What happens to community-based tourism if AI becomes the new way travellers discover and book experiences — but the experiences themselves are still **offline?**

<p>In this episode of the **Everything AI in Travel podcast**, I speak with **Emmanuel Annor, co-founder and CTO of Equera.ai**, about using AI to connect some of tourism's smallest and least-digitised businesses to the global travel ecosystem.<br />Emmanuel brings an interesting background to the problem. Before Equera, he built fintech and agritech products used by more than **70,000 farmers across Africa and Asia**, learning how to design technology for remote environments, unreliable connectivity and low-end devices. :chatgpt-content-reference{index="0"}<br />Now he's applying those lessons to travel.<br />The problem Equera is tackling is deceptively simple:<br />**AI can't sell what it can't see.**<br />Some of the most authentic community-based tourism experiences in the world aren't sitting inside reservation systems or OTA databases. They're being managed through **WhatsApp, pieces of paper, phone calls and conversations**.<br />So rather than trying to force these businesses into another extranet, Equera is building technology around the tools they already use.<br />We dig into:<br />🌍 Why community-based tourism is both economically important and home to some of travel's most memorable experiences<br />📱 Why Equera abandoned the assumption that suppliers should simply learn to use a portal<br />📝 The operator who wrote their coffee-tour itinerary **on a piece of paper, photographed it and sent it through WhatsApp** — and how that helped reshape Equera's approach :chatgpt-content-reference{index="1"}<br />🤖 How AI could turn a WhatsApp message, photograph or even a **voice note in a local dialect** into structured, bookable travel inventory<br />🔌 Equera's ambition to become an infrastructure layer connecting fragmented offline experiences with OTAs, AI agents and the wider digital travel ecosystem<br />📅 Why digitisation needs to go beyond simply listing an experience — suppliers also need capabilities such as live availability<br />🔎 How Equera's status as a **Google Things to Do connectivity partner** can make previously offline community experiences discoverable and bookable through Google :chatgpt-content-reference{index="2"}<br />📸 The challenge of collecting the photography, video and storytelling required to merchandise these experiences properly<br />❤️ How that content could also communicate the wider social and economic impact tourism is creating inside communities<br />🧠 Why Equera is benchmarking different AI models rather t