Last year, we introduced AI for Travel. Since then, AI has moved deeper into how travelers search, plan, and decide. It’s no longer just supporting inspiration. AI is now influencing more of the traveler journey—shaping what gets surfaced, how options are compared, and how quickly decisions are made. AI for Travel 2.0 is a focused update on what’s changed—and how destination marketing needs to adapt right now.

Advance Travel Tourism's Midwest Team hosted an informative webinar, featuring expert discussions on Midwest travel trends, the four stages of the travel decision-making journey, and an engaging conversation with Mackinac Island's team.

Frida BahjaFrida Bahja came into tourism through environmental engineering, which means she never learned to see a destination as just a product. She sees it as a system , one with feedback loops, pressure points, and failure modes that don't announce themselves until something breaks. Now Director of Research at Experience Kissimmee and a researcher with SETTRA, she's spent her career studying [...]

Ktimene AxetellKtimene Axetell has been on both sides of the data table, and that changes how she talks about it. Before she became CEO of Arrivalist, she ran a DMO — and led that team to a National Geographic Traveller Platinum Award in sustainability, which is not a marketing achievement. It's an operational one. It requires community alignment, economic modeling, and the [...]

Josh GibsonJosh Gibson has visited all 57 of Tennessee's state parks. That's not a trivia detail — it's the origin story. He came up through digital and social strategy for the Tennessee state park system, left for a stint in product management at FedEx, and came back because mission-driven work turned out to matter more than the compensation that replaced it. Now [...]

This is the shift most teams are still underestimating. The website is no longer the center of the journey. It’s just one input. In the episode, Eric Hultgren frames this as a “Copernicus moment” and it’s exactly right. We’ve spent years optimizing for: TrafficClicksSessions But now: Travelers get answers without visiting your siteAI systems synthesize information before users ever [...]