Brian Jewell (00:01)
All right, everybody. My guest today is a technology and marketing expert who spent 15 years helping organizations drive revenue through digital marketing. After spending some time running a sailing charter business, he launched Gondola, an organization that helps tour and activity operators build high-converting websites through strategic market and customer discovery analysis. Vitali Levitt, welcome to the podcast.

Vitaliy Levit (00:26)
Hey, thank you so much for having me, Brian.

Brian Jewell (00:28)
Hey, I'm so excited to have you here. I'm always excited when I get to talk to somebody who is in the trenches with tour operators because that's our tribe. And, those people, they they tend to be small business owners. They're solopreneurs or they have a very small staff. And the world is moving so quickly. And so anybody that's helping them make sense of business in the 2020s, I think is a hero to all of us. there's so much to your story, but I want to dig into what you have seen change because

Brian Jewell (00:58)
You spent fifteen years in digital marketing. I'm assuming a lot of that was SEO, kind of what we think of as like traditional SEO. Is that accurate?

Vitaliy Levit (01:06)
Absolutely. That's that was my that was my bread and butter for the longest time. That was an area that I somehow just understood. And the search engine algorithms were always just kind of like, I get this. I understand what it's doing and why it's doing it and how it's doing it and what the impact is for a business. So yeah, I've always I've always really loved SEO. yeah.

Brian Jewell (01:32)
Well, that

Brian Jewell (01:32)
puts you in a interesting place in twenty twenty six because all of a sudden the jury is out on whether SEO as we know it remains relevant. And in fact, you kind of pivoted away from SEO consultation because you didn't you you just couldn't count on it. So walk us through what changed in in the world and how it directed your thinking.

Vitaliy Levit (01:53)
Yeah, absolutely. Well, I started w when I was running my own sailing charter business, I had to learn the business, you know, learn the ropes from scratch. It wasn't something that I I I kind of got dropped into it and I'll save you the story there, the background. But I ended up, you know, running the sailing charter business and thinking to myself, Well, how am I gonna drive direct bookings? How am I gonna reach customers? Like all the same things that, you know, most operators struggle with, and try to figure that out. And you know,

Vitaliy Levit (02:22)
Across three years of running that operation, when we first started that operation, we were running about seventy percent of our bookings coming from OTAs. And then thirty percent of those bookings were coming from direct. By the time I sold that business, we were 70% direct and 30% OTAs. And so I had shifted the majority of our bookings to direct channels and through that process learned, you know, how to do SEO quite.

Vitaliy Levit (02:49)
well for our for this industry. And then when the pandemic hit and I sold that business, I wanted to help other operators. And I just taught them everything I knew and then I everything I had learned. Some of them put it into practice. Others asked me if I'd be willing to do it for them. And so I started teaching and executing, you know, SEO and website development for tournectivity operators.

Vitaliy Levit (03:17)
the first operator that we had was a boat charter captain out in of of Key West and implemented some of the strategies, you know, the formulas and everything that I had learned building my own business. And he went from, you know, running I think it was, I think he was doing like $70 or $80,000 a year to doing $450,000 a year in like the f in like the first year. and so he was just saw this insane ramp up and

Vitaliy Levit (03:47)
increased his his business drastically. And and so I was like, okay, well I think there's something here. Let's see if we can implement this SEO formula for for more tournectivity operators. And we did that time and time and time again. We built gondola using that that strategy. You know, you come onto the gondola platform, we will execute our SEO formula. You will grow, we will do it incredibly efficiently. So you can, you know, you can go to an agency and and spend, you know

Vitaliy Levit (04:16)
Five, ten, ten thousand dollars doing this, or you can come to us and we can do it for you for two thousand bucks. And we did it very effectively. 99% confidence rate on whether or not we could increase your direct bookings through SEO. And yeah, in 2025, 2024, 2025, across those years, you saw just the massive rise of large language models and artificial intelligence.

Vitaliy Levit (04:46)
And Google rolling out AI mode and AI overviews and Chat GPT and all of these major technological shifts and launches and SEO, the relationship between SEO and bookings. So by by SEO I mean organic rankings. The relationship

Brian Jewell (05:06)
Mm-hmm.

