When AI makes options abundant, a travel desk's product is curation: the choice made from the list by someone the client trusts. On the desks I ran, fewer than 7 in 100 priced options are on record as taken, and in a survey Steve Case cites, 60 percent of Gen Z and Millennials want to use a travel advisor.
Key facts
- Fewer than 7 in 100 priced options are on record as taken — the author's operations archive.
- 60 percent of Gen Z and Millennials said they want to use a travel advisor, in a survey of more than 4,000 travellers — cited by Steve Case, Skift.
- Bad friction, in Case's split: security queues, hold music and sorting through infinite options — Skift.
The news. In a Skift Global Forum preview, AOL co-founder Steve Case sets out what he calls the Scarcity Shift: use AI "aggressively on everything that's becoming abundant," and put capital into what is not. He splits friction in two. Bad friction is security queues, hold music and "sorting through infinite options", and AI can remove a lot of it. Good friction is the wrong turn that finds a neighbourhood you had not planned to explore. The design question for the next decade, he says, is not which friction to eliminate: "It's which friction to protect." He cites a survey of more than 4,000 travellers in which 60 percent of Gen Z and Millennials said they want to use a travel advisor.
Is more choice the service?
Case's point about abundance lands hardest on quoting. More options do not make a client more certain; they make the decision heavier. On the desks I ran, fewer than 7 in 100 priced options are on record as taken. A client takes one option; the rest of the list was work the desk did anyway.
Read the other way, that number says what the client was buying. Not the list. The choice made from it, by someone they trusted to make it.
Which friction is part of the job?
This is not an argument for slowness. Bad friction should go: typing the same request out again, starting the same search from zero every time. But not every step a machine could skip should be skipped. The question back to the client before quoting, the call to the hotel before confirming, the second look at a rate that seems too good to be true: each costs a little effort, and each can save a trip. That is good friction in an agency's terms. It is where judgement happens, and judgement is what people are asking an advisor for.
Why does it matter for the agency?
If the most digital generations are asking for an advisor, they are not asking for more options. Send fewer, better ones, and say why each one is there. Let AI take the searching. Keep the narrowing, the checking and your name on the answer.
Source: Skift — Skift Global Forum Preview: … Steve Case on Which Friction to Protect From AI.