Why the Experience Economy Needs AI Infrastructure
The $1 trillion experience economy is still running on spreadsheets and email. Here's why that's about to change.
One of our team spent a week shadowing a golf tour operator. Here's what we learned.
Last autumn, a member of our team embedded with a mid-sized golf tour operator in Ireland. They run about 200 trips per year, mostly American groups doing bucket-list tours of Irish links courses. Revenue north of €2 million. Three full-time staff.
What struck us wasn't the complexity of the trips themselves — though coordinating 8 golfers across Royal County Down, Portrush, and Ballybunion while managing accommodation, transport, and the inevitable weather pivots is genuinely hard. What struck us was how much of their week was spent on work that felt like it should have been automated fifteen years ago.
Every enquiry that came in — and they get maybe 30-40 serious ones per month — triggered the same sequence: pull up the spreadsheet of course contacts, draft individual emails to check availability, wait for responses (sometimes days), manually calculate pricing based on the season and group size, format everything into a Word document, convert to PDF, send. If the client wanted changes, the whole process started again.
This is a business generating seven figures, and the operational backbone is Gmail, Excel, and a shared Dropbox folder.
The experience economy has a $1 trillion infrastructure problem
We talk a lot about the "experience economy" — this idea that consumers increasingly value experiences over possessions. The data backs it up. Adventure travel is growing at 15-17% annually. The post-COVID recovery saw premium travel bounce back faster than budget alternatives. Millennials and Gen Z are prioritising travel over homeownership.
But here's what's rarely discussed: the businesses delivering these experiences are still running on tools designed for a different era.
Think about what's happened to other industries. Restaurants got Toast and Square. Hotels got revenue management systems. Airlines have had sophisticated yield optimisation for decades. But the tour operator crafting a £30,000 Scottish golf experience? They're copying and pasting from last year's itineraries and hoping the pricing still makes sense.
This isn't a technology gap — it's an infrastructure gap. There's no Stripe for experiences. No Shopify for tour operators. The tools that exist are either too simple (generic CRMs that don't understand itineraries) or too complex (enterprise systems that require six months of implementation).
Why previous solutions haven't worked
We've looked at dozens of software tools aimed at tour operators. Most fall into one of three categories:
Booking engines focused on the transaction, not the crafting. They're built for standardised products — "click here to book the 9am walking tour." That works for activities. It doesn't work for bespoke, multi-day experiences where the proposal itself is part of the product.
CRMs with tourism add-ons that treat itineraries as an afterthought. You can track your leads, sure. But the moment you need to actually build a trip, you're back to Word documents.
Legacy GDS integrations designed for travel agents, not experience curators. The complexity is all in the wrong places — managing airline codes instead of crafting narratives.
None of these tools understand that for premium experiences, the quote *is* the product. The proposal a client receives isn't just pricing information — it's their first taste of the experience. It should inspire, not just inform.
What AI actually changes
We're generally sceptical of AI hype. Most "AI-powered" products are thin wrappers around basic automation. But there's something genuinely different about what large language models enable for this specific problem.
The core challenge in experience operations is dealing with ambiguity. A client says "we're a group of 8, mostly mid-handicappers, flying into Dublin in May, want to play the best links courses, budget around $4,000 per person." That single sentence contains dozens of implicit requirements that an experienced operator understands instantly but a computer traditionally couldn't parse.
Which courses fit that budget in May? Which have availability for 8? What's the logical routing to minimise transfers? Should you suggest Lahinch or save that for a future trip? Is the budget realistic, or do you need to manage expectations?
An experienced operator holds all of this knowledge. But that knowledge has been locked in their head, not in software. Every quote requires manual translation from human intuition to spreadsheet reality.
AI changes this. Not by replacing the operator's judgement, but by making it scalable. You can encode expertise into a system that handles the mechanical work — checking availability, calculating pricing, generating documents — while the human focuses on the craft: the recommendations that make a trip memorable, the relationships with courses that get you preferred tee times, the subtle adjustments based on reading what a client actually wants.
What we're building
Fareway is infrastructure for experience businesses. We started with golf because the problem is most acute there — high-value trips, complex logistics, time-sensitive inventory — but the architecture we're building applies broadly.
The thesis is simple: operators should spend their time on high-value work (building relationships, refining recommendations, handling exceptions) rather than coordination (checking availability, calculating prices, formatting documents).
We're not building another CRM. We're not building a booking engine. We're building the operational layer that sits underneath — the system that understands what an itinerary is, how pricing works, what availability means, and can handle the translation between natural language requests and structured, bookable trips.
Early results have been encouraging. Operators using Fareway are responding to enquiries in hours instead of days. Win rates are up because speed matters when clients are comparing multiple proposals. And — perhaps most importantly — operators tell us they're enjoying the work more because they're spending time on craft instead of admin.
The opportunity is enormous
The experience economy represents over $1 trillion in annual spend. The operators, hosts, and concierges delivering these experiences represent millions of small and medium businesses globally. Most are still running on tools from 2005.
That's the opportunity we're going after. Not by adding another feature to an existing workflow, but by rebuilding the infrastructure layer entirely.
Golf is our proving ground. But the vision is much larger: a world where creating exceptional experiences doesn't require exceptional tolerance for administrative pain.
We're just getting started.