An Open Letter to Google, Gemini, TripAdvisor and Viator:

October 12, 2026

To the leadership of Google, Google Gemini, Tripadvisor Group and Viator:

I am writing as the owner of Sedona Wine and Vortex Tours, an independently operated Sedona tourism business built upon more than 35 years of experience in the local travel and hospitality industry.

I am also writing on behalf of a principle that extends far beyond my own business:

Independent tour operators deserve a fair opportunity to be discovered, evaluated, and booked by the travelers seeking their services.

The rapid integration of artificial intelligence into travel planning presents extraordinary opportunities. It also raises serious questions about fairness, transparency, competition, and the growing influence of large online travel agencies over the businesses that actually provide the experiences being sold.

I respectfully ask your organizations to consider these concerns before the next generation of travel discovery becomes another marketplace in which independent businesses must choose between surrendering an ever-increasing share of their revenue simply to reach their own customers—or being excluded from meaningful competition.

The Growing Influence of AI on Travel Discovery

For decades, travelers have relied upon Google Search, Google Maps, customer reviews, and independent business websites to discover local experiences.

Today, that process is changing.

Travelers increasingly ask AI-powered systems questions such as:

• What is the best vortex tour in Sedona?
• Who offers the best private wine tours in Sedona?
• Which Sedona tour company has the most experience?
• Where can I book directly with a local tour operator?

The answers generated by Google Gemini and other AI travel planning systems can profoundly influence which businesses travelers encounter and ultimately choose.

On July 30, 2026, Tripadvisor Group announced that Viator had become Google's first connected app for travel experiences, providing access to more than 425,000 tours and activities through Gemini.

The integration allows travelers to explore Viator's inventory within Gemini and proceed to Viator to complete reservations.

While this particular integration operates through a connected application, it illustrates a much broader development: the growing convergence of artificial intelligence, travel recommendations, commercial distribution, and online booking.

This development raises an important question:

When a traveler asks an AI assistant for the best local experience, will the answer reflect the actual merits of the available businesses, or will the recommendation process increasingly favor inventory distributed through large commercial booking platforms?

That distinction matters enormously to independent businesses.

The Difference Between a Tour Operator and a Booking Intermediary

Tripadvisor and Viator provide valuable services to travelers and participating businesses. I recognize that these platforms invest heavily in technology, marketing, customer reviews, and booking infrastructure.

However, an online travel agency is not necessarily the company that designs, develops, and personally delivers the experience, nor does it necessarily carry the substantial operational overhead associated with doing so.

Independent tour operators invest years, sometimes decades, building their expertise, developing original experiences, maintaining vehicles and equipment, establishing local relationships, and earning the trust of their customers.

When an third party interloper positions itself between the customer and the tour provider to receive a substantial commission on a booking, that revenue comes from an experience created and delivered by someone else—perhaps an experience developed and refined over many years.

Commission-based distribution is a legitimate business model. But it should not become an unavoidable condition of visibility in AI-powered travel discovery.

The ability to be discovered should not depend primarily upon a business's willingness or ability to pay a third-party intermediary.

The Problem With Applying Corporate Scale to Personal Experiences

The travel and tourism industry is enormous.

According to the World Travel & Tourism Council, travel and tourism contributed approximately $11.6 trillion to the global economy in 2025 and supported approximately 366 million jobs worldwide.

Those figures represent far more than airlines, hotel chains, booking platforms, and multinational corporations.

They also represent countless independent businesses whose knowledge, creativity, personal investment, and hospitality make travel worthwhile.

Corporate scale can produce impressive efficiencies in marketing, technology, distribution, and transaction processing.

But efficiency is not the same thing as quality.

An intimate, personally guided experience cannot simply be mass-produced without changing the very qualities that make it exceptional.

There is a fundamental difference between transporting a large group of visitors through a predetermined itinerary and creating an individualized experience shaped by the interests, personalities, and responses of the people participating.

Both forms of tourism have legitimate places in the marketplace.

But when commercial systems emphasize booking volume, standardized inventory, passenger capacity, and scalable group transportation, they risk overlooking the value of smaller, highly specialized experiences.

A private tour with two guests may generate less gross booking revenue than a bus carrying forty passengers. Yet the smaller experience may provide an entirely different level of personal attention, flexibility, meaningful interaction, and individual satisfaction.

A recommendation system that disproportionately rewards volume and scalability may therefore disadvantage some of the most distinctive experiences available to travelers.

