The Skift Podcast

I have known Brian Harniman, the Head of Strategy at digital transformation agency From since the early days of Skift — he was amongst the first online travel veterans to latch on to the potential of what we were building. Harniman is a serial entrepreneur with over 25 years experience leading innovation in travel companies. He was on the founding team of Priceline.com and held executive positions at Kayak, Hickory Global Partners, Open List, Where I’ve Been, and more. He and I have talked about travel startups informally on and off for years. This current episode’s context was sparked by a LinkedIn post I did a few weeks ago about travel startups in an age of artificial intelligence: “We are in the travel planning/inspiration/recommendations startups circa 2015 phase of AI boom now… dozens & dozens of them launched in the social media boom phase, all fizzled out because… no way to get enough usage frequency, and then drive to actual transaction which is where you make all money in travel…. I also won’t dump