Tech and Innovation in Global Travel and Hospitality

Wade Erickson (00:00):

Welcome all to another episode of Tech Leaders Unplugged. My name's Wade Erickson. Today our guest is Michael Cohen managing partner at Growth Advisors International Network, also known as GAIN. And today our topic is called Tech and Innovations in Global Travel and Hospitality. So, first of all, Michael, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your expertise with the community. And tell us a little bit about yourself and about Gain, and then we'll jump into the topic.

Michael Cohen (00:43):

Well, absolutely. And first of all, thank you very much, Wade for the opportunity. Always a pleasure. So growth Advisor International Gain is a global organization of c-Suite and SVP level experienced travel, hospitality and mice, which is meeting incentive conventions and events, mice industry executive talent. We are have history as founders of innovation technology companies. We have history as obviously c-suite and senior executives of various vendors and brands around the world. And really, it's a, it's a very focused tight network and connection of some of the best minds we've put together. Fortunately, we're very, very lucky about that, all about managing the tsunami of change in innovation and technology within the travel, hospitality, and mice industry, which is why this, this particular topic today, I think you know, fits perfectly for what gain is implementing and, and, and solving problems for our clients across the globe.

Wade Erickson (01:52):

Great. So you know, a lot of people that, you know, travel and go to conventions and stuff you know, you guys are the ones behind the scenes that are making all of that go as smooth as possible, reducing friction, as they say. Right? And oftentimes it is organizing, you know, data processing, badges, all of that kind of stuff. And there's so much technology that really is behind the scenes that makes that operation of not only getting people there and getting agendas and all that stuff set up, but, you know, there's just so much in this space that I think people take for granted and they just don't realize how much software really is involved in, in, in simply, you know, taking a trip, going on a vacation, checking into a hotel, going to a conference, those kind of things. So, so, yeah. So let's talk a little bit about the tech that's involved and and, and what you guys are doing to make the lives easier for these hoteliers and, and folks in the space.

Michael Cohen (02:55):

Sure. So really, really good segue. The reality is that in the travel hospitality, in mice industry, it's entirely about people. So, interesting. I haven't even talked about technology is the beginning. It's actually about people. It's about guests, it's about patrons, it's about passengers, it's about attendees, it's about employees, it's about executives. It's about the front of the house. It's about back of the house. So it's all about people, dialogue, interactions, services which have been around for hundreds of years. What's changed over the last hundred years, 75 years, let's say, is that to streamline and to optimize the growth and the elevation of what's possible from a service and delivery standpoint, or from a business management standpoint or from an efficiency standpoint, is technology. The travel and hospitality industry, which includes hotels, which includes restaurants, which include cruise ships, for example, mixed development and then of course mice, which I explained what that is. It's entirely about interactions, dialogues, it's about experiences. It always has been and always will be. What's changed again over the last 5, 6, 7 decades is the global growth in innovation and technology and data and robotics and mobile and artificial intelligence, and 5G and wifi, all those things, software and hardware. 'cause Software has to run the hardware. And there's integrations and there's all types of platforms, SaaS cloud-based traditionally used to be on premise. All those type of technologies have developed, have enhanced, have grown, have grown more complex, have grown more problematic to manage if they're not well designed. You know, all of that has expanded and grown tremendously over the last, let's say I said three or four or five decades. But in the last decade, let's say the last eight years, there's been a tsunami of change, an absolute tsunami of innovation. Things have just been condensed in regards to what's possible, what's being developed from a developer perspective, from a IT perspective, from a technology company perspective, from a brand perspective, and what's, hmm, the, what challenges, new challenges are now in place to actually slipstream and organize this incredible impact of technology innovation. So that it actually is truly delivering ROI, it's truly delivering a better guest passenger or patron experience. It's truly enabling employees in the back of the house to do more with the same, not more, but less, more with the same meaning like their bandwidth, their time, so that they're working on the most efficient most impactful from a client experiential specific space or from a operational area. The most efficient use of the bandwidth technology, software, etcetera, is actually driving that. Literally what we're talking about today in this industry and many others is how do we do more with the resources we have in a profitable, obviously, hopefully, and or more impactful way to, to, to take care of the client base, to take care of the employee base, to take care of our growing investments and businesses. All of it is not entirely technology's responsibility, but it's become a massive part of it. But business service, meaning service like service culture, experiential industries like travel, hospitality and mice, they're all about the people. They're all about humans. And it's important that people remember that, that the technology is facilitating the technology is an enabling layer. It's not the core IT people. Some VCs will say it's everything everywhere all the time. And that of course it is in some respects. But there's a lot of opportunities where technology actually gets in the way of a great experience or technology gets in the way of employees doing their best work. And our job people like organizations like Gain, you know, is really to provide leadership to amplify what great companies are already doing, or to frankly fix their broken toys once in a while. If there's challenges, they're, they've deployed technology, they've gotten behind innovation, they're confused with ai, they have legacy technology that they've spent, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars implementing that may have, you know, come sort of end of life or it's not performing at the same level as it once did, because the complexities of the service culture of hospitality and travel and mice have become much deeper and wider than they were 15, 20 years ago. So there's a lot of transition requirement that that's a lot of leadership that organizations have organizations need to amplify with people like gain. So that's really, you know, kind of playing field of all this. It's people first, technology enable second, and again, in these conversations and with a, a lot of technology people in the same room, the technology come seems to come first. And actual human and human interaction, people seem to come second. And that's not the case specifically in travel, hospitality and mice.

