ZergRouter is launched! This is game changing.

Airbnb just became an OTA, and it's sad. On Monday, Tripadvisor announced that a selection of its catalogue, the same 425,000 tours and activities Viator distributes across half the internet, will soon be bookable on Airbnb. Airbnb launched Experiences in 2016 promising travel you couldn't find anywhere else. Cooking with a nonna in her actual kitchen, not a bus tour. They paused the whole program in 2023, then relaunched it in 2025 with Brian Chesky calling experiences the future of the company. Fifteen months later they're plugging into the biggest commodity inventory feed in travel. I never believed the original story. The differentiation was always marketing. There was never a scalable supply of genuinely unique experiences underneath it, because unique doesn't scale by definition. What scales is the Colosseum skip-the-line ticket, the Ubud waterfall tour, the exact SKUs sitting on Viator, GetYourGuide, Klook, and every hotel concierge iPad on earth. So the hipster positioning collapses into the economics of every OTA before it. Sell what exists, take the margin, compete on placement. The lesson for brands runs deeper than travel. An experience is not inventory. The moment you treat it like a SKU to be aggregated, you've built a reseller, and resellers own nothing. No relationship, no data, no reason for anyone to come back to you instead of whoever ranks higher tomorrow. Airbnb had the captive audience to build something spectacular, but they chose the feed instead.

I am writing this from a window seat on a @united international flight. My toddler is sitting two rows back, alone, next to two strangers. The airline moved us apart without asking, days before departure, on a route we booked months ago. When I called, the agent said there was nothing they could do and that maybe I should Tweet about it. Reaalllllyyyy? When I posted about it on X/Twitter, it went viral, the brand's social team DMed me, apologized, and told me there's nothing they could do and I should just change the flight to another day. This taught me something about agency and how this brand thinks about its customers that I am still processing. For the record, I am a Platinum-tier member with this airline, and I have been a top-spend customer for more than a decade. The system that reassigned our seats did not know that, or more likely did not care. It treated me the same way it would have treated a passenger on a $79 award redemption who had never flown the airline before and never would again. Most large brands have confused customer service with customer experience, and the confusion is being underwritten by an entire industry of survey vendors that should have been called out years ago. Qualtrics, Medallia, InMoment, the whole apparatus of post-interaction surveys that consumer brands spend billions of dollars on every year. These are not bad products in a technical sense. They do exactly what they say they do. The problem is what they have trained an entire generation of executives to believe they do, which is "listen to your customers." They do not listen to your customers. They listen to the 1.8 percent of your customers willing to complete a survey, on the question the team happened to ask, on the day the survey went out, scored on a five-point scale that flattens everything interesting about a real human reaction into a number that can be averaged on a slide. The dashboards trend up because the methodology gets refined. The vendors have no incentive to tell you that their tool is measuring 1.8% percent of the wrong thing. Meanwhile, your top-decile customers are silently defecting and nothing in the system is calibrated to catch it. When a top-tier loyalty member gets silently separated from his toddler on an international flight, that is not a customer service failure. It is a customer experience failure, made by an operating system that either did not see or did not weight the most basic information about who was sitting in the seat. Not all customers are created equal. The systems that decide how to treat them in the moments that matter need to know the difference. The brands that survive the next decade are the ones that build the operational systems, the culture, and the operating philosophy to treat their best customers like the irreplaceable assets they actually are. Everyone else is just running a customer service department, paying Qualtrics for a survey, and calling it experience.

Flying internationally, and @united decided to move our seats without asking and separate my toddler and me across the plane from each other. Refuses to seat us together. Probably breaking some laws here, huh?

Didn't realize a Mamdani documentary was coming out so soon: youtube.com/watch?v=e-cInUK9…

Went to a friend’s birthday roast and a guy gave a 40 minute speech from the perspective of his Claude model. Classic SF.

AI Will Make Reality the Most Valuable Asset in the World xitter.cf/whereisyaffe/status/20…

Not a good look

So proud of @noor_siddiqui_ and the @OrchidInc team for bringing the future of health forward. This is just the start!