The best experience is not necessarily the one that can accommodate the most passengers, generate the most transactions, or produce the greatest commission revenue.

Who Understands the Experiences Being Sold?

Another concern deserves serious consideration.

The executives, technology developers, marketing professionals, and distribution specialists who design and operate large travel marketplaces may possess extraordinary expertise in their respective fields.

But corporate expertise in marketing, software development, and transaction processing is not the same as firsthand experience creating, operating, and personally delivering tours.

Decisions about how travel experiences are categorized, evaluated, promoted, and recommended increasingly influence the livelihoods of independent operators who may have spent decades developing their craft.

Those decisions should not be made without meaningful input from the people who actually deliver the experiences.

A tour is not simply a product listing, a seat, a time slot, or a transaction.

For many independent operators, it is the culmination of years of knowledge, refinement, creativity, personal relationships, and dedication.

The people who create the experiences deserve a meaningful voice in the systems that increasingly determine whether those experiences can be discovered.

A Perspective From 35 Years in Sedona Tourism

I began working in the Sedona tourism industry in 1991, long before the region became the internationally recognized destination it is today.

I witnessed the emergence and development of the Verde Valley wine industry. I watched Sedona's tourism market evolve, and I developed original private touring experiences designed around the extraordinary qualities of this destination.

Sedona Wine and Vortex Tours pioneered the combination of local wine touring and Sedona's world-famous vortex experiences. We also developed our exclusive Prana Viewing Vortex Experience™ offering guests an interactive experience that distinguishes our tours from conventional sightseeing.

These experiences cannot be adequately evaluated through generic product categories alone.

To us, such experiences are an art form. They can only be fully understood in the context of the tremendous long-term effort and passion that went into creating them and the foundational legacy being built beneath them.

The knowledge, creativity, hospitality, emotional engagement, and personal attention behind a tour are often what make it extraordinary.

A booking platform can display photographs, prices, descriptions, and reviews. But those data points do not necessarily communicate the depth of experience behind an independent operator's work.

Nor can a standardized group-tour model necessarily reproduce the personal connection that develops between a knowledgeable guide and a small number of guests.

The difference is not merely the number of passengers.

It is the opportunity to adapt, communicate, explore, respond, and create an experience that belongs uniquely to the people participating.

An algorithm should be capable of recognizing originality and expertise, not merely inventory availability and distribution scale.

What Is Happening to Independent Business Visibility?

Independent businesses increasingly face a difficult challenge: maintaining visibility within digital discovery systems that are becoming more complex, commercially interconnected, and difficult to understand.

Google Search, Google Maps, AI Overviews, Gemini, online travel agencies, and third-party booking platforms can all influence how travelers discover and evaluate local tour operators.

Yet the criteria determining which businesses receive meaningful exposure are not always apparent to the operators whose livelihoods depend upon that visibility.

This raises important questions about whether independent businesses can continue to compete effectively without becoming increasingly dependent upon paid distribution channels.

When a traveler asks for a Sedona wine tour or vortex tour, will Google's systems fairly consider an established local operator's experience, originality, customer reputation, and direct-booking availability?

Or will businesses increasingly find themselves competing against the enormous digital visibility and commercial resources of the platforms through which their own services may be resold?

The concern is not that every change in search visibility can be attributed to a commercial partnership.

The concern is that independent operators need meaningful transparency and fair access as travel discovery evolves.

No independent business should have to wonder whether its ability to reach customers is becoming dependent upon participation in a commercial distribution network.

These questions deserve transparent answers.

Seven Requests for Fair and Transparent AI Travel Recommendations

I respectfully ask Google, Gemini, Tripadvisor, and Viator to consider the following principles.

1. Preserve meaningful independent business discovery.

AI travel recommendations should provide appropriate visibility to qualified local operators, including those offering direct bookings outside major online travel agencies.

A company's absence from a particular commercial marketplace should not, by itself, diminish its opportunity to be discovered through broader, ostensibly independent travel recommendations.

2. Distinguish actual tour operators from booking intermediaries.

Travelers should be able to understand whether a recommended company actually creates and delivers an experience or primarily markets and processes reservations for another provider.

The identity of the actual operator should be clear throughout the discovery and booking process.

3. Make commercial relationships transparent.

Where recommendations are generated through connected commercial booking services, travelers should understand the role of those relationships.

They should also be informed when recommendations represent a particular marketplace's inventory rather than the broader range of available businesses.