Wade Erickson (08:59):

Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. You know, as a technologist when we apply technology to many different verticals, right? It's, it's natural for us to talk about what we know and, but like, you know, having, having folks like you in, in the path of delivery, it, it is about the end customer which is the human. And the employee in this case, obviously with like the back office, like you said,

Michael Cohen (09:31):

And Wade, soon, soon it's going to be the robotic employee. I mean, that's just real. I mean, there is that technology morphing of the two is absolutely, obviously we're on the path to that. And that's a whole other, maybe a whole other podcast, a whole other conversation. But that is, you know, a relevant part of this discussion is, is how do we manage slipstream the artificial part of artificial intelligence into the overall intelligence of an industry.

Wade Erickson (10:03):

Yeah. Yeah. You think of the conversational bots and the maturity they're having, you know, when you call the front desk, when will that not be a human? That will be a very aware AI

Michael Cohen (10:14):

How about now? It's, I mean, here's the reality is the future is now and traditionally, which is changing somewhat. The travel and hospitality and mice industry have been somewhat of a laggard. They've, we've been, you know, not the first, not always the last, but usually there's a little bit of delay, let's put it that way, in regards to innovation being fully implemented. But over the last four or five years spec specifically since the pandemic for sure, because the pandemic was a real catalyst for technological innovation services optimization out of necessity. Because, you know, one of the real hurt vertical industries globally within the, within the pandemic was travel and hospitality. In my industry, it literally.

Wade Erickson (11:06):

Yeah, yeah. It done. I remember driving by hotels that were parking lots were full just the previous week, within two weeks, empty restaurants empty. And, you know, the staff that was impacted, I mean, it, it was an industry, you know, I'm sure hotels that have been around for 50 years just like restaurants or maybe 80 years had to close their doors 'cause they just didn't have the, you know, 'cause the margins are tight. You know, it's not like there's a, usually, especially the boutiques, they're not a huge cash reserve there usually to keep 'em running through those.

Michael Cohen (11:42):