Vitaliy Levit (05:07)
between a number one, number two, or even number three ranking and bookings completely broke.

Brian Jewell (05:16)
Wow.

Vitaliy Levit (05:17)
So you could have a number one ranking for exactly the term that you want to be f ranking for that you know brings in business and you just can't count on it to drive direct bookings anymore.

Brian Jewell (05:33)
Mm.

Vitaliy Levit (05:34)
And so I essentially had to retire their my entire SEO product line, my entire

Vitaliy Levit (05:43)
Strategy for helping operators grow. I killed a multiple six-figure line of business, went back to the drawing board to try to figure out what we're supposed to do here in this situation, and spent seven months running deep intelligence and analysis on how AI recommends businesses, specifically

Brian Jewell (06:10)
Yeah.

Vitaliy Levit (06:10)
in our industry.

Vitaliy Levit (06:13)
I ended up publishing a fifteen thousand word report that's free on our website for how tour and activity operators can give found by ChatGPT and other AIs, what matters, what doesn't matter. and have just relaunched our offering that actually, you know, I think is gonna work.

Brian Jewell (06:39)
Yeah.

Vitaliy Levit (06:39)
yeah.

Brian Jewell (06:40)
So yeah, obviously the LLMs massively disrupted what was a stable sort of strategy in SEO. You studied this for seven months. Tell me what were some of the key things you learned about how travelers are using AIs to plan travel, and how that's different than how they were using Google 10 years ago to research travel.

Vitaliy Levit (07:04)
Yeah, the biggest the biggest difference is one is partially just how consumers have adapted to AI. So, you know, ChatGPT, people are now using Chat GPT, kinda like they're using Google. Google went into red alert mode when Chat GPT started becoming popular. And they said, Holy crap, there's a n whole new wave of consumer preferences and behaviors that are popping up. We need to adapt to it as well. And so Google, of course

Vitaliy Levit (07:33)
Rolled out AI overviews, which now is a summary of your answer at the very top of your Google page. They rolled out AI mode, which is an entirely new tab inside of Google where you just chat with their AI called Gemini. And now Gemini has replaced all of Google Assistant on every Android device. So, you know, as a reaction to the popularity of large language models like ChatGPT.

Vitaliy Levit (08:01)
Google said, okay, we're gonna just put this everywhere. And so and so part of it is the consumers change in behavior. The other part of it is the consumers being forced to change their behavior because Google thinks that's the that is the it's the future and was ever wherever everything is going. And they're not entirely wrong because you know, getting an answer is a lot better than clicking on fifteen links and opening up and doing hours and hours of research, which is

Vitaliy Levit (08:31)
Essentially the biggest change. The biggest change is that people would put in a search into Google, they would get their list of long their long list of all the links. They would open up each link in a new browser or a new tab. And they would compare and they would say, Is you know, tour operator A or tour operator B better? Well, let me just make sure I can ask all these all these questions. And then you just you dig and you dig and you dig and you make these decisions. And so the website had a lot of influence.

Brian Jewell (09:00)
Mm-hmm.

Vitaliy Levit (09:00)
In this

Vitaliy Levit (09:01)
in this process. Now, when you ask Google a question, it just gives you the answer. And those questions are becoming more and more sophisticated and loaded with more and more preferences. And so now instead of clicking on 10 blue links, you're just feeding Google all of the information that you want. And then Google comes back with the answer.

Brian Jewell (09:27)
Yeah. So what is the small tour company to do? how how do you make sure you're getting surfaced when people have that conversation with their AIs? Or is there a way?

Vitaliy Levit (09:41)
Yeah, there absolutely is a way. so what we found is that there are kind of three core components to AI visibility. The first is being known. So being known means that you have to be inside of the consideration set. You have to be available and mentioned on the web so that.

