The future of destination marketing isn’t simply about being discovered. It’s about becoming a destination that travelers, and the AI systems helping them, can trust.

Imagine planning the perfect family vacation.

You want hiking trails with spectacular views, restaurants worth traveling for, beautiful beaches, and enough activities to entertain the kids. Maybe there’s skiing in the winter, incredible shopping, and a quiet place to work on that novel you’ve been promising yourself you’d write.

Now imagine finding a destination that checks every box.

Except you didn’t really find it. It found you.

That was the premise of a recent presentation by Eric Hultgren, National Director of Content at Advance, exploring what an AI-first destination marketing organization (DMO) might look like.

The fictional island at the center of the presentation represents something much bigger than another tourism marketing campaign. It illustrates a future in which destinations use artificial intelligence to understand traveler interests, match visitors with experiences, manage availability, and create economic value for the communities they represent.

And it raises a question every destination marketing organization should be asking:

Are we creating destinations that are worth finding?

The Traveler Journey Was Never a Straight Line

For years, tourism marketing has organized the traveler journey around five familiar stages: dream, plan, book, experience, and share.

It’s a useful framework, but it doesn’t accurately reflect how people behave.

A family might begin planning next summer’s vacation while they’re still enjoying this year’s trip. A traveler might discover an interesting destination while scrolling through TikTok, forget about it for six months, and then encounter it again in an AI-generated itinerary.

Someone might be halfway through a vacation when a conversation with a local resident completely changes what they planned to do the next day.

Travel decisions have always been messy, personal, and nonlinear.

AI is making that journey even more complicated by introducing another participant into the decision-making process.

Instead of navigating a dozen destination websites, travelers can ask an AI assistant to recommend a location, construct an itinerary, accommodate a budget, or suggest alternatives when plans change.

Increasingly, the traveler isn’t the only one evaluating a destination. An AI system is evaluating it on the traveler’s behalf.

As Hultgren explained during the presentation:

“What a traveler wants is for you to be trusted and usable.”

That sounds remarkably simple. But it represents a significant change in how destination marketers need to approach visibility.

Your Website Might Be a Culver’s Menu

One of the more memorable comparisons from Hultgren’s presentation involved the menu at Culver’s.

For someone who has never visited the restaurant, that menu can be overwhelming. There are burgers, sandwiches, chicken, sides, frozen custard, and, tucked away among the options, pot roast.

Finding exactly what you’re looking for requires some work.

Now consider the typical destination website.

Things to do. Places to stay. Events. Restaurants. Attractions. Trip planning. Seasonal experiences. Visitor information.

Every category makes perfect sense to the destination marketing team that built it.

But what about the person visiting for the first time?

They’re not necessarily interested in exploring an organizational structure disguised as website navigation. They’re trying to answer a question.

Where should I take my family for a long weekend?

What’s worth doing if it rains?

Can we visit without renting a car?

Where can we have a great dinner that accommodates a child’s food allergies?

Those are fundamentally different ways of approaching the same destination.

“This menu can feel intimidating,” Hultgren explained. “We want to feel like this,” referring to a simpler experience that invites a conversation rather than requiring visitors to navigate endless choices.

AI offers travelers an alternative. Instead of learning how a destination has organized its information, they can simply describe what they want.

That means destination websites must do more than contain information. They must make that information understandable, accurate, and useful wherever the traveler encounters it.

The Rise of the AI-Mediated Traveler

The next major change in travel discovery may not be another search engine.

It may be the growing use of AI agents.

Traditional chatbots generally operate through a conversation. Someone asks a question, receives an answer, asks another question, and repeats the process.

AI agents are being developed to take that experience further by working across applications and completing tasks on a person’s behalf.

For a traveler, that could mean researching destinations, comparing available accommodations, identifying suitable restaurants, monitoring itinerary changes, or assisting with reservations.

The important distinction isn’t which technology company wins this competition.

It’s what happens when travelers begin delegating parts of their decision-making to software.

A destination might never receive a website visit during the early stages of trip planning. Instead, its information could be evaluated and presented inside an AI-generated recommendation.

This introduces a challenge for tourism marketers who have spent years measuring success through traffic, clicks, and engagement.

If the traveler discovers your destination through an AI assistant, how will you know?

And more importantly, what information will that assistant use to determine whether your destination belongs in the recommendation?

Five Questions Every Destination Should Be Asking

Hultgren outlined five areas that destinations should evaluate as AI becomes a more established part of travel planning.

First, can machines understand your destination?

This goes beyond traditional SEO. Destination information needs to be structured, accessible, and sufficiently clear for search engines and AI systems to interpret it.

Second, is your information accurate?

