Episode #9
What happens to community-based tourism if AI becomes the new way travellers discover and book experiences — but the experiences themselves are still **offline?**
In this episode of the **Everything AI in Travel podcast**, I speak with **Emmanuel Annor, co-founder and CTO of Equera.ai**, about using AI to connect some of tourism's smallest and least-digitised businesses to the global travel ecosystem. Emmanuel brings an interesting background to the problem. Before Equera, he built fintech and agritech products used by more than **70,000 farmers across Africa and Asia**, learning how to design technology for remote environments, unreliable connectivity and low-end devices. :chatgpt-content-reference{index="0"} Now he's applying those lessons to travel. The problem Equera is tackling is deceptively simple: **AI can't sell what it can't see.** Some of the most authentic community-based tourism experiences in the world aren't sitting inside reservation systems or OTA databases. They're being managed through **WhatsApp, pieces of paper, phone calls and conversations**. So rather than trying to force these businesses into another extranet, Equera is building technology around the tools they already use. We dig into: Why community-based tourism is both economically important and home to some of travel's most memorable experiences Why Equera abandoned the assumption that suppliers should simply learn to use a portal The operator who wrote their coffee-tour itinerary **on a piece of paper, photographed it and sent it through WhatsApp** — and how that helped reshape Equera's approach :chatgpt-content-reference{index="1"} How AI could turn a WhatsApp message, photograph or even a **voice note in a local dialect** into structured, bookable travel inventory Equera's ambition to become an infrastructure layer connecting fragmented offline experiences with OTAs, AI agents and the wider digital travel ecosystem Why digitisation needs to go beyond simply listing an experience — suppliers also need capabilities such as live availability How Equera's status as a **Google Things to Do connectivity partner** can make previously offline community experiences discoverable and bookable through Google :chatgpt-content-reference{index="2"} The challenge of collecting the photography, video and storytelling required to merchandise these experiences properly ❤️ How that content could also communicate the wider social and economic impact tourism is creating inside communities Why Equera is benchmarking different AI models rather than automatically assuming the biggest and most powerful model is the best tool for every job And how an emerging world of AI agents and agent-to-agent commerce could create entirely new distribution opportunities for these businesses. There is a bigger issue here that I think is going to become increasingly important. As travellers shift from Google searches and OTA filters toward simply asking an AI **"What should I do?"**, we risk creating a new digital divide. The large, structured and already-digitised tourism businesses are easy for AI to find. The woman running a cooking experience in her village, the family offering a homestay, or the local guide organising experiences through WhatsApp may effectively be **invisible**. As Emmanuel puts it, if we're increasingly depending on AI for travel discovery and booking, we need to make sure the businesses that aren't currently represented in the data don't get left behind. :chatgpt-content-reference{index="3"} That's what makes Equera particularly interesting. It's not simply using AI to make an existing digital travel business more efficient. **It's using AI to help bring an entirely offline layer of tourism into the digital economy.** And potentially giving AI agents access to some of the best stuff in travel in the process. #TravelAI #AI #CommunityBasedTourism #TravelTech #AIAgents #Tourism #Experiences #SustainableTourism #TravelStartups #Africa #Equera
