The future of travel marketing isn’t about creating more content. It’s about creating something AI can’t reproduce without you.

There is a fundamental problem emerging in travel marketing, and it has very little to do with whether you’re using ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or whatever new AI product showed up while I was writing this sentence.

The problem is that we have spent years teaching ourselves to create content for search engines without necessarily asking the most important question:

Why should someone find us in the first place?

Recently, I wrapped up the second part of a workshop called Worth Finding, working with destination marketers on what it means to become an AI-first destination marketing organization (DMO).

In the first session, we talked about the changing relationship between travelers, search engines, and artificial intelligence. In the second, we put that thinking to work.

We asked marketers to behave like travelers, interrogate large language models, discover what those machines knew about their destinations, and identify where their organizations were missing from the conversation.

What emerged was something more interesting than a conversation about AI.

It was a conversation about identity.

You Can’t Own Every Question

Imagine asking an AI assistant to help plan a family vacation.

You might tell it you have two kids, a limited budget, and a few days when everyone is out of school. You want somewhere within driving distance, something memorable, and ideally somewhere that won’t leave you regretting your life choices halfway through the second day.

Notice what you didn’t ask.

You didn’t ask for a particular destination.

You described a problem, a set of constraints, and the experience you wanted to have.

The machine is now responsible for figuring out where you should go.

For destination marketers, that represents an enormous shift. Your potential traveler may never begin their journey by searching for your city, region, or attraction. They may begin by describing something they want to experience and letting AI decide which places deserve consideration.

Which brings us to a difficult question.

What are the five questions your destination should own?

Not 50. Not 500. Five.

What are the things your destination knows, offers, or understands better than the places competing for that same traveler’s attention?

During the workshop, I used myself as an example. If I wanted AI to understand who I am and what I know, I would start with a handful of territories: bourbon, comic books and pop culture, AI and travel marketing, unusual food experiences, and storytelling.

Then I would identify the questions within those territories that I want to be associated with.

What bourbons are genuinely worth chasing? What can pop culture teach us about curiosity? How should travel marketers respond as AI changes discovery? How do we turn an idea into something people remember?

Those questions begin to establish what I want to be known for.

The exercise works the same way for a destination.

And there’s a catch.

You have to be willing to acknowledge that you can’t be known for everything.

Your Biggest Attraction Might Not Be Your Biggest Advantage

One participant in the workshop was wrestling with an interesting challenge involving a major entertainment venue.

The venue attracts significant performers, the kinds of acts that people will travel to see.

That sounds like an obvious marketing advantage, right?

Except those same performers might be playing 60 dates across the country.

When someone asks an AI assistant where they should see that performer, your venue becomes one of dozens of possible answers.

The performer is the commodity.

The experience of seeing that performer at your particular venue is potentially something else entirely.

What makes that venue special? What is the surrounding experience? Why should someone travel to your community instead of seeing the same performer somewhere closer to home?

Suddenly, we’re having a much more interesting conversation.

The destination cannot own the artist. It can own the story of what makes seeing that artist there extraordinary.

This is the distinction I want marketers to spend more time thinking about.

Because there is a significant difference between being included in an answer and being the reason someone makes a decision.

Commodity Content Is Not the Enemy

For years, marketers have created enormous amounts of content around information that is relatively easy to summarize.

Hours of operation. Parking information. Admission prices. Directions. Lists of attractions.

This information matters. In fact, getting it wrong can ruin someone’s experience.

But it isn’t necessarily the content that will distinguish your destination.

If someone asks Gemini when a state park opens, the machine can provide that answer without requiring the traveler to read a thousand-word blog post.

And that’s fine.

The traveler got what they needed.

But what if someone asks about navigating that same park in a wheelchair?

Now imagine that your destination has a detailed, firsthand account written by someone who uses a wheelchair and has actually experienced the trails, facilities, transportation, and obstacles.

That piece of content is fundamentally different.

AI can summarize park hours. It cannot independently recreate the lived experience of the person who navigated that park.

It needs the perspective, details, and authority of the original source.

That is what I mean by non-commodity content.

Content built around original insight, firsthand expertise, specific useful information, and a recognizable human perspective.

The distinction isn’t that commodity content is bad and non-commodity content is good.

It’s that they serve different purposes.

Commodity content helps the traveler complete a task.

Non-commodity content gives the traveler a reason to trust you, remember you, and potentially choose you.

Your content strategy needs both, but they should not require the same level of investment.

The Most Important Thing AI Can Tell You Might Be What It Gets Wrong

One of the more valuable parts of our workshop involved asking participants to test their destinations against actual traveler scenarios.