Commercially connected recommendations should be clearly distinguishable from independent evaluations of available travel experiences.

4. Disclose intermediary commissions to consumers.

When a third-party booking platform sells an experience operated by an independent provider, travelers should have access to a clear disclosure of the intermediary's compensation.

Ideally, the booking process would identify the percentage of the booking price retained by the intermediary and the portion paid to the operator responsible for delivering the experience, with appropriate treatment of taxes, fees, and other charges.

Such information could appear during checkout, on the booking confirmation, or through another clearly accessible disclosure.

Consumers routinely make purchasing decisions based upon transparency, value, and their desire to support local businesses.

They deserve to know how much of their purchase supports the people actually providing the experience and how much compensates the company facilitating the transaction.

Transparency should extend beyond the price the traveler pays to include how that price is distributed.

5. Evaluate genuine expertise, originality, and the quality of personalized experiences.

Established experience, verified customer satisfaction, specialized knowledge, original tour concepts, and the quality of an operator's offerings should be meaningful considerations in travel discovery.

Recommendation systems should recognize the distinction between mass-market group transportation and highly personalized private experiences without automatically favoring either model.

Travelers seeking intimate, specialized, or individually tailored experiences should receive recommendations that genuinely reflect those preferences.

6. Protect the opportunity to book directly.

Travelers should retain a practical ability to discover and book directly with independent providers without being unnecessarily routed through commission-based intermediaries.

Direct-booking opportunities should remain meaningfully accessible in AI-assisted travel planning and conventional search results.

7. Support appropriate competition protections and regulatory transparency.

I support the fair enforcement of existing competition and consumer-protection laws, as well as the thoughtful development of new legislation where necessary to address emerging challenges in AI-powered commercial discovery.

Such measures should encourage transparency, protect meaningful consumer choice, discourage unfair exclusionary practices, and preserve opportunities for independent businesses to compete.

I encourage policymakers and regulators to examine whether existing legal frameworks adequately address the growing convergence of AI recommendations, commercial marketplace participation, and transaction processing.

These principles should apply consistently and fairly to all participants, without imposing unnecessary burdens upon legitimate businesses.

This Is About More Than One Sedona Tour Company

The implications extend far beyond Sedona wine tours, vortex tours, and Arizona tourism.

Across the country, independent guides, family-owned excursion companies, outdoor adventure operators, local transportation providers, and specialized hospitality businesses depend upon their ability to reach customers.

Many cannot compete with the advertising budgets, technological resources, or commercial influence of multinational corporations.

Yet these small businesses are often responsible for the very experiences that make destinations memorable.

They employ local people. They support local economies. They preserve regional knowledge. They develop original products. And they invest personally in the satisfaction of their guests.

A travel discovery system that disproportionately rewards distribution power over genuine local expertise risks diminishing the diversity and independence of the tourism industry itself.

The consequences could extend beyond individual business failures.

Over time, the loss of independent operators could reduce consumer choice, discourage original experiences, and leave travelers increasingly dependent upon a narrower range of commercially standardized offerings.

An industry capable of generating trillions of dollars in economic activity should also be capable of preserving meaningful opportunities for the independent businesses that contribute to its success.

An Invitation to Lead Responsibly

I am not opposed to artificial intelligence. I am not opposed to online travel agencies. And I am not asking Google or any other organization to guarantee favorable placement for my business.

I am asking for something more fundamental.

Let independent businesses compete fairly on the merits of what they actually offer.

If artificial intelligence is to become a trusted guide for travelers, its recommendations should strive to reflect the quality, relevance, authenticity, and diversity of available experiences—not simply the commercial relationships and distribution channels of the largest participants.

Google, Gemini, Tripadvisor, and Viator have an opportunity to establish a higher standard for transparency and fairness in AI-assisted travel planning.

I encourage your leadership teams to engage directly with experienced independent operators and consider how these technologies can support, rather than marginalize, the businesses upon which the travel experiences industry ultimately depends.

I also encourage elected officials, regulatory agencies, industry associations, and consumer advocates to participate in this discussion before the structure of AI-driven travel discovery becomes firmly established.

The future of travel discovery should empower the people who create extraordinary experiences—not make those people increasingly dependent upon intermediaries to survive.

Respectfully,

SedonaBear
Founder, Sedona Wine and Vortex Tours™
Sedona, Arizona
35 Years in Sedona Tourism