Vitaliy Levit (10:11)
When somebody asks at the very top of the funnel, they ask a question like, How do I get to Charleston with a group? Or what are things, what are the things to do in Charleston? That you're part of that discovery consideration set. So you have to become known, then you have to be knowable, right? So when somebody asks a very top of funnel question, they're just trying to tr plan their trip,

Vitaliy Levit (10:35)
and then and then you get into the the the brass tacks, right? Which is people are gonna wanna understand the details of the trip. They're gonna want to understand, whether or not it makes sense for somebody with accessibility requirements, or they're traveling with a family and they they want to know what kind of family-oriented activities are gonna be, right? So they're gonna get into all of the details, the meeting points, the locations, the itineraries, the

Vitaliy Levit (11:03)
the the the very the the fine the finer things that actually allow them to make a decision and then there's booked which is how easy is it to actually book something with you. And so you know ideally you're setting yourself up so that an a large language model or an AI can also check things like availability and whether or not you're bookable and the dates that you are going out. And like so there's there's a there's a lot of detail around being booked as well, right?

Vitaliy Levit (11:31)
And so those are the three pri major categories that we found influence AI visibility.

Brian Jewell (11:38)
Yeah. Okay. So I love this example of Charleston. And I know you've done some digging in preparation for our interview today. let's say somebody goes to their AI assistant and asks, hey, I want to do, you know, a six-day escorted trip somewhere in the southeast, maybe Charleston. how does the AI go about deciding which tour companies to recommend?

Vitaliy Levit (12:03)
Yeah. In this particular case, for group travel, what we found for day tours and multi-day tours is a little different for group travel. Because for group travel, you're looking at a starting point and a destination point. And so what the AI is trying to do when you're asking a question like

Vitaliy Levit (12:31)
A top-of-funnel question. So an example, top of funnel question would be: I want to take my church group to Charleston. Who can organize a trip for us? What the AI is pulling from is some DMOs and government sites, but only about 7% of the information that AI is citing is coming from official government or tourism boards.

Brian Jewell (12:54)
Okay.

Vitaliy Levit (12:54)
The majority of the of the answers, 93%, are coming from individual independent.

Vitaliy Levit (13:01)
Group tour operator websites.

Brian Jewell (13:05)
Okay.

Vitaliy Levit (13:06)
And so for that particular question, I get responses of Gray Line of Charleston, and they have a page dedicated on their website just to for group and group travel and guest services. Adventuresightseeing.com. They also have a dedicated page for group travel. And because they are, they have pages.

Vitaliy Levit (13:30)
That are dedicated to answering that exact question, which is who can organize a church group to Charleston? They have pages specifically dedicated to that. The AI is picking that up.

Brian Jewell (13:45)
Hmm. Almost reminds me of the content marketing focus from 10 or 15 years ago where people were saying, if you want to be, you know, found in organic searches, you just have to write tons of content about what you do. Are we legitimately seeing a resurrection of that, or is it somehow fundamentally different because the technology is different?

Vitaliy Levit (14:07)
I think we're absolutely seeing seeing more of that. the difference is that your primary audience is not a human.

Brian Jewell (14:17)
Ha ha

Vitaliy Levit (14:18)
Your primary audience is an AI. And so the way you deliver that information, you know, has to be in a in a in a more technical nature and in a more streamlined way. So, like things for instance, site accessibility.

Vitaliy Levit (14:36)
site speed, site performance, site structure, like all the technical things that used to be kind of technical SEO is actually much more important now in the world of AI. So the AI has to be able to see these pages, access these pages, be able to understand where to find all the information, how to how to get the information out. And then they really do pattern match. There's a lot of like very much a you know, if you're asking a question to the AI,

Vitaliy Levit (15:05)
If that same exact question is is is phrased in exactly the same way on your website, the AI will have a much easier easier time pattern matching it. And so, you know, content marketing, I think, was very much designed to attract a person to the website so that they can then read and can and and essentially, you know,

Vitaliy Levit (15:32)
ingest this information themselves and and

Brian Jewell (15:34)
Mm-hmm.

Vitaliy Levit (15:35)
and learn something. What the AI is doing is, you know, they're not it's not the AI is not going return back the entire article. Back right. The AI is just looking for a very specific answer. And so the way that you structure these pages, the way you deliver this this information has to be structured specifically for the AI to be able to ingest it itself.

