Marketing and Advertising CEO Mark Penn on the Future of Travel and Technology

In 2015 Mark Penn, a pollster, trendspotter and former chief strategist at Microsoft, created a marketing services firm in Washington, D.C. He was convinced that by focusing on the digital domain and data analytics, his start-up, Stagwell, could trounce traditional ad agencies and plunder their clients. His biggest backer was ex-Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, who pitched in $250 million.

Less than a decade on, Stagwell is a Nasdaq-listed company with a market capitalization of approximately $2 billion, with a stable of more than 70 agencies and 13,000-plus employees in 34 countries. And Penn, who celebrated his 70th birthday in January, shows no signs of slowing down. Indeed, he’s racking up air miles faster than he can spend them in the pursuit of ever more global opportunities.

Gratifyingly, though, at an altitude of 35,000 feet, the energetic chairman-CEO is just like the rest of us. “I never work on a plane,” says Penn. “I doze, I eat, I watch movies. Not even good ones—B movies. For me, planes are an escape from whatever else is going on.” He particularly loves long-haul flights, as he can get some real shuteye.

Stagwell has a stable of more than 70 agencies and more than 13,000 employees in 34 countries / Photo: Courtesy of Michael George

“I’m really happy business travel has picked up again as videoconferencing has its limits,” he says. “As a company, Stagwell always encourages its people to get out as much as possible.” He notes that in June about 100 staffers attended Sport Beach, a starry networking event the company hosts during Cannes Lions, the global ad industry’s annual shindig on the French Riviera.

Stagwell now has more than 20 agencies in Europe, including London-headquartered travel media company Ink, publisher of Business Traveler. In April it opened its EMEA headquarters in London and has since made its first moves into the Middle East, acquiring an Israeli marketing and social commerce organization and a panregional government advisory firm.

For Penn, the worst part of zipping all over the world and meeting new people is spending time in airports, which he says are designed for 20somethings. “The worst things are the moving walkways that suddenly end halfway down a corridor. Seriously, what is the point? You still have to walk the rest of the way.

“I dream of floating through the airport like I’m on a Disney ride, as if I’m in some bubble,” he continues. “That’s where you need the driverless cars— inside the airports. You could program them to take you to Gate 59 and make all the stops you need.” While Penn, an inveterate early adopter, believes technology is constantly upgrading everyone’s travel experiences, he pours cold water on the idea that any one innovation will suddenly upend the entire travel industry—not even generative AI, which Silicon Valley insists is poised to transform the whole world.

“Travel is an essential human activity. AI will help us do what we want but more efficiently,” says Penn. “We’ll be able to plan trips better, there’ll be smarter transport management, onboard Internet will be faster—but all improvements will be incremental and continual. There won’t be a travel revolution. And we’ll never achieve a technology-driven travel nirvana, either. People’s expectations are often very unrealistic. Travel is amazing but there’ll always be bad weather and delays.”

Moreover, he points out, even when the hype is justified, people can be remarkably resistant to change. “We could have superefficient multimodal transport hubs all over America right now. It’s not lack of technology holding us back. We’re waiting 20 years for a rail line to reach an airport because many of us are still so wedded to our cars.” He nonetheless believes AI will soon have an effect on almost every aspect of commercial flying, from the customer experience to routing and fuel efficiency.

Next-generation biometric technology, he notes, is already being rolled out at airports throughout the world, quietly changing how we move through them, from checking in bags to boarding aircraft. At the same time, AI is already starting to play a larger role in managing aircraft both in the air and on the ground. Several U.S. airlines are working on ever-faster tools to analyze weather conditions and track all other commercial and private flights in order to suggest the best routes. Other AI systems are beginning to be used to steer just-landed planes to the nearest available gate with the shortest taxiing time. This could all mean better-informed passengers spending less time in the air and—to Penn’s utter delight—far less time at airports.

However, what interests the data devotee the most is how travelers will engage with AI as consumers. “AI enables all businesses to offer customers incredibly personalized services,” he says. “A bot could book your flight factoring in dozens of preferences—the time you want to set off to the airport, say, or family birthdays you cannot miss. It could book restaurants based on your favorite foods, and make suggestions based on your previous purchases or activities.”

Perhaps a more exciting application of the technology, he suggests, is the possibility of using conversational AI as a kind of virtual concierge while on the move, with AI helping to provide real-time updates about events, attractions and potential disruptions. “The question is, of course: How many people actually want this?” Penn says.

In fact, according to a 2023 survey by one of Stagwell’s marketing consultancy firms, National Research Group, six percent of travelers have already started using conversational AI to plan trips. About half (49 percent) said that they found it to be a “very effective” tool—meaning that they believe AI is a more useful resource than online travel forums and blogs, and only slightly less effective than review sites such as Tripadvisor and Yelp.

This is pretty remarkable considering that when the National Research Group survey was carried out, AI platforms like ChatGPT had not been fully optimized for travel-related use, and travel platforms such as Expedia had only just begun rolling out chatbot functionality. Moreover, 61 percent of those surveyed said that they would be willing to use a chatbot to help plan a future trip.

At the same time, more than half (51 percent) of travelers said that they were worried that AI-powered travel tools would fail to adequately protect their personal data. Another significant concern is that travel firms could use this personal data to hike prices.

In Penn’s view, how this plays out will ultimately boil down to something he has written about at length: whether consumers prefer some version of the Ford economy, driven by low-priced standardized products, or some version of the Starbucks one, governed by the notion that the more choices consumers have, the happier they are. He suggests that as AI starts to become more widely integrated in marketing tools, travelers will receive more and more highly personalized digital content from airlines, travel platforms, hotels, credit card providers and loyalty points operators. At the same time, this ecosystem may hatch several independent travel-tech start-ups. “This space could actually get quite crowded pretty soon,” says Penn, “which could be good news for those of us who travel a lot.”