the comments (link in footer). If I receive enough great input, I will publish a post with this crowdsourced content. Looking forward to your contributions!
2. Tasmania’s odd jobs
Speaking of the anti-ad by Visit Oslo (the most clicked link of the last newsletter), Rod Cuthbert, founder and former CEO & chairman of Viator, sent me an email about a similarly creative campaign from his home state of Tasmania (Australia):
I won't describe it -- news outlets worldwide have covered it, from the BBC to the Smithsonian to the India Times and hundreds of others. Our current estimate (I'm on the Board, so "our") is that the audience reach is well over 1 billion to date. Wow! Check out the video for the "odd jobs" here.
The campaign offers ten people the chance to leave their regular jobs and take on unique "Odd Jobs" in Tasmania this winter. These roles include Wombat Walker, Wine Whisperer, Sauna Stoker, Oyster Organizer, Truffle Snuffler, and more. The ten winners will be announced on Monday, July 15th. This is definitely another innovative approach to tourism marketing.
3. Solve today's problems today
In a recent podcast with Lenny Rachitsky, Ami Vora (CPO at Faire and formerly at WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram) highlighted that customers don't care about five-year plans or grandiose strategies. They care about the product in their hands today and, more importantly, how effectively it solves their problems.
She strongly advocates for prioritizing execution over strategy, arguing that perfect strategy with poor execution yields no results and no learnings. Conversely, good execution of a decent strategy allows for iterative improvement. Listen - Lenny’s Podcast.
4. Founders shouldn't think like investors
YC Group Partners Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel discussed how founders often adopt a VC-like mindset, overemphasizing macro-level analysis and market forecasts. While VCs (and similar professionals like consultants, bankers, and PE investors) focus on market sizing and analyzing trends, Dalton and Michael remind early-stage founders that they should concentrate on micro-level execution:
Macro vs. Micro: Focus on micro tasks—developing ideas, building it, and getting initial customers. Don't overemphasize on macro analysis.
Unlearning: Unlearn corporate habits, embrace a beginner's mindset and solve immediate problems. Early-stage success is about action, not analysis.
Time with Users: Spend more time with your users. Their problems matter more than market trends.
Superpowers: Think differently from VCs to see opportunities others miss. Many successful startups started with off-trend ideas underestimated by investors.
No Exit Strategy: Don't fixate on long-term plans. Focus on reaching significant revenue and then scaling.
Simplicity and Adaptability: Leverage your strengths, solve familiar problems, and iterate quickly based on feedback. Let the macro picture emerge organically.
5. Return on Luck
"Chance favors the prepared mind" — Louis Pasteur.
A prepared mind attracts luck because it is better positioned to notice a breakthrough than other minds. In Return on Luck (ROL), Sahil Bloom refers to research by Jim Collins that found that great companies do not get more good luck than others, but they do disproportionately benefit from the good luck they get. Bloom suggests the following traits that contribute to generating a high ROL in our lives and in business:
Adaptability: The ability and willingness to pivot quickly and follow new information or evidence.
Bias for Action: Creating more collisions and generating more data through motion.
Grit & Resilience: Persevere through setbacks.
Ownership: While some events are outside your control, it is within us to capitalize on them.
6. Hotel direct bookings drop 36% with DMA
The Digital Markets Act (DMA) is a regulatory framework introduced by the European Union to ensure fair competition. However, like many regulations, when these go live in the marketplace, the outcomes are not exactly what the bureaucrats’ Excel spreadsheets anticipated.
For Google, DMA meant it could not include its own vertical services (such as Google Hotel Ads and Google Flights) in search results pages. Users now see a collection of ads instead. Since hotels will never be able to compete against OTAs in digital marketing, OTAs benefit from this regulation—and Google, too, since it benefits from OTAs' marketing spend.
Javier Delgado, Managing Partner at Mirai, analyzed the impact of Google's compliance with DMA. Data shows that hotels in EU markets affected by DMA implementation experienced a 30% decrease in clicks and 36% fewer bookings compared to those where DMA has not been implemented. Read + Mirai.
End users are not benefiting from the DMA either. Their experience on Google's hotel search results page has become less clear, less intuitive, and requires more clicks. They are funneled through intermediaries to purchase services they could previously book directly from hotels with greater clarity, ease, and efficiency.
So far, DMA has reduced hotel direct bookings, increased the hotel’s dependence on large intermediaries, eroded hotels’ profitability, and worsened consumers' experience.