Brian Jewell (15:54)
Yeah, so I remember you know, for for me as a journalist and content creator, I remember a sort of a a turning point where I started recognizing that content had been written primarily for Google when I read it. You know, I'd I'd read a a page or an article somewhere and you you see the same three word key phrase turn up over and over and over in a way that wasn't quite natural for humans. And I realized, okay, they're they're trying to game their their search results here. So

Vitaliy Levit (16:16)
Yeah. Yeah.

Brian Jewell (16:19)
for somebody who's trying to create this content.

Brian Jewell (16:23)
Is there a way to create it in a way that is AI friendly but does not seem off putting to humans?

Vitaliy Levit (16:29)
Yes, there is a mechanism that people have been using and that we've also tested and I'm gonna share a bit more here with you. it's called an AI start here page or an

Brian Jewell (16:42)
Mm.

Vitaliy Levit (16:43)
LLM start here page or an LLMs.txt. and so this is a page designed purely for an AI.

Brian Jewell (16:53)
Hm.

Vitaliy Levit (16:54)
And it's a structured way to deliver the information to the AI in exactly the way that it wants that information. So you're essentially what you're doing is you're taking all the information that you're you already have. You're just restructuring it in such a way that when you feed it to the AI, it knows exactly what to pull from it and when. And so this LLM start here page, we actually ran an experiment ourselves.

Vitaliy Levit (17:23)
Where we took all the operator content. so we, we we have hundreds of tournativity operators on our platform. And so we built a pipeline where we took all of their pro all their product content, all their website content, all their blog post content, all the stuff that they've written and that they share with the world anyway. We took all of their customer reviews that we imported from Google Business Profiles, from TripAdvisor, from

Vitaliy Levit (17:51)
we we import from a half a dozen different sources, took all their customer reviews. We take all of the contact forms that people have submitted. So contact forms typically have questions in them because people need more details. And so this is perfect source of information for group travel leaders. It could be, you know, an email inbox, it could be wherever. So you essentially want to like put all of this stuff together and then you feed it to an AI and you say, here's all here's my here's all everything you need about my business.

Vitaliy Levit (18:20)
There's everything my customers say about my business. And then you essentially have it write in the form of questions and answers.

Brian Jewell (18:29)
Mm.

Vitaliy Levit (18:30)
Every question that somebody might have about all the products, the tours, the business, the brand, like everything you can possibly imagine. You have it write all these questions and then answer them with using all of your context, all your data.

Brian Jewell (18:45)
Yeah.

Vitaliy Levit (18:46)
And having one of these pages on your site.

Vitaliy Levit (18:50)
In our research, increases AI visibility by 121%. So more than doubles how often AI cites your own website to answer questions for customers. And so that page is vitally important. now there's there's a a lot more, like the tentacles go deeper, but this is that's really like that one page is super, super important to have.

Vitaliy Levit (19:19)
on your website, which just answers every question that somebody might have about about your business.

Brian Jewell (19:23)
Yeah, that that is excellent. Now you mentioned reviews. I have noticed when I am asking AIs questions about things, I'm I'm exploring the world of barbecue smoking right now, smoking meats and what, what gear do I need and what's the best wood chip for this and that. And and my AIs are are very heavily weighting the answers they give me based on customer reviews. So tell us more about why reviews matter to AIs and how.

Brian Jewell (19:52)
tour operators can leverage them to boost themselves in that knowable and bookable phase of their AI journey.

Vitaliy Levit (20:00)
Yeah. That's one of the least utilized yet most valuable assets that an operator has access to is customer review data. what's funny is how hard it is to get it out to actually

Brian Jewell (20:18)
Mm.

Vitaliy Levit (20:18)
do stuff with it, right? So Google wants to lock their reviews up, TripAdvisor wants to lock their reviews up, everyone has their reviews, but like actually pulling them out of those systems so that you can use them for stuff.

Vitaliy Levit (20:30)
is harder than it looks because

Brian Jewell (20:33)
Mm.

