Travel Tech Essentialist #191: Reality Check
“The only value of forecasters is to make fortune tellers look good” - Warren Buffett
Beware.
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1. Travel Megatrends 2026: Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V + a few new buzzwords
Right about now, the usual suspects are preparing to release their groundbreaking 2026 megatrend reports. New year, same trends. Here they go:
Sustainable Travel. Pay extra to feel bad, then pay more to feel good about feeling bad.
The End of the OTA: For the 14th year in a row.
AI: Your new travel agent now judges your life choices and books you a 10-day vow of silence in Bhutan because you seemed tense.
Loyalty: Gamified Stockholm Syndrome. Earn your way back to basic benefits you used to get for free.
Personalization: The algorithm noticed you like hotels. So now it shows you more hotels.
Off-the-beaten-path luxury: Private jets to secret coves already tagged 4.7M times on Instagram by the same people warning you about overtourism.
Overtourism: Loudest from the influencer on her fourth Bali trip this year and the digital nomad who moved to Barcelona last Tuesday and now wants tourists gone.
Slow Travel: Luxury trains, boutique cruises, e-bikes, and walking, the slower the better, while lecturing about planes.
Bleisure Nomadism: Nothing screams freedom like WiFi-dependent serfdom
Experiential Travel: deep connection means chasing the northern lights while live-streaming to strangers
Wellness: Expensive mud baths, mushroom ceremonies, and sound healings now rebranded as “mitochondrial realignment.”
Live Event Tourism: Sports, music festivals, eclipses, reunions... basically herding cats with passports.
Luxury Class: Happily spends 40% more to stay nowhere near you, then posts black-and-white reels captioned “This used to be paradise… before everyone came.”
The Connected Trip: although it’s now rebranded as “agentic experience environment”.
My personal 2026 megatrend is Nostalgia Tourism to 2020—staying home and avoiding carbon shaming and overtourism outrage. Who’s with me?
2. Groceries as souvenirs
This WSJ article makes a strong case for food as the most underrated souvenir. Instead of buying junk you’ll throw out in a year, travelers are bringing home ingredients from local supermarkets and hosting dinner parties to share the experience. It also reflects a clear behavior shift: 40% of travelers now make a point of visiting grocery stores abroad, and 44% go out of their way to find foods they can’t get at home. TikTok grocery walkthroughs now get up to hundreds of thousands of views.
The article highlights some examples, such as hot sauce from Belize, cloudberry jam from Norway, barley-rusk croutons from Greece, paprika chips from Spain, Portuguese sardines, and Japanese matcha…plus a few practical tips for packing, cooking, and gifting.
And if you’re visiting New Orleans, here are a few things you’ll want to bring home with you…
3. 2026, if you’re building with AI
Greg Isenberg’s 2026 predictions are the kind I like: actionable and grounded in what builders are already experimenting with. Some are out there (agents with crypto wallets), but plenty feel immediately useful if you’re working on lightweight tools, agent workflows, or new consumer interfaces. Here are a few standouts and their implications for travel:
Micro-companies built on agents serving niche communities could open up new paths for solo founders…think destination-specific concierge agents or personalized travel planning tools.
Search replaced by answer synthesis. Browsers that read 50 sources and return a single output will reshape how people find and book. The trip-planning funnel could be up for grabs.
Disposable software. One-off apps that exist for a single trip, event, or experience. Useful for short-term campaigns or personalized services.
Agent-run media. Daily travel digests, hotel content, or local guides produced autonomously or with just a human editor.
The invite-only web. As trust and reputation become scarce online, curated, closed ecosystems become more valuable. Lots of implications for marketplaces and discovery layers.
4. A crash course in building with AI agents
More from Greg. He put together a tactical guide to launching an AI startup in under 3 hours for less than $500. The playbook leans heavily on off-the-shelf AI agents to handle everything from product ideation to coding and sales ops. It’s framed around a 5-step workflow:
Find the right idea/trend with tools like ideabrowser.com
Sketch out the idea with tldraw
Feed it into Manus to scope and structure your MVP
Use Bolt.new (a code generation tool) to build a working prototype
Set up automated lead-gen and sales agents with Lindy
Greg’s full breakdown is here
5. How to ask for an investor intro
If you’re asking for an investor intro, make it easy for both the person forwarding the email and the investor to decide whether it’s worth their time. This is a clear, no-fluff guide from David Booth, who used to write the “featured startup” blasts at AngelList and has helped thousands of founders get connected. He breaks down exactly what to send, how to structure it, and what to leave out. Here’s the format he recommends:
Send a fresh email with the subject line: “intro: [your name (company)] <> [name of investor you want to meet]
Open with a short note such as “Thanks for offering to intro me to X. I’d particularly love to connect because [one clear reason…specific to their thesis, past investments, etc.]”