Just another day at the office for EU regulators.
7. Flying on a lawnmower at 6600ft
This flying machine is like a go-cart on wheelbarrow tires, attached to a parachute with a snowmobile engine and a three-blade prop.
At 6600 feet, about to drop through the clouds:
And here’s the (perfect) landing, right next to his truck in the Nebraska cornfields.
I found the first video thanks to Avi Meir (founder TravelPerk), who shared it and accompanied it with a perfect caption:
Corporate: "Sorry, but we first need three approvals, then we need a committee. After that, we can hire McKinsey to prepare a study, which we will bring to the board for voting, where each member will have the opportunity to review, discuss, and ultimately decide on the proposed plan. This entire procedure ensures that we follow a structured approach, covering all necessary steps to reach a well-informed decision."
Startup: "Someone got a spare lawnmower at home?"
8. Ryanair and OTAs
Ryanair leads the European airline market, with around 15% of airline seats (source). In Italy, Ryanair held 34% of the total capacity (domestic and international) and an impressive 45% of the domestic share in 2023. Its market share in Spain and Portugal is 21% and 19%, respectively. All to say that for travelers and OTAs (notably those that are heavily flight-dependent), Ryanair is a big deal.
The airline has had a long and troubled history with OTAs, accusing them of "piracy" for selling Ryanair tickets and scraping website content without agreements. Despite the official narrative that OTAs stopped selling Ryanair tickets in late 2023 and early 2024 due to a court ruling, the true explanation is likely different: Ryanair figured out a robust technical solution to block OTAs from scraping and selling their tickets. The trade media often highlights court rulings and legal battles, but the real contest has been between OTA and Ryanair engineering teams. Until this year, OTA engineers had the upper hand.
Ryanair’s latest technical victory triggered an unexpected turnaround in the long history of hostile relationships between the airline and OTAs: Ryanair experienced a drop in traffic numbers in its Q1 result, and several OTAs decided that it was worth playing by Ryanair's rules to regain access rather than continue legal and technical battles.
The result of this shift was the signing of several partnerships with key European OTAs to authorize the sale of its tickets and packages: LoveHolidays on January 23rd, Kiwi.com on January 30, OnTheBeach on February 27 eSky (eSky.eu, eSky.com, eDestinos.com) on April 2, Lastminute.com Group (Lastminute.com, Bravofly, Rumbo, Volagratis, weg.de) on July 5, Etraveli Group (Mytrip, Gotogate, Flightnetwork) on July 9th.
eDreams remains a notable exception to Ryanair's recent partnerships. This is significant given eDreams' strong presence in countries like Spain and Italy, where Ryanair has a substantial market share. For now, eDreams continues without selling Ryanair tickets, leaving its ability to do so to its engineering team and to the ongoing regulatory battles.
9. Buzzword rant
I’m jumping on Christian’s bandwagon:
Irritation of the day #2: Personalization. This warrants a full article. But the nonsense has to stop. I feel like the entire industry has just blindly gone along with some notion that this is some natural next step for the industry. If you ask travelers, "Do you want a more personalized trip?" - the surveys say the answer is YES. Ask them to define it, and I bet the results fall apart. Now ask them what's the difference between "personalization" and "choice" and we'll be here all day. It's at the point now where industry people talk about it because they think they're supposed to, and it makes them feel like there's some solid future goal that they're working towards. I'll leave the rest of my rant for a full article. — Christian Watts, Magpie Travel Founder
Good point about industry buzzwords that sound good on trend reports and are difficult to disprove. Seamless, bleisure, experiential, and off the beaten track are other potential candidates. There’s nothing wrong with pursuing these concepts as long as they solve real problems for real travelers. But if it’s about chasing the next big thing and name-dropping buzzwords, perhaps we should focus more on improving the basics: reliable bookings, clear communication, and genuine hospitality.
In any case, I look forward to reading Christian’s full article. He promised it, so I’m holding him to it :-)
10. A $4 Million question: trash in trashcans or litter?
New York City’s Department of Sanitation paid McKinsey $4 million to answer the following question: Is putting trash in trashcans better than throwing trash on the ground?
Executive summary: Yes
You can find the full 95-page report here (42k / slide)
Jokes aside, trash is being collected more efficiently in NYC this summer. If McKinsey had anything to do with this outcome, those $4 million were well earned.
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24 July, Heathrow Airport, Q2 results
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Mauricio Prieto