I'm making a conscious effort this year to step outside the echo chamber of advertising conferences and instead go where the actual brand-side marketing conversations are happening. Yesterday, that took me to Visit California's Outlook Forum in Los Angeles.
While the adtech conferences host their umpteenth panel on "the promise of AI," destination marketers are deploying solutions that drive measurable outcomes.
I watched a mainstage panel discuss AI's rapid penetration into tourism marketing. National and regional tourism groups tend to be very conservative marketers. New "tech stuff" is not always welcomed with open arms, but things are changing.
The end of the generic travel itinerary
Despite billions spent on destination marketing, 70% of travelers still find trip planning "extremely frustrating."
When a panelist was discussing AI with an 18-year-old traveler who admitted to using ChatGPT to plan her entire Dolomites trip, it highlighted the wins and fails of travel AI. The itinerary hit all of the expected highlights, including the most massively overly crowded spots in the area. It was a mess.
Generic AI is already having massive impacts on travel marketing...sending everyone to the same Instagram-worthy spots whether we like it or not.
On the positive side, Costa Rica's AI-powered road trip planner, developed with MMGY Global, has seen 3x higher engagement than traditional chatbots. Why? Because it moves beyond generic recommendations to hyper-personalized itineraries that leverage the destination's proprietary data.
Robert Patterson, SVP of Marketing Technology at MMGY Global, described the moment it clicked during user testing.
"We asked a woman to use the tool and she said, 'Oh that's AI. That's not for me.' The moderator asked her to try it for two minutes. When we came back to her, she said, 'I love this tool! I wouldn't even use the website. I would use this to plan everything.'"
Predictive intelligence: The trip they don't know they want
The most compelling marketing insight came from focus group data showing American travelers typically book 7-day Costa Rica trips while Europeans and Canadians book 14+ days.
Of course, Americans consistently regretted not booking longer stays.
Patterson explained how they've weaponized this insight.
"What destination doesn't want longer stays and more spend? We're looking at opportunities for when people are initiating itineraries that are seven days or less to prompt them, 'Maybe you want to add these other things.' We're helping them solve a problem they don't even know they have yet."
What I thought was interesting was that the tools are not really intended to be question-and-answer machines or recommendation engines. It actually predicts needs before travelers articulate them.
As Olivér Csendes, CEO of Visit Hungary, put it: "It will predict where you will be disappointed or not. It will predict your interests."
The European approach: Creative first, conversation later
European destinations are taking a different tack. Nick Hall, founder of Digital Tourism Think Tank, highlighted the Faroe Islands' AI-generated art exhibition imagining "What if Van Gogh painted the Faroe Islands?" The campaign generated global PR by leveraging AI's creative capabilities rather than its conversational ones.
Other examples include the Netherlands' tool that takes your street address and "Dutch-ifies" it by adding tulips, bikes, and canals to your Street View. Both approaches sidestep the data privacy issues that plague conversational AI in Europe.
"European organizations are rather risk-averse," noted Csendes, "but there is really a lot going on when it comes to experimenting and seeing what AI can do."
The sustainable AI opportunity
For an industry grappling with overtourism, AI offers a chance to manage visitor flows more intelligently. Dr. Jonathan Roberts, Chief Innovation Officer at Dotdash Meredith, pointed out the risk of sending everyone to the same spots.
"If everyone's getting the same answer, everyone's going to go to the same spot."
Csendes sees AI as key to shifting from reactive to proactive visitor management.
"75% of CO2 emissions in tourism arise when people move from A to B. It's traffic, it's travel. How can we optimize that? If you use the right analytics powered by AI, you will be able to avoid situations where people are standing at one spot and the local population is not very amused."
Data architecture: The marketing foundation most are ignoring
While creative applications get the spotlight, the panel emphasized that data architecture is the true competitive advantage. Csendes described efforts to build tourism data spaces across Europe, emphasizing the need for interoperability across systems.
"Start with decreasing food waste. Start with better forecasting. Start with forecasting to your energy provider so they can offer you better and cheaper energy. This is how you will build trust and get partners to contribute to interoperable, safe data spaces."
Germany's knowledge graph approach connects disparate data sources to feed AI systems more accurately, while Austria and other European countries are building schemas to structure tourism data properly.
The destinations with the best data architecture will win the AI race, not those with the flashiest interfaces.
Horse and carriage moment
Dr. Roberts offered the most apt analogy for where we stand with AI in tourism marketing.
"When we invented the internal combustion engine at the beginning of the last century, we had horses and carriages, and then suddenly we had carriages without horses. They still looked like a horse and carriage because the form factor had not changed yet. It just had an engine in it. We're very much at that moment with AI."
The destinations using chatbots as "search bars" are stuck in the horse-and-carriage phase. The ones reimagining the entire visitor journey with AI as the foundation are building the tourism marketing equivalent of the modern automobile.
Where does your destination stand?
