C-Suite Perspectives On AI: Lisa Chen Of ToursByLocals On Where to Use AI and Where to Rely Only on Humans
An Interview With Kieran Powell
What Are Your Key Differentiators? What makes ToursByLocals special is our incredible network of heavily vetted local guides who build a personal relationship with each of our travelers. If we were to shift to using AI to plan itineraries or engage with our travelers, we would be losing our most important key differentiator.
As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to advance and integrate into various aspects of business, decision-makers at the highest levels face the complex task of determining where AI can be most effectively utilized and where the human touch remains irreplaceable. This series seeks to explore the nuanced decisions made by C-Suite executives regarding the implementation of AI in their operations. As part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Lisa Chen.
Lisa brings nearly 30 years of business leadership experience to ToursByLocals, with her career spanning across general management, strategy, operations, technology, marketing, and branding at companies like Disney, Expedia/VRBO, BedandBreakfast.com, and Forte Foundation. She has led large teams through complex business transformations in two-sided marketplaces and SaaS software products, as well as small teams to achieve the next level of profitable scale and growth. An avid scuba diver, she has lived on 5 continents, and during a 13-month trip around the world loved adding to the journey by taking personalized tours guided by local experts. Lisa now lives in Austin, Texas with her husband, young son, and their small fluffy dog.
Thank you so much for your time! I know that you are a very busy person. Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?
Before joining ToursByLocals, I was the GM/Vice President of Expedia’s Lodging Connectivity and Software businesses for both vacation rentals and hotels. In this role, I helped to deepen Expedia’s use of APIs and software, allowing it to significantly scale its business with property managers and hotels and become the preferred platform for these partners. Before that role, I was GM of VRBO’s Bedandbreakfast.com business, leading the transformation of the website to a fully-transactional e-commerce marketplace serving B&Bs globally in addition to overseeing a property management software product used by B&B owners to run their business.
Prior to Expedia, I was the head of global marketing for Forte Foundation, overhauling and digitizing its approach to marketing as a top website for women and top website for entrepreneurs. I also worked at The Walt Disney Company, guiding senior leadership and teams across the Disney, ESPN, and ABC businesses in brand, marketing, and consumer strategy initiatives.
It has been said that our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
One of my first professional roles was working in PR, at an agency. As anyone who worked in PR in the early to mid-90s knows, junior staffers were expected to be constantly on the phone, pitching stories. My focus was B2B tech stories, and I soon learned that the people I was trying to reach were starting to use email, not phones. They found it more practical and productive, and so I began reaching out to them this way. Of course this meant that I was spending less time on the phone, and this soon drew the attention of my superiors, who assumed I wasn’t working as hard or as diligently as my colleagues, when in fact I had figured out how to reach people in a different way, that was getting results. The lesson learned? When you’re in a quickly changing tech landscape, share your learning with your colleagues: bring other people along for the ride!
Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?
Our biggest focus recently has been a new site launch, modernizing our tech stack and major brand refresh for ToursByLocals, spotlighting the local guides who are at the heart of what we do as a company. Since the company launched 15+ years ago, ToursByLocals has grown tremendously — we’ve sent 2.5 million travelers on tours — and we’re excited to unveil this new brand identity and website that celebrates the people that make ToursByLocals unique. We can’t wait to hear what our travelers think of the new features on the site, from an easy-to-reach customer support team, to a streamlined messaging platform making it easier to facilitate the relationship between travelers and guides as they customize tours, and simplified searches to help our travelers find their perfect tour.
Thank you for that. Let’s now shift to the central focus of our discussion. In your experience, what have been the most challenging aspects of integrating AI into your business operations, and how have you balanced these with the need to preserve human-centric roles?
Like all industries, AI is a huge topic of conversation in the travel space — so many companies are using it as a way to automate, which can potentially come at the cost of personalized experiences. One of our core tenets (and something that has paid out in terms of our continued sustained growth) is longing for genuine connections and personalized experiences remains paramount among consumers — and it’s a huge part of our ethos at ToursByLocals, as every tour we offer is private and customizable. That said, we are adopting marketplace technology that supports our experiences, ultimately leveraging technology as a way to keep travel human.
We see AI as one tool that clears more time and space for human interaction. If our staff can save 15 minutes using AI to help generate copy for a templated message, that’s 15 minutes extra they have to dedicate to a customer who needs a phone call, or a colleague who needs a 1 on 1 chat. The more time we can free up for these essential human interactions, the closer we’ll be abiding to our purpose of keeping travel human.
Can you share a specific instance where AI initially seemed like the optimal solution but ultimately proved less effective than human intervention? What did this experience teach you about the limitations of AI in your field?
Many people are playing around with ChatGPT as a way to put together a quick itinerary for different travel destinations — and at first glance, it might seem like a more efficient solution for travel planning. But when you really look at these itineraries or travel tips, you’ll quickly realize they’re essentially aggregated from top trending recommendations — nothing unique, off-the-beaten track or personalized — and often inaccurate or out-of-date, since the information isn’t always current or 100% fact-checked. There are also nuances to travel that AI can’t quite grasp — what one traveler may consider walking distance compared with what their content suggests, or cultural sensitivities to be aware of when traveling. These missing pieces are all seamlessly addressed with an expert local guide like you’d expect from ToursByLocals. We offer our travelers the unforgettable experience of traveling like a local, with hidden gems and recommendations from someone on the ground, who knows the city best at any given moment of time.
How do you navigate the ethical implications of implementing AI in your company, especially concerning potential job displacement and ensuring ethical AI usage?
Our goal with AI is to save time on the small, routine tasks, so we can focus more of our time and energy on providing a human touch in all of our most important interactions. If we can save 15 minutes drafting a stock message, that frees up time to have a conversation on the phone with a customer who needs personalized attention, or to provide thoughtful support to a staff member, or a guide. As a company dedicated to fostering meaningful connections through local travel experiences, we live and breathe the values of being a people-first organization.