Vitaliy Levit (20:34)
they these these systems actively are trying to prevent you from pulling stuff out of out of them. and so there there is a tool, there's a couple of different tools if you just Google like free go free Google review export and stuff like that. There's a couple of different tools that you can use. I think one of them you have to pay like 20 bucks or something like that and it gives you enough credit so you can pull it out of a TripAdvisor and Google and Viator and all stuff.

Vitaliy Levit (20:58)
But having that corpus of information, this essentially is your customers' words. Like this is what

Brian Jewell (21:02)
Mm.

Vitaliy Levit (21:03)
your customers are saying about your brand, your tours, your people. you know, one of the one of the cool thing, cool experiments we did a long time ago is we were like, well, I wonder if we if if I if I export, you know, two years of reviews for an operator and I wanted to run like a SWOT analysis. Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and what's the little T for?

Brian Jewell (21:27)
Threats.

Vitaliy Levit (21:27)
Threats. Yeah. Yeah.

Brian Jewell (21:28)
Yeah.

Vitaliy Levit (21:29)
Right. So if you if you run this analysis just on your customer review data, it is incredible the kind of insights you get. Cause it will literally tell you like, here are the things that you're really good at. Highlight more of it on your

Brian Jewell (21:42)
Mm.

Vitaliy Levit (21:42)
website and all your material and whatever else. Here's your weaknesses, things you should be working on. It will give you opportunities, like things like partnership opportunities and all kinds of other things, and then all any other threats, which is competitive analysis and stuff like that. And so

Vitaliy Levit (21:54)
It is, it's it's incredible. That that data set is is insanely beautiful. and so when when we when we up when we onboard an operator, that's one of the first things we do. Like we we have our own native review import just for that exact reason because of how valuable that data is. I mean it can be used in so many different ways. We even have it, we have a we have a tool called Echo Social that takes your customer reviews and turns it into social media posts, right? Because like operators oftentimes are like, I don't know what to post on social media.

Brian Jewell (22:22)
Yeah.

Vitaliy Levit (22:22)
I'm like, well, if you mine your customer reviews, there's an endless amount of insights you can get out of your customer reviews. and so that's that definitely helps you answer all of the questions that people might have about your products and services, and is a great data set to feed to large language models to be able to do what you wanted to do.

Vitaliy Levit (22:48)
Yeah, especially for creating the AI Start Here page, for instance, or answering questions about your product or there's a there's multitude of f different ways to use it.

Brian Jewell (22:55)
Yeah. So I can imagine a a tour company owner hearing you and thinking, gosh, you're asking me to trust the machine with lots of stuff that I consider proprietary. is this just the future we're living in? Are we are we all going to, you know, have to hand over our reviews and and trade secrets in order to get visible? Or is there a way to do it that is still safe and, you know, preserves proprietary information?

Vitaliy Levit (23:23)
Yeah, there's absolutely ways to preserve privacy and and and security here. the the the first and foremost is to run your own large language model on your machine. I'm not gonna go into the play by play on that. You can ask ChatGPT on how to do how to how to do that. but if you run a local model, then that information never goes anywhere. It's just running on your local machine.

Brian Jewell (23:46)
Mm.

Vitaliy Levit (23:48)
it's actually really, really crazy. It's it's it's alchemy.

Vitaliy Levit (23:51)
Okay, if it's

Brian Jewell (23:51)
Yeah.

Vitaliy Levit (23:51)
alchemy at at the craziest, cause you you're the the the the alchemy here is that you're taking sand and you're turning it into intelligence, which is

Brian Jewell (24:00)
Yeah.

Vitaliy Levit (24:00)
the craziest thing you could possibly think about if you really zoom out here. You're you're turning sand into silicon, which are chips that then process information and give you real good like answer answers, like real intelligence. It's just

Brian Jewell (24:13)
Yeah. Yeah.

Vitaliy Levit (24:15)
absolutely bonkers to me to think about that. But

Vitaliy Levit (24:20)
But yeah, you would run a local a local model. also reviews aren't really there aren't really anything. There's if you're gonna give your your accounting and your financials and stuff like that, like sure there's there's some some some things you might want to ski private there. but frontier intelligence from labs like OpenAI, Anthropic, which runs Claude. they are I mean, just the they're they're getting so good. So

Vitaliy Levit (24:48)
Good. Holy

Brian Jewell (24:48)
Yeah.

Vitaliy Levit (24:50)
moly, are they getting good?

Brian Jewell (24:51)
Yeah.

Vitaliy Levit (24:53)
and so I think that if you r truly care about privacy, you should probably get off the internet. Like I had somebody

Brian Jewell (25:01)
That ship has sailed, right?

Vitaliy Levit (25:02)
Yeah, I mean, I had somebody stop me. I w I used to live in San Francisco. I had somebody stop me on on the on the street, and then it was like back in the day, and they were like, Hey, did you know Google can now use your profile pictures and advertising? Isn't that like a complete, you know?

Vitaliy Levit (25:15)
offense to your privacy and and and I was like, listen, if I cared about my privacy, I probably wouldn't be on the internet. it's just if you don't want to be tracked, you should get rid of all your digital devices because that's literally all that companies want to do is track. I mean, think about yourself. You're a tour and activity operator, you're a small business owner. You want to have all the information. You want the analytics. Like you want to know why people are booking with you, how they're booking with you. I mean, like that's the that's how you make decisions. I mean

Vitaliy Levit (25:45)
That's how you should be making decisions. I don't

Brian Jewell (25:47)
Right. Right.

Vitaliy Levit (25:49)
wanna I don't want to speak about you should be making decisions with data. and it's really hard sometimes to get data, and it's because all these systems make it make it hard. But I'll I'll tell you who has the most resources to make sure they have the data is the bigger the company, the more they can spend, the more likely they are to tracking you everywhere. So like you're using your Google Chrome, Google's tracking you. You're using Google Analytics, Google is tracking you.

Vitaliy Levit (26:14)
You're using Facebook, Meta is tracking. You use Instagram, Meta's and so and so and these these these large players want to make it harder and harder for each other to see what people are doing within their pl platforms. But anyway, that's a whole other thing that we won't get into.

Brian Jewell (26:29)
Yeah. Yeah.

Brian Jewell (26:31)
So let's talk about the holy grail, or maybe is it the holy grail of AI discoverability, which would be the idea that agents could book tours on your site. people this is all I hear people talking about in the world of travel tech right now. So first part of the question is how close are we to a scenario where, you know, Chat GPT or Claude could actually go through the booking process and book a tour for someone.

Brian Jewell (26:58)
without them ever having to come to your site. And but secondly, is that even a desirable outcome or do we still want some human step? Do we still want some friction? Do we still want people to interact with us personally instead of their bots interacting with our bots?

Vitaliy Levit (27:14)
I would definitely break this up into two parts, which is how close are we technically to having

Brian Jewell (27:19)
Mm-hmm.

Vitaliy Levit (27:19)
that ability versus how close are we to actually being ready to let an agent make a booking on our behalf,

Brian Jewell (27:27)
Mm.

Vitaliy Levit (27:28)
which I think is the consumer, the like the the the personal be the personal, you know, the choice. Technically, we're very close. I mean, I mean, WebMCP is a standard that ChatGPT just adopted, which means that.

Vitaliy Levit (27:43)
if if the application has this thing called WebMCP, which is that essentially is giving agents direct access to understand how to utilize that website. And so things like availability and and and and and checking, you know, specific dates and times and people and and all that kind stuff. That technically is either already doable or about to be doable.

Brian Jewell (28:08)
Mm.

Vitaliy Levit (28:09)
So we're not that far off from it being technically available.

Vitaliy Levit (28:13)
From a consumer behavior perspective, I don't that part I is really hard to tell. I think there's definitely gonna be some early adopters, people who are very gung-ho. I don't know if you remember back in the crypto boom when Bitcoin became like a huge thing, there were entire websites that popped up dedicated to being able to book a trip with your cryptocurrency. And so there was there was like a sub segment of people who were like, I want to spend my cryptocurrency to go travel and and and book trips.

Vitaliy Levit (28:42)
And so there, I think we'll always be early adopters. And so I think that is that is happening. I think for the majority of people though, especially if they're spending money on a group trip, multi-day trip, that's three, four, five thousand dollars, I don't think that we're even close. I think you're still gonna want to talk to somebody. I think

Brian Jewell (29:01)
Mm.