Not vague prompts like “Tell me about my destination.”

Specific questions involving party size, budgets, travel dates, interests, and restrictions.

What happens when a family has a dietary restriction? What happens when an attraction has seasonal limitations? What happens when transportation or accessibility information is outdated?

Participants discovered instances where AI results were incomplete, missed important details, or failed to surface the experiences they expected.

One participant raised an issue involving gluten-free options. Others discussed timely information about attractions and experiences.

These discoveries point to something destination marketers should take seriously.

AI visibility and traveler trust are not the same problem, but they are increasingly connected.

A destination might appear in an AI recommendation and still fail the traveler if the supporting information is incorrect.

Imagine being recommended a restaurant only to discover that it cannot accommodate your dietary needs.

Or arriving at an attraction to find that its operating hours have changed.

The AI assistant might have delivered the recommendation, but the real-world experience belongs to the destination.

This means the job isn’t simply to get recommended more often.

It is to make sure that the information travelers and machines rely on deserves their trust.

Who owns that information? Who keeps it current? Where should those answers live? Are your partners sharing the same information that you are?

Those questions belong in your marketing conversations just as much as your next content campaign.

Stop Making Content Just to Make Content

There is another reason I think this exercise matters.

Small destination marketing teams are being asked to do an extraordinary amount of work.

Create videos. Write blogs. Manage social media. Support partners. Analyze data. Learn AI. Report results.

And somewhere between all of those responsibilities, we’re supposed to have an original thought.

The answer cannot simply be to create more.

It has to be to create more intentionally.

If you’ve identified five questions your destination should own, those questions become the foundation of your content system.

Perhaps you interview a local accessibility expert. That interview becomes a long-form video, a detailed article, a series of short clips, and social content that explores particular parts of the experience.

Maybe you conduct original research about why families choose your destination. That research becomes a resource that journalists, travelers, and AI systems have reason to reference.

The important thing is that you’re not starting with a calendar full of empty boxes and asking what to post on Tuesday.

You’re starting with a question that matters and building the assets that help answer it.

AI can help with the production and adaptation of those assets. It can help you reorganize material, identify gaps, and create platform-specific versions.

But it shouldn’t replace the very thing that makes the work valuable.

Your expertise.

Your experiences.

Your community.

Your point of view.

If a machine can manufacture your entire content strategy without ever consulting you, I would argue you don’t have much of a strategy.

You have a production schedule.

Build the Habit, Not Another Massive Initiative

One of the things I wanted to emphasize during the workshop was that becoming an AI-first DMO doesn’t require rebuilding your entire organization tomorrow.

In fact, I’d argue that’s exactly the wrong place to start for most small teams.

Start with one question.

Ask ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude to help plan a trip for a traveler who should be interested in your destination.

Make the scenario specific. Give the traveler a budget, interests, dates, and constraints.

See what happens.

Did your destination show up? Did the machine understand what makes it special? Did it reference information that was current and accurate? Did it recommend an experience you actually wanted to be known for?

Then identify one thing you can improve.

Maybe it’s an outdated partner listing. Maybe it’s a missing accessibility resource. Maybe it’s a story that only exists in the head of a longtime employee.

Fix that.

Five days later, do another.

Then another.

Eventually, this becomes part of how your team thinks about content, rather than another overwhelming initiative that competes for time and attention.

You should also return to your traveler prompts periodically. You need to understand whether the information being surfaced has changed and whether your work is making a difference.

But don’t confuse testing AI responses with measuring a perfectly stable ranking. Different questions, contexts, and model responses can produce different recommendations.

Look for patterns. Find the gaps. Make the work better.

Being Found Is Only the Beginning

The more I work through this idea of Worth Finding, the more convinced I become that we’re looking at something bigger than a change in search technology.

For a long time, digital marketing rewarded organizations for producing content that matched the language people typed into search engines.

Now travelers can describe their circumstances, preferences, questions, and ambitions to a machine capable of assembling an answer from many different sources.

That changes the responsibility of the marketer.

We still need to make sure our information is accessible, accurate, and understandable to machines.

But we also need to give those machines something meaningful to discover.

Something that exists because we have firsthand knowledge.

Something that reflects a perspective another destination cannot simply copy.

Something that helps a traveler make a better decision.

The machines are getting remarkably good at producing answers.

Which means the opportunity for destinations isn’t necessarily to become better at producing the same answers.

It’s to become the source of something worth answering with.

And that begins with knowing what you want to be found for.