When you work in travel marketing, you don’t just manage campaigns you read the culture. You watch for signs, interpret movement, and try to understand what’s coming long before it arrives. That’s how explorer Paul Rosolie learned to survive in the Amazon, and it’s how marketers must adapt to the new terrain of AI. Because let’s be clear: AI is not new, it’s normal.

From the Amazon to the Algorithm

In Rosolie’s world, every footprint, sound, and shadow told a story. In ours, data and digital behavior are the tracks left by travelers navigating inspiration, research, and booking. For decades, we’ve survived in one ecosystem the SEO jungle. But we’re crossing into new terrain. Google’s blue links are no longer the water source; answer engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity are. In this new ecosystem, our job isn’t to plant more trees (content) it’s to cultivate clarity. Blogs feed AI. Video delights humans. Both are essential if we want to be found by machines and beloved by people.

When “Viral” Becomes a Mirage

Marketers are obsessed with going viral, but virality rarely converts. If a post brings a million eyeballs but your town only holds ten thousand beds, you’ve gained nothing but bandwidth bills. Success isn’t reach it’s resonance. The metric that matters most? Return visits, repeat guests, and real stories shared.

Stop Cross-Posting. Start Translating.

Most organizations still push the same post to every channel and call it “distribution.” It’s not. It’s dilution. Coca-Cola’s recent campaign proved it: one video worked on LinkedIn and died everywhere else. The problem wasn’t creativity it was context. Each platform is its own dialect. To be heard, you have to translate, not duplicate.

The Bread Theory of Content

If you bake a single loaf, you can make forty different things with it croutons, sandwiches, breadcrumbs, even ornaments. One keynote, podcast, or trip recap can yield months of content if you slice it the right way. Long-form builds authority; short-form fuels attention. The alchemy is in repurposing with intent.

Trust Is the New Luxury

In travel, nobody books a trip unless it creates more value than it costs, emotionally, financially, or experientially. Automation can scale content, but it can’t scale connection. Every visitor wants to feel like the woman at the John Fluevog store seen, valued, and part of something personal. That’s the paradox of AI marketing: the more synthetic the tools become, the more authentic the storyteller must be.

Redefining Success in the Zero-Click World

As AI answers more questions directly, web traffic will become a vanity metric. So what do you measure instead?

• Mentions in AI search responses
• Repeat visitation and referrals
• Engagement depth (saves, shares, comments)
• Employee-driven advocacy and community growth

Travel marketing has always been about movement of people, of ideas, of emotion.
AI may change the mechanics, but not the mission. The job now is to craft stories that breathe, connect, and inspire people to see the world differently. That’s how we stay human in a machine-made age.