Escape has unveiled Ask Skye, a new AI-powered travel assistant designed to bridge the gap between holiday dreaming and booking, offering consumers personalised itineraries with live flight, accommodation, activity, and expert recommendations.
Integrated across escape.com.au, Ask Skye launches today in beta and aims to tackle one of the industry’s most significant friction points: inspiration overload.
News Corp Australia’s Head of Travel, Kerrie McCallum, said the tool has been built to cut through the noise and help travellers make decisive decisions. “Ask Skye turns inspiration into action by pairing Escape’s trusted expertise with live, bookable options, transforming endless scrolling into a confident, streamlined plan.”
She added that the tool strengthens Escape’s end-to-end offering.
“It strengthens Escape’s end-to-end travel offering with tailored, real-time recommendations grounded in credible content and seamless booking, while giving clients a direct way to reach travellers, maximise engagement and conversions, and move consumers straight to partners’ booking platforms.”
News Corp Australia’s Head of Travel Kerrie McCallum
Fixing the friction in holiday planning
The Growth Distillery’s Technographics: Travel research highlights the scale of the challenge: one in three travellers abandon planning altogether because they feel overwhelmed by choice and complexity. Ask Skye is designed to break that pattern by connecting inspiration, research and booking in a single workflow.
The tool prompts users for key details up front, allowing it to deliver more relevant suggestions and highlight contextually appropriate articles from Escape’s travel writers – a blend of AI and editorial expertise that aims to personalise planning without sacrificing credibility.
Built with Ask Layla, launching in beta
Ask Skye has been developed in partnership with Ask Layla, an established AI travel tech company. The beta launch gives consumers early access, enabling Escape to gather feedback and refine the product before a full rollout in February.
A national marketing campaign will introduce the tool across digital, print and social channels within Escape and the wider News Corp network.
A growing travel ecosystem
Escape reaches a monthly cross-platform audience of more than 3.1 million readers through its national print inserts, weekly sections, weekend magazines, website, video, eDMs and social channels. The business describes Ask Skye as the next step in evolving that ecosystem into an integrated, bookable travel platform.
With the addition of AI-driven recommendations and real-time fare data, the publisher is betting travellers will embrace a more guided, less fragmented planning experience – one that moves them from dreaming to doing with far fewer stops along the way.