Yeah. And, and what's interesting is we just had globally the largest hospitality technology conference in the world called High Tech that just completed in Charlotte, North Carolina like two weeks ago. And the, and there was like 6,000 attendees. So all the major brands, all the major technology vendors gain was heavily involved. We were facilitating relationships and facilitating commercial deals and, and, and, and we're sort of like a, a hub and, and enabler of, of the industry community at a senior level to get stuff done and the feedback in general, not just us, of course, the whole feedback, many people in our networks, it was incredibly clear that we're finally back meaning revenue wise, we've been back for the, like last year, maybe 18 months. 'cause You know, this the whole industry and the consumer side the client side of the, of the industry, there was a big, you know, backlash, revenge travel. Like, you know, we're going to do all this stuff we couldn't do for two and a half years. We're doing it all now in, in one year or something, or a year and a half. But what's interesting is, from a technological perspective, which is nature of this conversation, the greatest catalyst for travel and hospitality, innovation and technology was the pandemic. And it created opportunities. Think about this, even from an installation perspective, for a property or a restaurant or a convention center to put systems in software, cloud-based or hardware, there was nobody there. So guess what? You didn't have to turn off rooms. You didn't have to shut down a, a restaurant for a week and a half. You didn't have to close out certain convention area space 'cause it wasn't being used. So many smart management and leaders utilize that timeframe to implement, deploy, test, integrate, and execute on all this technology that has been bubbling up. And all this innovation has been bubbling up for the five or 10 previous years. So when you combine that with obviously the explosion in ai, the paradigm of ai, which let's be clear inter, so PCs, something called the internet, something called mobile, something called 5G like, you know, connection everywhere, Wi-Fi, 5G and now AI, those that cumulative layering of these paradigm shifts have now cul, you know, culminated in this tsunami of change. And that's why we exist as gain, because there is a gap sometimes in organizations on the supply side, on the buy side domestic, international for experienced leadership and knowledge, subject matter expertise to augment and amplify what they have internally or maybe to fill the gap. Because also with what happened within the pandemic is a lot of very important experienced senior executives in travel, hospitality and mice and many other industries said, I'm done. I'm using this as my early retirement. I'm using, I I'm not interested in what's going to happen next. I'll, I, I I'm going to do something different. You know, they're working from home and suddenly they had a consultancy or they started writing a book, or they started to teach or whatever. A lot of a very significant minority percentage of important global leaders, not always at the c-suite, but in that whole range, you know, senior and up moved outta the industry, which created this gap that gain has filled. But secondarily, technology and innovation has made medium, sorry, mid-level, senior and c-level leadership even more effective in many ways, but also more challenged because there's so much coming at them and so many initiatives coming at them at the same time that they're constantly juggling even more. So how to, you know, make the investment in certain innovation and technology, when to do it, what to do. You know, everyone's telling them this, that they have all these, you know pressures, competitive pressures you know, geopolitical pressures, financial pressures. How do they pick and choose? What are the priorities for their organization? What are the priorities for their front and back? So the guest patron and passenger interaction experience, and of course the optimized, most efficient use of their human resources and overheads. That's the dilemma that many, many leaders and senior managers all over the world are grappling. Not in, not just in our vertical, but in many verticals. And again, we are fortunate that you know, we have 38 gain advisors around the world. And, you know, we have groups that are on different areas of expertise, but they all work very well together. And we have multi-functional teams that we put in, like, you know, for certain clients or certain professional service offerings. And it kind of has been able to flow with the requirements and, and, and needs and challenges of a client base that includes, you know, technology vendors, travel and hospitality brands, venture capitalists and the, and the money who has been investing in, in, in, both in, in hospitality companies, but also maybe more importantly, into various startups and scale ups and, and, and innovative enterprises. So we have a wide range of client bases that we're able to amplify the impact, work with them on solutions that are actually not just consultants. 'cause we're not consultants. Consultants who are, you know, delivering a report for $150,000, $200,000. And they're saying, thank you, good luck. Hope you like it. You know, here's the invoice. We are thought leadership, we are expertise. We have a contemplative dialogue type relationship. Of course we build strategies and plans with the client base in all those different sectors. And then we're part of the execution. And wait, that's the difference. That's the missing link in many of these c-suite conversations or senior executive conversations in all types of travel, hospitality and mice industry companies, is how do they leverage this innovation? How do they leverage this? How is AI going to be rolled into their business? They're running their business. It's hard for them to also be able to spend the bandwidth time and contemplation and have experience on how they decide and strategize and execute on what is AI for their business and where is the low hanging fruit using AI as an example, and where is the ability to turn ROI and to maximize their differentiation with competitors and all those scenarios. It's become very exciting, but it's also become very challenging. And you know, that from many different era of technology and paradigm shifts and explosions of innovation industries have had to have ability to absorb it, kind of navigate what's the best priorities or where the, where this particular group of innovations or technology software or otherwise can do the most positive damage, the most impact. That is not just going to be like, for the sake of being cool, how do we actually pick and choose and who's going to design it, interface it, integrate it, deploy it, support it, train it. Those are the challenges now that many organizations have.

