Travel marketing has been through this before.

When drones became broadly accessible, they changed destination marketing almost overnight. Aerial footage that once required a helicopter, production crew and sizable budget could suddenly be captured by almost anyone.

For a while, the results felt revolutionary.

Then everybody bought a drone.

Before long, destination marketing was filled with sweeping shots of downtowns, coastlines, mountains and people walking dramatically toward scenic overlooks.

The technology was still useful. It simply stopped being differentiating.

Artificial intelligence is moving through a similar cycle, only much faster.

Generative AI gave marketers faster writing, ideation and production. Then the internet started filling up with content that looked remarkably similar.

The problem isn’t AI. The problem is what happens when everyone uses the same technology in roughly the same way.

For travel marketers, the bigger opportunity is understanding how AI is changing traveler behavior, how it can improve our thinking and where it creates new opportunities to influence travel decisions.

Travelers aren’t searching the way they used to

A traditional search for an anniversary trip might begin with:

Best destinations for a 20th anniversary.

That produces articles, travel sites, reviews and social posts. The traveler then has to compare the results and narrow the options.

But that isn’t really the question they want answered.

They want to explain where they have traveled before, what they enjoyed, what they disliked, how much they want to spend and what would make this trip feel meaningful.

Large language models can synthesize that context into a recommendation rather than simply returning a collection of links.

Every useful answer increases trust. And every increase in trust changes the role traditionally played by search engines, destination websites and travel publishers.

That creates a question every destination, attraction and tourism organization should be asking:

What questions should we own?

Not simply what keywords should we rank for. What questions should travelers be able to ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Copilot, Perplexity or whatever comes next and consistently encounter our destination as part of the answer?

AI makes average content easier to ignore

As AI becomes an intermediary between travelers and websites, generic destination content becomes increasingly easy to summarize.

We think about this as the difference between commodity and non-commodity content.

Commodity content can largely be recreated without you.

Non-commodity content can’t.

It contains firsthand experience, original research, proprietary information, genuine expertise or a perspective that requires the original source to exist.

A generic article about running on an island can be summarized. A first-person account from someone who ran the route, including where they stopped, what surprised them and what they would do differently, creates something much harder to reproduce without attribution.

Commodity content still serves a purpose. The goal is knowing which questions matter enough that the answer deserves something only your organization can provide.

Creation is becoming easier. Distinctiveness is becoming more valuable.

Better AI starts with better thinking

Marketers are spending an enormous amount of time collecting prompts. But better results don’t always require longer instructions.

Sometimes the most useful approach is to give AI the messy notes, half-written email or unfinished idea and ask:

Find the strategy hiding in here.

If you don’t know enough to write the prompt, ask AI to interview you. If you find a campaign that works, ask AI to identify the structure underneath it rather than copy the execution.

The goal isn’t better prompting for the sake of better prompting.

It is better thinking.

AI is becoming another discovery layer

Organic visibility is only one part of this shift.

Advertising inside AI environments is creating another potential path between traveler intent and destination marketing.

Traditional search advertising is largely organized around keywords. AI conversations can contain much richer context, including family size, budget, accessibility needs, previous vacations and the type of experience someone wants.

That creates two compelling opportunities for travel marketers.

The first is brand demand: helping someone already asking about your destination.

The second is discovery: entering the conversation before someone has decided where to go.

Our early work in paid AI environments has also raised an important question about whether paid exposure and organic AI visibility can reinforce each other. The initial patterns are promising, but they require a different way of thinking about the traveler journey and how influence is measured.

The advantage won’t come from using AI

Soon, saying your organization uses AI will be about as meaningful as saying it uses the internet.

Everyone will.

The advantage will come from how you use it.

Can you create information AI cannot easily recreate without you? Can you identify the questions your destination deserves to own? Can you appear while travelers are still deciding what they want?

In our latest webinar, we explore how AI is changing travel discovery, what makes content worth surfacing and where paid AI may create a new opportunity for tourism marketers.

Watch the full webinar below: