Steve Case warns: some travel friction should not be automated

Steve Case has long applied one question to every investment he looks at, and now he is bringing it to the travel business. As Skift reports, the Revolution founder will take to the Skift Global Forum with an idea that is simple to state and hard to execute: separate what AI will make abundant from what will remain scarce. His thesis is that capital and attention should go to the scarce part, and that a chunk of the industry's job now is spotting which travel friction is worth keeping.

Translated into our business, that question becomes concrete product decisions. Charging for a phone call has no defence, and neither does forcing someone through a seven step form to change a date. But some friction does build value, and that is where teams should slow down the automation plan:

• Human conversation on a sensitive claim.
• The advisor who knows the destination and reshapes a route in real time.
• The sales rep who understands a corporate account.

My reading, and I say this as opinion, is that the decision is made far less in the chat window and far more in internal data. If your inventory, rates and customer history are messy, AI does not remove a bad experience, it hides it under a faster layer. What stays scarce in that case is clean information.