Rafat Ali, Media Operator & Dad

Travel, for me, stopped being about destinations a long time ago. It became a proxy for a childhood I left behind in India in the 1990s and have never stopped looking for. I finally wrote about it. operator.substack.com/p/mangoes-guav…

A @BookingHoldings job post for building foundational AI models led me down a rabbit hole of AI tech stack approaches by big online travel players, I've come up with a 5-layer AI tech stack. Using my Claude brain, I try to connect the dots. Full story: skift.com/2026/04/14/the…

LEAKED: The Secret Airline CEOs WhatsApp Group skift.com/2026/04/11/lea… via @Skift

What 170 AI Job Listings Reveal About Who Is Actually Building in Travel skift.com/2026/04/06/wha…

What if the OpenAI-buying-TBPN deal is not a signal of anything but just the egos involved, similar to CBS buying The Free Press? Because-they-can sometimes is the simplest, best and the real explanation.

Recency bias is the most expensive cognitive error in the travel business…or any business. Wrote a column laying out why Dubai obituary is being written too early, and what the history of every macro travel crisis tells us about what comes next. skift.com/2026/04/02/rec…

The End of ‘Incredible India’ >> “Incredible India” was built to attract outsiders, but the center of gravity in Indian travel has shifted from selling the country abroad to building for travelers at home. skift.com/2026/04/01/the… via @Skift

“The Lament of Jordan”, an audio narrated essay on fate of Jordan’s tourism amidst its existence in a volatile region, suffering consequences of wars it did not start. On travel, perception, geography, human cost of instability & what gets lost when geopolitics becomes abstract.

How Montreal Quietly Became the Second Most Important Travel Tech Hub, loved writing this story, one of my faves I have researched.

Airbnb has spent $10.9bn on buybacks since 2022 & made exactly one acquisition in 6 years. It has the cash, the brand, and the category gaps to justify a serious M&A strategy.

The Claude Effect Is Coming for Travel skift.com/2026/03/02/the… via @Skift

What a Siberian Startup and a Saudi Ticketing App Reveal About Travel’s Future skift.com/2026/02/11/wha… via @Skift

@drnovac VCs know anything about building companies??

@rafat that was all the rage for vc influencers last year, delphi ai raised money from sequoia for it

Here's something I really think is a massive business idea: AI companies need to figure out how to let people build subscription layers on top of their accumulated AI brains...What if you could subscribe to a domain expert's AI brain the way you subscribe to their newsletter?

The expert's AI brain becomes the product, the AI itself becomes the delivery mechanism and the subscription becomes the business model. Who's building this?

The first platform that figures out how to let experts package, distribute AND monetize their AI brains will unlock an entirely new creator economy I think, one built not on content but on cognition.

Can I say something mean about WaPo since I am not on here anymore and no one reads my tweets anyway: it has sucked as a product and business for two decades now, so whatever is happening is in the long arc of its suckiness under the previous owners, IMHO.