Vitaliy Levit (29:01)
you're g I I've had multiple conversations actually with multi-day operators over the last like week. And the recurring

Vitaliy Levit (29:10)
the thing is that sure you can put a a a a book now, instant book on your website. What's funny is that they have that on there. They have an option to just pick a date, pick a time, pick up pick your people, and then put your credit card in and you're done. But on a two thousand dollar product, the ninety percent of people st still want to pick up the phone and call and talk to you. And so I think that's not gonna change. Like I think you're still gonna want reassurance as a consumer, you're still gonna wanna f feel like you trust.

Vitaliy Levit (29:39)
This transaction, that's a that's a big chunk of change to in like in and who you're gonna be traveling with, it's there's there's all kinds of all kinds of things that people are gonna want. that I don't think

Brian Jewell (29:49)
Yeah.

Vitaliy Levit (29:50)
a w website and AI is gonna give them.

Brian Jewell (29:53)
So we're gonna use machines in more and more developed ways to research, but then before we buy, we're still gonna want a human to kinda hold our hands and reassure us and close the process. Yeah. Yeah.

Vitaliy Levit (30:06)
Yeah, I I think so. Yeah. I've

Vitaliy Levit (30:09)
I've been I've been doing a lot of work with AI. a lot. And one of the things that I'm noticing is that I wanna I I want all of the grunt work handled by AI. Like I want I want the research, I want the the the details, the the c e the like writing of the emails, the writing of the messages, the like

Vitaliy Levit (30:36)
Updating of my CRM. I've like of I there's all of the stuff that's like the like I would consider the admin side of of of of of work. That I as much of that as possible I want to give to the to the AI is I'm like, go

Brian Jewell (30:50)
Yes.

Vitaliy Levit (30:50)
do all of this stuff. I want to have more of these. Like I want to have more of these conversations. And the reason I'm able to have so many more conversations is because.

Vitaliy Levit (31:03)
I source out all of my admin grunt work to the AI. I don't

Brian Jewell (31:08)
Yeah.

Vitaliy Levit (31:09)
want to replace myself with an AI. I think that's actually kind of silly. People are like, look, you can build a digital clone. I'm like, okay, yeah, sure, you can build a digital clone, but like for what purpose? You're

Brian Jewell (31:19)
Yeah.

Vitaliy Levit (31:19)
you do what are you gonna do if you're not if you're not doing something that's fulfilling you? Like my it's very fulfilling to me to talk to you, to talk to operators, to continue to help operators. Like every time an operator calls me and they're like,

Vitaliy Levit (31:32)
I had I'm up 50% this year. I'm having a great year. Holy moly, does that make me feel good? I don't want to sub that out to an AI to collect that information. That's the that's the conversation that I actually want to have. That that that that you know is my livelihood. And so and so I I I I see AI as an immense unlock for my ability to to have more of the meaningful work that I want to have and less of the the of the grunt stuff, grunt work.

Brian Jewell (32:01)
Yeah, I love that. So if somebody's hearing you right now and wants to learn more about gondola, learn more about working with you, see how you might be able to, you know, leverage your knowledge and insight to help them, what is the best way for them to get in touch with you?

Vitaliy Levit (32:16)
Yeah, absolutely. You can email me personally at Vitaliagondola.travel. You can check us out on the website at gondola.travel. And I think also in the show notes, Brian and I discussed that we're gonna put the report, a report that we ran specifically for Charleston. you know, what what would what would like the the entire customer journey look like for somebody who's trying to plan a group trip to Charleston?

Vitaliy Levit (32:45)
And where does that data come from and what does AI cite? And so it's a bit of a technical, you know, resource, but I think it'll be u very useful if you want to check it out. it's in the gonna be in the show notes. You can check out that report.

Brian Jewell (32:57)
Yeah, absolutely. We're going to link to that. It it's I've seen the early version of it. It's fascinating. There's so much more insight there than you you probably are aware of, and it could really help you strategize about how you go about building your storefront for the AI future. So I love that.

