The 1st anniversary of Chat GPT just happened on November 30 – and the way AI has grown over the last 365 days since the emergence of Chat GPT continues to boggle our minds.
Hundreds of additional AI tools popped up this past year, and while some are… clunky, others have been game-changers for companies across industries. AI is not perfect, but many tools can streamline your workday.
No matter the size of the tour company, you probably have some dead-weight tasks that suck up your time. AI can jump in as your little assistant in handling remedial tasks or complex analyses. Here are a few ways tour companies can leverage AI in daily tasks, from data analysis to content creation.
3 Important Things to know before you leverage AI
- AI, especially undertested or newer concepts of AI, is not always accurate. Ensure you review and confirm the info before publishing.
- AI doesn’t always have the most recent information to work with, so current event information won’t be included by any AI-generated content. AI-generated output can easily be considered plagiarism, so you can’t copy and paste results as your own information.
- Black-box algorithms are in play, making citing information hard to do.
With those imperative cautions, here are the ways AI can optimize your tour company.
1. Conduct a Sentiment Analysis on Your Customers
Tool: Chat GPT
Tool Description: A chat-based AI tool that will help you scrape the internet, analyze information, and provide information on various topics.
How Tour Operators Can Leverage This AI:
Customers who have experienced your tour can have feedback about their experience. Potential customers who haven’t yet booked a trip will have questions. With all this information swirling around on multiple contact forms, review platforms, and social tools, checking it all and finding patterns can be extremely time-consuming.
AI can expedite this process by finding those patterns, trends, and sentiments for you. Here is some information AI can glean from your contact form, review platform and social data.
- AI can identify which tour guides are mentioned the most in reviews, which is excellent for establishing guides that offer the most positive experiences. You can use this to reward great team members or pick their brains about how they set their tours apart from the rest.
- AI can find the most common questions that potential customers ask when considering booking your experience so you can optimize your website content and FAQ pages.
2. Create Simple Branded Graphics
Tool: Canva
Tool Description: Canva AI, coined Magic Design, allows the input of media or ideas as text and transforms them into customized templates matching the content and context needed.
How Tour Operators Can Leverage This AI:
This tool can use your design ideas, images and branding to create easy-to-share graphics for social media, print, or website content. It can also help edit an existing photo by removing the background or translating your text graphics into other languages.
While the output is not to the level of a professional graphic designer, companies needing basic, branded content can easily leverage this technology to create graphics in a matter of seconds. It can also be helpful if you are limited in your company’s visual assets as this tool can create custom AI-generated art from simple text prompts. Be careful with this, as the tool will let you do things like add a palm frond coming out of a railing on a bridge, so check your work.
3. Conduct Easy and Streamlined Research for Competitor Analysis or Market Research
Tool: Google AI
Tool Description: Google recently revamped the Google search experience with generative AI capabilities for an easier and quicker search experience.
How Tour Operators Can Leverage This AI:
Business owners have many questions about factors impacting their business, and AI can be utilized to understand market fluctuations. Google is always the go-to for initial research, and luckily, Google made this process even easier with AI. This new functionality dropped in the spring of 2023 to a limited pool of Google users, but as the response to the tool was largely positive, we expect this to roll out for all Google users eventually.
The Google AI tool will summarize multiple articles, websites, and information sources to create a clear and easy-to-understand response to your queries. Here are just a few things you can learn in a few seconds:
- How many competing operators are in your area?
- Who are the top competitors in your area?
- What companies are running ads?
- What SEO efforts are or aren’t being used?
- What companies are active on social media?
Understanding your competitors and how you size up compared to them will help you find holes in your market and create a stronger reputation in the long run.
A visual example of Chat GPT
4. Create New and Update Existing Content
Tool Descriptions: Chat GPT is great for research, content creation and information organization, while Jasper AI is great for SEO strategy practices.
How Tour Operators Can Leverage This AI:
Writer’s block – the bane of a busy person’s existence. Those simple yet time-consuming tasks can take much longer than they justify when you have hundreds of other tasks on your plate. AI can help you check these off your list without too much unproductive screen-staring.
- Tour descriptions: Repetitive website content, like summarizing tours in simple descriptions, is easily replicated with AI.
Language translation: AI-powered language translation tools can help tour operators reach a global audience by automatically translating content into various languages. Additionally, AI can assist in adapting content to specific cultural nuances and preferences, ensuring localized and personalized messaging.