Wade Erickson (19:49):

Great. so when I was looking at your site I noticed that you have this concept of service packs. Which was intriguing. I've seen it a little bit, but it, it is a great way to productize services instead of just having a a general vision and message for the service organization. You packaged it so it's consumable bites for your customers. So tell me a little bit about, you know, the design process of those and, you know, in the product space, the software space, we're used to having product roadmaps and those kind of things, but in reality, you can apply the same techniques to service roadmaps, right? So tell me a little bit about how that decision process was of what you package, how you organize those things. Because I think, you know, the modern organizations of software product companies are having no choice but to bring in services as well. Now, how to implement your product as much as, and so tell me a little bit about that decision making process.

Michael Cohen (20:51):

Well, a couple of things. First of all, very fortunate that, you know growth advisors international network gain is a select collective of really smart people. The cliche is, I'm managing partner, of course, that's great. But, you know, if you surround yourself with people smarter than you and more experienced and frankly you know, specialized in many different areas, you have an ability to really execute and, and, and vision ideate test. And then there's the ability to, you know, have the opportunity to package, create service packs so that it is digestible to the industry. And that's what you're talking about is how to take this, you know, tsunami of change and this huge menu of what is now a requirement or is a competitive advantage or disadvantage if you don't roll something out or there, or an opportunity to have a more optimized business front or back revenue or efficiency and bandwidth having things in more, I wouldn't say bite-size, but I'd say more organized modules and service packs is key. And you know Karen O'Neill are Chief Commercial Officer, Jay Simonis, our chief marketing officer. We have some really bright senior people and also the next generation of, of amazing bright people like Vincent Thomson, our chairman, David Mully. These are all folks who collectively with myself and others, have put together this systematic approach to create these kind of lanes of innovation execution. They're all part of an overall trend, let's say, or overall requirement, but they create lanes of, of technology and innovation, you know analysis strategy implementation, and then support. And it, it makes it far more it makes the dialogue shorter with potential customers, with potential investors like the VC community looking to align their portfolio companies with people like us who can take them somewhere, grow them, et cetera, and or the, you know, brands and corporate entities who are looking for this kind of you know, amplification and clarity on what they should be doing from certain of these lanes of innovation within the travel, hospitality and, and mice industry. So that's where it's logical. It sounds logical. It is logical. We've done it this way so that we are subject matter expertise on loyalty, innovation and technology, sub subject matter expertise on artificial intelligence for hospitality, both operationally and sales and market and revenue wise, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. We're just launching in, in the very near future the spatial computing and immersive technology service pack for travel, hospitality and mice. And that's led with some very substantial industry leaders like Daniel OV and Louis Bravos Martin. These are industry leaders of their, in their own right within travel and hospitality, spatial and immersive, immersive technology. And we brought them in 'cause they're best of breed, they're also part of our network. Then we brought them in and now they are collectively working and to develop this, this very impactful vr, ar mixed reality service pack on what it is, why you should be looking at it as a overlay to your you know, customer interface or customer guest experience. And also how do you implement it within your back of the house training and operations and engineering, you know, all these things that people have been talking about. We actually help organizations, clients and ENT entities do it. And I think that's the biggest part of how to take the tsunami of change. Like I keep talking about in this fire hose of innovation, organizations like Gain, we're very fortunate, have somewhat perfected this ability to compartmentalize in a positive way, create lanes of innovation and, and execution that is digestible and consumable and executable by the client base globally. And not a lot of companies are doing that.

Wade Erickson (25:15):

Yeah. You, you bring up the impact of VR and immersive technology into travel, and this is something I thought about like a year ago, is for people that can't travel, people that are disabled, you know, I want to go see you know, Venice, but I can't travel there easily. Put on a VR and a three and somebody's provided a 360 camera view and walked it. And so you have virtual tours and the the viewer is in control. They can spin around in their chair and completely change. It's not like a, you know, a 2D film. It's a 3D immersive experience with sound and everything.