Vitaliy Levit (33:14)
Yeah,

Brian Jewell (33:15)
before we let you go, we've got some questions that are just for fun. So we ask everybody and you can answer off the top of your head. when you book travel, do you book a window seat or an aisle seat?

Vitaliy Levit (33:25)
Window.

Brian Jewell (33:25)
Yeah, what's you just love the view or you like to rest your head or something else? Yeah.

Vitaliy Levit (33:28)
Both. Also,

Vitaliy Levit (33:31)
I'm six foot three and my elbows and legs always stick out outside of the seats. and man, do I have some elbow PTSD from those carts coming coming through the aisle aisles? Yeah, exactly.

Brian Jewell (33:44)
He said I'm not putting myself in that position again, huh? Yeah.

Brian Jewell (33:49)
All right. So what is something in your carry-on that you wouldn't travel without?

Vitaliy Levit (33:56)
probably a backup battery pack for for my for my my electronic devices.

Brian Jewell (34:02)
Yeah, it's that

Brian Jewell (34:03)
that's a a very vulnerable feeling if you are all of a sudden out of charge, right?

Vitaliy Levit (34:07)
Yeah. Well I have so I drive a Tesla, my keys on my phone, so and then my on my wallet is on my phone and yeah, it's like it's like it's it's crazy now with the entire my entire life is on that device and so

Brian Jewell (34:20)
Yeah.

Vitaliy Levit (34:20)
if it dies it's it has pr has massive implications and so yeah I always I always keep it back.

Brian Jewell (34:26)
Yeah, good idea. So if you had a free airline pass in a week with nothing else to do, where would you go? Really? Have you been there?

Vitaliy Levit (34:33)
Japan. Yeah.

Vitaliy Levit (34:35)
I'm actually going for my birthday. My fortieth birthday's coming up. I'm going in the first week of November. I'm going for that. Yeah.

Brian Jewell (34:42)
Awesome. Yeah. I everyone I talk to these days has either been or is dying to go to Japan. So I don't

Vitaliy Levit (34:47)
Yeah.

Brian Jewell (34:47)
know what their tourism marketers are doing right, but th they sure have gotten in everybody's consciousness, including mine. I can't I can't wait to get there. Yeah.

Vitaliy Levit (34:54)
Nice. Yeah.

Brian Jewell (34:56)
So last question. what is something you have seen or done on the road that you wish you could go back and experience again with somebody you love?

Vitaliy Levit (35:10)
When I was running my sailing charter business in Tenerife, we were experimenting with adding other product lines and tours around the island. And there was one. So Mount Tata is a you know, people say it's a dormant volcano, however, it does grumble occasionally. but Mount Tata is the tallest point in Europe.

Vitaliy Levit (35:42)
and it it sits above the cloud line on the island. And so when you get to the top at night, there is zero obstruction between you and the stars.

Brian Jewell (35:56)
Wow.

Vitaliy Levit (35:58)
And it's an it's an it's an UNESCO heritage site, it's protected, it looks like Mars. It's just the it's one of the coolest, coolest places I've I've been to in my life. and when you get up there at nighttime, it is just

Vitaliy Levit (36:11)
The absolute most majestic sight. It just feels like you're literally swimming with the stars.

Brian Jewell (36:18)
Yeah.

Vitaliy Levit (36:20)
and we did some really, really cool star gazing while we were up there. I had a friend of mine who had like one of those commercial grade, like serious, you know, you have to like plug in the the numbers on a remote control and like where it's supposed to look and stuff. It's like requires calibration, like a real peat, like a serious piece of equipment.

Vitaliy Levit (36:39)
And so he'd be we'd be up there with a h a cup of hot cocoa in the middle of the night, looking at the stars through this like massive telescope. Anyway, it's just it was it was really, really cool. And so I still think about that quite often. I I loved going up there.

Brian Jewell (36:53)
Yeah. Wow. What a what an experience. I hope to get to do that one day as well. So Vitali love it. Thanks so much for joining us. It's been a pleasure.

Vitaliy Levit (37:01)
Thank you, Brian.