Matador CEO Says A.I.-Powered Travel Tool GuideGeek Can Forge Human Connections

18.09.2023 - 19:49 / forbes.com

It’s a brisk morning on the San Francisco Bay as Ross Borden unlocks the door to the Sausalito warehouse Matador Network calls home. The co-founder and CEO of one of the planet’s most prolific travel websites hasn’t been to this dockside doorstep in a while, he admits. He’s got a newborn at home.

As one might expect from a global network of travel writers and content creators, Matador’s home office is seldom used. But as the mid-morning sun beings to burn a porthole to the glistening city in the distance, Borden swings open the latch and takes the pulse of the one-room loading bay framed by natural woodwork, fatigued leather couches, a garage door and a 6,000-pound family safe from a bank in Idaho.

The spires of San Fransisco strike an Oz-like pose over this marina. The specters of Salesforce tower and the Transamerica pyramid loom over Matador’s home like watchful bastions of big tech, monitoring the moves of startup enterprises and next new things swirling around them daily.

“Is that where you keep GuideGeek?” I ask Borden, pointing to the safe.

It is not. The secrets harbored during a years-long development process to create an A.I.-powered travel assistant are unlocked and open for viewing now. They’re public knowledge unleashed among the torrent of A.I. tools being put to use by companies as far ranging as JPMorgan Chase, Netflix and Adobe.

Borden settles in to a comfortable spot in front of a large desk lined with offline computer monitors to tell the tale me the tale of how Matador—a travel website spawned by group emails and a mountain climbing trip to Peru in the pre-blogging era—now finds itself spearheading travel itineraries built by artificial intelligence.

GuideGeek is a Matador’s free, A.I.-powered travel assistant that is currently being integrated into the largest message platforms in the world. GuideGeek’s Instagram following is already more than 1.3 million. It’s on WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, too. And it works just like a chat or a direct message to a human user on those apps.

GuideGeek gets to know travelers. It attempts to understand the likes, dislikes and motivations of each traveler before cultivating destination recommendations based on specific people.

“It’s read every hotel review, every restaurant review and stalled up the entire internet essentially up until 2021,” Borden says. “It’s a massive resource for planning travel and for people who are traveling right now.”

In addition to hotel and restaurant reviews, Borden says GuideGeek integrates with SkyScanner to find flight deals. It will soon launch live hotel data to allow booking accommodations within the chats as well—and it’s fluent in 45 languages. In galactic terms, GuideGeek is the C-3PO of travel agents.

“Wha