Michael Cohen (25:57):

Wait, it gets even better. Think of it this way. Think of, I mean, we'll talk very briefly about this, but think about the old the old scenario of the seventies and eighties where we went to grandma's house or we went to our uncle's house. cause We spent two hours watching slides of their trip to Italy.

Wade Erickson (26:15):

Yeah.

Wade Erickson (26:15):

But it was a collective family experience. We had, you know, the Kodak click, click, click. Yeah. Yeah. The screen got pulled down. Now what's happening? And it's very vital. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's lives’ happening is 3D content of my vacation with my nuclear. Whatever. There's, but, but, or, or there's others, you know, just like when you go to Disney, they say, let me take your picture. Now you can go to certain destinations and they'll actually capture 10 minutes of you and your family in a 3D like the 3D camera capture of you in real life doing stuff. Then you go home, you send grandma a, a meta three or soon an apple you know the whole Apple product line. You send that to them, they, they put it on. And now all of us share in, in the immersive space the experience that we experienced live a month ago. Now the family can collectively be in it together in an immersive environment. Not watching it, experiencing it. Amazing. That's the difference. 2D is watching 3D and immersive is really, but experiential. Yeah. But guess what? There's a massive amount of different technology, a massive amount of different you know, platforms, different business models. It's exactly the same reason why gain exists. And our, and we're putting together this amazing team of spatial and spatial computing and immersive technologists for travel and hospitality and mice, because there needs to be framework. If I leave you today with one important component of this tsunami of change and innovation and travel and hospitality and mice, is there needs to be lanes and frameworks. And that's why gain exists. We are, we create the frameworks. We work with our clients in all these different facets to build these frameworks. So that could be ideation again, there could be, you know strategy, there could be development, whatever that means. There could be you know, feedback. There could be execution, there could be support, and there could be growth that happens in all of our service packs that happens in all the particular lanes of innovation and, and technology beyond AI, which is obviously huge and permeates everything. Frameworks, lanes, like think, hear the language. Do I sound like I'm a technologist? No, I am in some respects, of course, but I'm not a propeller head right here. Nothing wrong with that. And I'm not feeds and speeds. We haven't talked about feeds and speeds one iota today, which you may do in other conversations, and that's fine. This is about how to overlay innovation on a 1000 year old industry that is becoming ever more innovative, ever more impactful. That's what this is about. That's what we are about. And that's what's happening in the industry today.

Wade Erickson (29:10):

Great talk. Great talk. So this is the part of the show. I like to pivot and talk a little bit about you and you as a person in your personal journey. Sure. And one thing I did notice in your profile that I picked up on is, is how you have blended a traditional career working for companies and done a lot of public speaking, a lot of keynote speaking, and then now this has obviously moved into a services model that really is around your expertise and somewhat consultative in nature. And, and I do know you do a lot of keynote speaking. Tell me a little bit about, and there's a lot of folks that, you know, I mean, obviously speaking is a, a big fear for many people. But there's people that love it and you know, people that teach and do all kinds of things. And you know, I kind of fall in that category. But tell me what, as you were working in your career, where did, what was that you know, stepping off point into to speaking and keynote know? Did you just see a gap or tell me a little bit about what, what was the catalyst for taking on speaking as part of your career?

Michael Cohen (30:15):