A wonderful itinerary becomes significantly less wonderful when the restaurant is closed, the museum has changed its operating hours, or a seasonal attraction is no longer available.

Hultgren recalled his years producing travel videos across Michigan, when destinations occasionally sent him to businesses that weren’t open on the days he was filming.

“As frustrated as I would be as a creator, I couldn’t imagine if I was actually traveling there,” he said.

For a traveler who has planned an entire afternoon around that experience, incorrect information can damage trust in the destination itself.

Third, are you answering the questions travelers actually ask?

Not the questions your organization wishes travelers would ask.

Real questions from visitor centers, social media comments, website searches, chatbots, and conversations with local businesses can reveal what travelers genuinely need.

Fourth, can travelers act on the information?

Discovery without an accessible path to booking creates friction.

As AI agents become more capable of helping travelers complete transactions, destinations will need to think carefully about how lodging, attractions, restaurants, and other partners make their availability and booking options accessible.

Finally, do you know what AI systems are saying about you?

Hultgren recommends developing a collection of 150 to 200 meaningful traveler prompts, organized by audience, budget, interests, and intent.

Run those prompts across different AI platforms. Repeat them over time. Look for patterns.

Does your destination appear when travelers ask about the experiences you offer? Are the recommendations accurate? Are competitors consistently appearing instead?

An AI visibility audit should reveal more than whether a destination’s name appears. It should help explain why the destination is, or isn’t, being recommended.

The Content AI Cannot Create Without You

There’s another part of this conversation that deserves particular attention.

For years, destination marketers have produced enormous amounts of informational content.

Top-ten lists. Three-day itineraries. Things to do this weekend. Where to eat. What to see.

Much of that information remains useful. But increasingly, AI can assemble generic versions of it without requiring travelers to visit the original source.

Hultgren describes that material as commodity content.

“Commodity content is anything that AI can surface without using you,” he explained.

The alternative is what he calls non-commodity content: original reporting, firsthand experience, proprietary knowledge, and distinctive human perspectives that an AI system cannot independently reproduce.

Consider the difference between a generic article about running on Mackinac Island and a firsthand account from a runner who has actually explored its trails.

The second piece can tell you what the terrain feels like, where the difficult sections begin, which views reward the effort, and what makes the experience memorable.

That specificity creates value.

It also gives search and AI systems a reason to reference the original source rather than simply assembling another interchangeable answer.

This is where destination marketing organizations possess an extraordinary advantage.

They have access to the people, experiences, stories, and local knowledge that make a place distinctive.

The challenge is turning that access into original content that earns attention and trust.

AI can organize information about a destination. It cannot have the experience of being there.

That distinction should shape the next generation of destination storytelling.

From Promoting Destinations to Creating Value

The most interesting opportunity for AI-first destination marketing extends beyond increasing visitor numbers.

Imagine a destination that understands which businesses have availability, which experiences appeal to different travelers, and when particular attractions are approaching capacity.

Instead of sending everyone to the same three popular locations, that destination could help distribute visitors across the community.

Instead of concentrating travel into a handful of peak weekends, it could introduce travelers to experiences available during quieter periods.

Instead of measuring success entirely through website sessions, it could begin connecting recommendations with bookings, local economic activity, and visitor satisfaction.

That represents a much larger role for destination marketing organizations.

Hultgren described the transition as “moving from broadcasting what our DMO does to orchestrating traveler movement.”

Of course, this vision depends on reliable local data, willing business partners, appropriate privacy safeguards, and an understanding that technology should serve the community rather than simply maximize visitor volume.

But the underlying opportunity is compelling.

A destination that understands its travelers and its community can make better recommendations for both.

The Future Belongs to Destinations Worth Finding

There’s a temptation whenever a new technology emerges to immediately reorganize marketing around it.

We did it with social media. We did it with search engines. And now we’re doing it with AI.

But the underlying purpose of destination marketing hasn’t changed.

Travelers still want meaningful experiences. They still want accurate information. They still want to feel confident that the destination they choose will deliver what they’ve been promised.

What’s changing is how those expectations are evaluated and who, or what, helps travelers make the decision.

For destinations, that means getting the fundamentals right while investing in the original storytelling that makes a place impossible to confuse with somewhere else.

Make your information understandable. Keep it accurate. Answer real traveler questions. Make experiences easy to book. And create the kind of content that couldn’t exist without the people who know your destination.

Because the next era of destination marketing isn’t going to be won by whoever produces the most content or attracts the most website traffic.

It will be shaped by the destinations that consistently provide the most useful, credible, and distinctive answers when travelers are ready to explore.

The question isn’t simply whether travelers can find you. It’s whether you’ve given them, and the technology helping them, a compelling reason to choose you.

That’s what it means to be worth finding.