Could you describe a successful instance in your company where AI and human skills were synergistically combined to achieve a result that neither could have accomplished alone?
One of the earliest applications of AI we’ve built helps us maintain trust and safety on our platform. We use AI to identify abusive/derogatory/sexist/racist/inappropriate language in messages sent to any tour guide. We want to ensure they have a welcoming and safe platform to conduct their business on. AI flags these issues, and customer support investigates and makes the decision to keep or remove users, ultimately boosting the health of our online marketplace.
Another example is in our marketing department. Using AI as a content creation tool, a single staffer has been able to create individualized content for hundreds of pages on our website. She’s identifying the content needs, using AI as a drafting tool, editing and fact-checking the results, and ultimately improving our SEO results with published content on a large scale.
Based on your experience and success, what are the “5 Things To Keep in Mind When Deciding Where to Use AI and Where to Rely Only on Humans, and Why?” How have these 5 things impacted your work or your career?
We anchor on keeping travel human — with our customers but also with our internal teams. We’re always looking at new additions (any form of automated technology or AI) to the company’s processes through the lens of our guiding principles, our purpose, and vision.
1. Remember Your Core Values. The importance of people is clearly stated in our company name — ToursByLocals — we rely on real local guides in our 170+ countries to offer unforgettable tours. No efficiency we could find from AI would be worth sacrificing the diverse and real human experiences we stand for.
2. Consider Your Loyal Customers. ToursByLocals has a very loyal following, with a nearly-unheard-of Net Promoter Score of 88. When it comes to our user experience, we wouldn’t want to drastically change anything that might alienate those customers — and keeping humans at the center of our business is a big part of that. For instance, always being able to reach a human on the phone, via email or chat to solve any large or small support issue.
3. What Are Your Key Differentiators? What makes ToursByLocals special is our incredible network of heavily vetted local guides who build a personal relationship with each of our travelers. If we were to shift to using AI to plan itineraries or engage with our travelers, we would be losing our most important key differentiator.
4. Does this interaction require a human touch? We offer our travelers and guides a number of channels to contact us through — emails, phone, live chats, and social media. These channels all reach a live human. Our customer base is in the business of creating and purchasing truly unique, personalized experiences, and they expect ongoing interaction with a human as a part of the customer journey, rather than a chatbot.
5. Will this save time and resources without impacting customer experience? There’s clearly a theme here: in all we do, our goal is to provide a seamless customer experience that keeps travel human, and highly tailored to the individual. If we can save 10 minutes using AI to draft a simple stock message for instance, that’s 10 more minutes that can be dedicated to speaking with a traveler or guide on a call about a more complex issue.
Looking towards the future, in which areas of your business do you foresee AI making the most significant impact, and conversely, in which areas do you believe a human touch will remain indispensable?
Like most businesses, we’re in the early stages of understanding what will and won’t be powered by AI; where the true benefits lie, and how we can leverage it to best suit our vision and guiding principles. So far, there’s no one killer use case scenario, but lots of breadcrumbs we’ll be investigating to see what has the most impact.
Early learnings suggest we’ll be leaning into it for two key uses: as a productivity booster, and quality enhancement.
- Productivity:
We give our staff a lot of autonomy to take the initiative to explore AI uses in their individual roles, and then share their learnings with others. We’ve seen staff using AI as a content creation tool, to help them save time writing messages, or to get a first draft started for marketing copy. I personally have used it as a learning tool: instead of going to our VP of Engineering to have him explain a new tech tool to me, I’ll get a quick crash course using AI-assisted learning. It’s helping people get smarter, faster, and with the time saved on solitary tasks, we have more time to dedicate to those human, conversational moments we need. AI is shedding much of the administrative work that allows our team members to focus on creating better relationships with each other and with our guides and travelers.
2. Quality Enhancement:
We use AI tooling to keep messages sent to guides safe, kind and productive, which helps us in sending only quality inquiries to the partners using our platform. We also use AI to help guides put their best foot forward with their itineraries. Using AI learning, we determine which experiences travelers are most seeking. We pass along our learning to guides, empowering them to tailor experiences and put their highest quality, most sought-after itineraries front and center, helping travelers more easily to find the right experience for them.
You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
I think we are starting that movement at ToursByLocals! Too often, tourism does not directly benefit local people in destination. For instance, cruise ships dock, send hundreds of people onshore on large group tours organized and led by the cruise line. After a few hours, passengers return to the ship, eat and sleep there, and don’t provide any substantial economic or social value to the places they’ve visited. ToursByLocals aims to disrupt that model of tourism by providing local people in every destination with a means to market and sell their expertise to visitors, in small groups. Local guides benefit economically from the visitors, and because the tours are small in size, can introduce travelers to smaller restaurants, local businesses and venues that large busloads of tourists can’t access. Visitors leave with a better understanding of the destination, and — this isn’t insignificant — a new friend, in a different country.
In a nutshell: I want to see tourism benefit local destinations in meaningful ways.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
Check out our new website at ToursByLocals.com.
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
About The Interviewer: Kieran Powell is the EVP of Channel V Media a New York City Public Relations agency with a global network of agency partners in over 30 countries. Kieran has advised more than 150 companies in the Technology, B2B, Retail and Financial sectors. Prior to taking over business operations at Channel V Media, Kieran held roles at Merrill Lynch, PwC and Ernst & Young. Get in touch with Kieran to discuss how marketing and public relations can be leveraged to achieve concrete business goals.
C-Suite Perspectives On AI: Lisa Chen Of ToursByLocals On Where to Use AI and Where to Rely Only on… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.