Yeah fair and, and actually gain, we established something called gain talks specifically for that. And that's what we're many of the gain advisors and people who are outside of gain. They're involved in gain talks, and it's an organize, it's a service bureau like others, but it's specialized to travel and hospitality and mice innovation and so on. But here's the thing many of us by osmosis because of our careers, because of our ambitions and aspirations became subject matter experts. Maybe we didn't know it. Maybe that wasn't the primary intention. But that's what's happened. When you're successful in your career and you've been doing it for a while, the end result is you become a subject matter expert. Now that could be something that you're, you write a book or that could be something that it's really just great for your sales career or you know, how to train people really well in the, in, you know, in regards to HR systems and, and back of the house. But many times, conventions virtual or physical or seminars or et cetera, they're looking for great impact. People are tired of the generalists. People are tired. Organizations are prior tired of paying $25,000 or $50,000 for someone to generally tell a business environment how to have a better day. How to be more, more, you know more present. I'm not trying to be pejorative. Those are important. They're killer. They're, you know, super foundational, but they also have become a little bit genericized, somewhat commoditized even. And I think that ego, which I have like anybody else, ego drives great speakers. If you don't have healthy ego, and if you don't have some love for what you're talking about, do not be a speaker. If you have some confidence and you enjoy communicating and you enjoy dialogue, it's got to be back and forth. It's usually the best type of keynotes anyways. If you can incorporate some, some level of dialogue. So it's not just the professor open vessel, I'm the expert. You're here at the keynote. cause You're supposed to be here at the keynote and the organizers hope it's going to be entertaining, and it, I hope that it's going to be valuable. The key is, is that there's so many great, smart, interesting articulate executives, teachers, professors, obviously you know just general you know, educated or not. cause education is not always about education in the traditional sense. It could also be about your life experience and your content that it's generates out of what you've learned, what you've done, how you've been successful, how you've been a failure. And I've been successful in a failure all my life. So that also makes it a little more interesting perhaps for me to talk sometimes. But, you know, the, the, the path was, Michael, can you speak Joe, can you speak some, like, Hey, we need someone, this, that, the other thing, a panelist can you be here? Very much shotgun, very, very disorganized. And I just felt that as a, as a logical part of my career, and also a logical part of gain is to have this more focused impactful ability to add keynote or add a speaker, add a panelist, add, take the subject matter expertise, and kind of wrap it in a dialogue and a communicative format that to just share interesting knowledge, have dialogue. It's not about being smarter than anybody else. It's about having some focused knowledge and experience that is relevant to other people that makes you a great speaker. And I felt that there was some, after, you know, 30 years of doing this, there was an ability for me to communicate. I love to travel. I like people. I think you can tell that I enjoy talking about things. Hopefully it's interesting and it's somewhat well thought out. So it felt like a logical, clear path to add it to my personal commercial business career. And then of course, the more people that we identified within our network and within our extended network globally that were super smart, super driven, had a ton of experience, it made logical sense to bring them in, to gain also as, as keynote speakers and amplify their impact and give them opportunities to share the value they have with, with, with the global industry.

Wade Erickson (35:10):

Thanks for that so much. That's very insightful. And it sounds like you were kind of pulled into it and then you kind of started to like it and then.

Michael Cohen (35:19):

It, it, well, it was, wait, it was definitely strategic. It just happened faster and quicker than I anticipated because I have an ego. I hopefully don't have an ego. So I, I was like, I think people would like what I have to say, I have, I have topics of interest to me that I believe are interested to others in my space. Yeah. So I, I kind of thought it was a good path, but I didn't realize it would be as quickly or as impactful as it's been. And we have a great relationship with an organization called m and i, which is the largest meeting and, and events company for the meeting and events industry. So think about like in Washington, in the beltway, you know, companies that service that government, they're like the greatest, most powerful meeting and events organization globally for events about the meeting and events industry, right? So we have a strategic relationship with m and i where we're their exclusive primary exclusive keynote providers for all their conferences around the world. So that's just happened because it was logical and strategic for gain. And, and, and I've been, and others have been able to had the pleasure of, of presenting to these organizations of meeting an event executives about things like ai, about things like innovation, about tsunami of change. So there's, there's a lot of need for that out there. We're not the only people that have knowledge or experience, but we're one of the few that have it organized in a tight digestible and commercially viable fashion.

Wade Erickson (36:52):

Great. Great. So time flies. We're at the, you know, the top of the hour here. And quickly I'd like to introduce next week's show and then we just wrap up. So next week we have Melissa Daly, president of Orca intern intelligence, Wednesday the 17th, same time nine 30 Pacific. And hope you join us for that conversation. And yeah, so thanks so much for spending some time with us today. Learned a lot about the travel industry and appreciate you know, sharing your knowledge with us today. And you have a great rest of your week.

Michael Cohen (37:34):

My pleasure. Anytime. I appreciate the opportunity. Wade, thank you very much.

Wade Erickson (37:38):

Alright, until next week. Goodbye.