Magpie launches new tool for tour operators built on ChatGPT

Magpie , a content and distribution system for tour and activity providers and a PhocusWire Hot 25 Startup for 2020 , has released a new tool built with ChatGPT’s API.

The “product optimization tool” is intended to help tour and activity suppliers create better quality marketing content, including titles, descriptions, keywords and translations.

“Product descriptions, anything text, is just difficult for tour operators or anyone in this industry because they are not usually professional writers,” says Christian Watts, founder and CEO of Magpie.

“So they’ll do an initial description just to get it out there, but this description is critical for everything. It’s their interface for their sales – whether for an online travel agency or their own website. This is what people are reading to make purchase decisions based on.”

Watts published a short video on LinkedIn to demonstrate how the tool, in a matter of seconds, can rewrite content to be optimized for search.

“I took a terrible tour description from someone that probably wasn’t an English-first speaker and made it really good. It covered all the right points and made it read very well and with very good grammar,” he says.

“So that product is going to convert higher on every channel where it’s published.”

Operators can pick a tone for their content - for example persuasive, humorous or heartfelt – and can also designate a target audience such as luxury travelers or families. The tool can also translate the copy into 10 major languages.

Watts says one of the next ideas for this tool is to add the ability to read and synthesize reviews so operators have a better understanding of what travelers do and don’t value about their experience.

“I know there’s a ton of data in the reviews for these products … which operators aren’t really able to read right now except one by one,” he says.

“There’s data in the reviews that can be surfaced with a tool like this that can be used to write the descriptions even better.”

And Watts says so far feedback from Magpie’s customers has been positive.

“There’s definitely enthusiasm. It has a wow factor,” he says.

“There was initial skepticism on the question of can you publish AI content. People were talking about Google penalizing it. But Google has come out and said they don’t care who generates it - as long as it's good.”