Platform Personalization

How food & travel apps gain mass appeal with customization

In an era of personalization, where lifestyles and social media feeds are individually curated, eateries and apps both feel pressure to deliver experiences that feel exclusive to patrons yet reach a mass audience. That obviously is a tall task, but AI is making it not only possible, but a viable model for growth. Food and lifestyle apps are connecting unique places and experiences with those who would enjoy them most. It’s allowing consumers and businesses to find their niche and have fun doing it.

Travelers increasingly rely on curated digital recommendations before they arrive at their destination, whether they’re looking for street food in Bangkok, tapas bars in Barcelona, sushi in Tokyo, or the best restaurants in Sydney for a special occasion.

Power Rankings

A generation that grew up online, Gen Z is often portrayed as being bad at socializing and making friends. Solving that might just be a matter of finding the right way to reach Zoomers. Beli, an app launched in 2021 for cataloguing and ranking dining experiences, seems to have found the combination. Four in 5 Beli users are under 35, and the app has become something of a social network for foodies.

So far, at least, the app is invitation-only, maintaining an air of exclusivity and sense of community even as it grows. Beli users posted 30 million reviews in 2024, surpassing Yelp by a wide margin.

“I don’t want the implications that, let’s say, a public Yelp or Google review has,” Gillian Feinglass, one of Beli’s power users, told Taste. “These are my own thoughts, and I share them with my own community. I get very creative with my summaries or my thoughts on restaurants.”

Users compare restaurants to other places they’ve visited, and Beli uses that information to give each spot a personalized ranking for that user. It then uses those to offer recommendations. Users themselves know where they stand thanks to leaderboards documenting who has posted the most reviews in a given city or on the whole app. They’ve even taken to sharing their Beli reviews on dating profiles, evaluating potential matches on their culinary tastes.

“Pretty much every foodie we spoke to kept some kind of restaurant list, whether it was in their Notes app or a doc or a spreadsheet or a text thread, but there was just no central place where everybody was keeping lists together,” co-founder Eliot Frost told Taste.

Now there is.

Trend Creation

Not content to just book a table for diners at the restaurant of their choice, Resy has leaned into what CMO Hannah Kelly terms “trend creation.” The app’s analytics tell Resy’s engineers and marketers where the next hot spot is and what’s likely to be the next one after that. They use that information to shine a spotlight and on-and-coming chefs and cuisines, shaping the conversation through its annual trend report and daily through the app’s Discover tab.

“It’s telling the stories that are untold,” Kelly told Fortune.

Those stories include encouraging diners to go out during the annual holiday lull between December and January that results in a 30% drop in restaurant traffic and to find off-the-beaten path spots that locals frequent.

When it comes to booking a table, Resy’s Notify feature alerts users when a booking opens up at their preferred dining spots. For American Express cardholders – AmEx bought Resy in 2019 – Global Dining Access membership holds prime tables at sought-after restaurants, provides early access to exclusive chef events, and alerts partner restaurants to a user’s VIP status.

Kelly prides the app’s ability to provide authentic human connection, and Resy has backed up those assertions by supporting legislation to stop bot activity, leaving hard-to-book tables available for real people. That helps make a night out special, as does data analysis on what kind of experience people are looking for.

“We look at the ‘why,’ as in why are people searching for something,” Kelly told Ad Exchanger. “The ‘why’ helps us tell stories.”

Adding to the Experience

With consumers, especially younger ones, prioritizing experiences over things, leading travel apps are leaning on AI to help them customize journeys. Airbnb has launched an experiences platform that includes such activities as carving marble with a third-generation sculptor in Greece.

“We wholeheartedly believe in the experience economy,” Tripadvisor CMO Matt Dacey told Forbes. “Travelers are prioritizing memories over material goods, and we’ve seen that only accelerate since the pandemic.”

Dacey said leisure travelers typically visit dozens of websites over a period of weeks in the planning of their trips. Tripadvisor aims to make the process simpler with automated alerts such as restaurant recommendations two weeks before travel and travel document reminders days before a trip.

Tripadvisor offers more than 400,000 activities for booking through Viator, using AI to recommend what it thinks travelers might like and using new tools to help them find a hotel near their activities, rather than the other way around.

“When you center your trip around an event or an activity, you want to know what’s nearby. We’ve enhanced our maps and product design to help people choose stays that align with their planned experiences,” Dacey said.

Tripadvisor’s Rewards system gives users 5% of the value of their booking to use as Trip Cash for hotels or experiences on the Tripadvisor platform, and new members get $30 to use on experiences. Dacey told Forbes that this is just the beginning of the personalization on the platform.

“We sit in a unique place as a global platform used to plan, book, experience, and share travel,” he says. “That gives us a foundation to evolve loyalty in ways that feel natural to travelers.”

Strategies like that will keep them coming back.