Announcing Ask Skift 2.0, the Travel Industry’s Answer Engine

We released an updated version of our Ask Skift answer engine earlier today. We think it’s a big improvement over the previous iteration, which rolled out in the early days of publishers’ experimentations with generative artificial intelligence. 

Like before, it’s built on the body of work done by Skift reporters, editors, and researchers. Without their 12-plus years of work interviewing, researching, and writing there’d be no foundation for Ask Skift. Each story, report, and podcast adds to our knowledge base.  

We’ve also incorporated U.S. SEC filings to gain insights into the financial performance of public travel companies, the same data that powers our ST 200 stock index. (Another excellent tool for Skift subscribers.)

Our internal team has leveraged this content, OpenAI’s advances, and new tools to create a much-improved version of Ask Skift. It’s such a leap forward that calling it Version 2.0 doesn’t quite capture it.

What’s New

When we launched in May 2023, we looked at how other AI tools worked and adopted a chatbot-style interface. We tracked user questions and feedback to inform this updated version.

• Suggested Stories: Related stories appear as you ask questions. These stories may be used to build the answer or offer additional context. 
• Answers: Ask Skift now reads entire articles for deeper understanding, delivering longer, more detailed answers, often with bullet points and charts.
• Sources: Key stories used to build the answer are linked for further reading. 
• Follow Up Questions: You may have used features like this on Perplexity, Copilot, or LinkedIn. Like those tools, ours lets you explore related topics you may not have considered. 

Where to Find It

We’ve moved Ask Skift from the bottom right corner – where it was often mistaken for a user help tool – to more prominent places: the top navigation, search results page, and section pages like Hotels, Online Travel, and Airlines. 

• We’ve also integrated it into Skift articles: Choose from contextually driven questions about a story you’re reading.
• Summaries and Key Points: Read Ask Skift-generated key points and summaries of every new story. Just click on the “Summarize this story” button above the social sharing icons. 

Subscriber-Only Features

We like to keep some of our best features for subscribers, our premium products. That means if you’re a logged-in user of SkiftPro, Skift Research, Airline Weekly, or Daily Lodging Report, you will have access to a few additional things.

• Unlimited Questions: Subscribers can ask unlimited questions, while non-subscribers are limited to three per month.
• My History: Track and organize your questions and answers by session.
• Sharing: Share your answer stream via email, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Facebook, or X.

How Skift Thinks About Generative AI

It’s impossible to have a conversation about technology and media without talking about generative AI. Some publishers are striking deals with companies including OpenAI that are paying a fee to license the content they had already scraped from websites. Others are suing, which is also an approach. 

We know from a Washington Post story that Skift and its sites were scraped to train large language models more than any other travel news site on the planet. Earlier this year we changed our terms of service and asked AI sites not to scrape Skift or access content that’s reserved for our subscribers. We’ll see if they listen. 

While we await their response, we continue to invest in Ask Skift and collaborate with third parties who value the role of publishers. Stay tuned for announcements in the coming months.