Four bullets (one sentence each) on:
What you do and the problem you’re solving
What traction you have, or why it’s working
Who’s on the team, and why they’re right for this
Fundraising status (what you’re raising, what’s committed, past investors, etc)
If the bullets are strong, you don’t need to attach a deck. Just send that once you’re introduced. The goal is to make it easy for someone to help you while giving the investor just enough context to decide if it’s worth a conversation.
6 Where private equity money might be moving in travel
This new McKinsey report (framed for private equity) is also a helpful map of where consumer demand and infrastructure gaps are emerging in travel. It covers three primary shifts: experiential travel, luxury demand, and tech integration. A few points worth pulling out:
Discretionary spending in the US has been steadily shifting toward experiences over goods since the 1990s (see image) and travel is taking a growing share of wallet, with rising interest in categories like adventure, culinary tourism, wellness, and night-based activities (northern lights, nocturnal safaris…). More than 60% of travelers want to explore lesser-known spots.
Luxury is expanding. High-net-worth travelers are younger and more global, and they’re showing a strong preference for multi-trip, high-touch travel, often blending luxury with adventure or wellness. From 2015–2025, luxury travel in North America grew at 12% CAGR, compared to 3% for the overall sector.
Planning behavior is changing fast. 29% of consumers already use gen AI for some part of their travel planning and AI-driven referrals show a 45% lower bounce rate on travel websites, suggesting higher user intent and trust.
Infrastructure is lagging behind demand. There are ~210,000 yachts globally but only ~160,000 marina berths, and marinas are adding just 300 berths every 5–10 years. The gap is sharpest in the Mediterranean. There’s similar friction in expedition cruises. Founders building around logistics, services, or tech for these categories could benefit from that mismatch.
Live event tourism. Nearly 1 in 5 travelers now plans trips around concerts or sporting events. There’s growing opportunity in bundling around these events and some brands are already building hospitality products around this behavior.
7. Experiential rewards work better
Not one to share too much academic research in this newsletter (I usually favor things that are closer to the ground and tested in-market), but “When rewards connect to the self: Unlocking customer engagement through experiential rewards” from researchers at Michigan State, San Diego State, and the University of Alabama stood out when I saw it in the Science Says newsletter.
Across six studies (four in the lab, two in the field), they found that even small experiential rewards consistently drive more engagement than material ones. That includes more word of mouth, stronger loyalty, more redemptions, and more spending both before and after the reward.
People see experiences as part of their identity, not just a transaction. That makes them feel closer to your brand. Experiences feel more personal, and they lead to better results. The value of a reward lies more in the connection it generates than in its size.
8. AI adoption is mainstream, but true transformation hasn’t really started.
McKinsey’s State of AI in 2025 report shows adoption is broad, but depth is lacking. 88% of companies say they use AI, but only a third have scaled AI agents, mostly in tech, media, healthcare, and insurance. Travel ranks lower on the spectrum. Most companies remain in experimentation and pilot mode.
The high performers (top 6%) approach it differently:
55% have redesigned workflows (vs. 20% of non-high performers)
82% set growth targets for AI use (vs. 50%)
50% intend to use AI for enterprise-wide transformative change (vs 14%)
35% invested more than 20% of digital budgets in AI (vs. 7%)
They’re 3x more likely to have senior leaders personally accountable for AI
9. The lawsuit that could change how travel is sold
According to this post by Mario Gavira, a court case between Amazon and Perplexity might be one of the most important legal battles for the future of online commerce and travel.
At stake is whether AI agents have the legal right to act as digital proxies for consumers. In other words, can they browse, compare, and book on your behalf without permission from the sites they interact with?
This piece outlines two diverging scenarios depending on who wins:
If Amazon prevails, the current ecosystem of OTAs, metasearch, and supplier partnerships stays “protected”, but AI agents must go through formal partnerships and gated APIs. Some sort of a certified agent program.
If Perplexity wins, we enter a free-roaming, agentic web. AI agents can scrape and transact independently, potentially disintermediating OTAs while reshaping how inventory is found and booked.
10. All we need is…
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Mauricio Prieto
Spot on round up! Great pull of charts from McKinsey that matter.
I love it