5. AI Persona Chatbots
Tool: Stack AI
Tool Description: Stack AI has many functionalities, including custom-generated chatbots to engage customers, answer questions, and help them down the purchase funnel.
How Tour Operators Can Leverage This AI:
Chatbots are becoming the bread and butter of website visitor communication. If you are not yet using chatbots, you leave valuable conversions on the table. AI tools like Stack AI can create virtual assistants that can answer questions and help visitors navigate your website.
Chatbots built with Stack AI leverage the best AI models, connect to multiple knowledge bases, and create another way for website visitors to book your experiences.
6. Automated Onboarding
Tool: Voiceflow
Tool Description: Voiceflow helps companies create quick and accurate customer or internal user experience flows.
How Tour Operators Can Leverage This AI:
Especially for smaller companies, one of the hardest parts about onboarding is taking time out of your day to train new hires. AI can help you by automating platform access, sending welcome emails, sharing process information, and more so you can focus on the important training.
Tools like Voiceflow use machine learning to streamline the process and expand from the standard linear flow. AI can identify new employee positions, learning styles, strengths, and weaknesses to offer tailored training modules, courses, and business processes.
A visual example of Stack AI
7. Easily Connect AI to Your Platforms
Tool: Zapier
Tool Description: Zapier is a pre-AI technology, but it has adapted to become the ultimate AI integration tool that allows all your favorite platforms to work off each other and streamline your business processes.
How Tour Operators Can Leverage This AI:
AI is great, but it can just feel like one more platform you must log into daily. AI support tools like Zapier fix that issue by connecting popular AI tools to business integrations you already use, like Slack or Gmail. This way, you can leverage the power of AI technology without having all your separate platforms segregated.
For example, Zapier can:
- Connect Facebook messages to AI: When a new message is sent to your page, it can prompt an AI-powered, text-based question-and-answer response, ensuring swift replies to customer queries.
- Connect Slack to AI to swiftly evaluate and direct the message to the appropriate recipient or department.
- A Zapier workflow can swiftly extract key information from the incoming text in real time when a new lead is generated on TikTok.
8. Create a Simple Website
Tool: Durable
Tool Description: An easy-to-use Website creation platform that can create simple website landing pages in seconds.
How Tour Operators Can Leverage This AI:
This AI tool is great for creating a simple, mobile-friendly landing page in a matter of minutes. It won’t replace the website professionals can create, but it is great for supplementary websites that don’t require custom functions.
Consider this platform a great, affordable option for supplemental content like blog sites.
9. Summarize Email Threads and Create Action Items
Tool: Google Workspace AI
Tool Description: Another recent Google AI play that will help streamline your workspace processes – think of this as a digital personal assistant for every person on your team.
How Tour Operators Can Leverage This AI:
Can your team get bogged down in communications, emails and actionable items from said emails? Sometimes, that can take the entire workday without ever getting to the actual task. Google Workspace AI will untangle those communications and offer tasks and action items to you on a silver platter.
Google Duet AI can create notes, briefs, and documents based on the info in your emails, so you don’t have to sift through every email to find those tiny updates or details.
10. Upscale Images
Tool: Gigapixel AI
Tool Description: This AI tool can help you create crisper, larger and more engaging images.
How Tour Operators Can Leverage This AI:
Engaging images is one of the most important things in your toolbox, especially when selling experiences. If all you have to work with are blurry or low-quality images of your adventures, that’s a tough sell. With Image upscaling, you can sharpen low-quality photos to look more professional and better for grabbing your audience’s attention.
Bonus: Inventory Management and Tour Optimization
Tool: GA4 AI
Tool Description: GA4 introduced a game-changing feature called the “Insights” panel, driven by powerful artificial intelligence.
How Tour Operators Can Leverage this AI:
If you have GA4 set up, you have mountains of data begging to tell you important insights about your business – and AI can help you get that info easily.
With this AI-driven capability, GA4 can automatically detect valuable opportunities and reveal deep insights that would be challenging to uncover manually. Additionally, it can identify patterns and forecast anomalies in your data, providing you with a comprehensive understanding of your customers’ behavior. By harnessing GA4’s AI-powered insights, you can make well-informed decisions and gain a competitive edge.
Here are some of the ways you can optimize your tour inventory using AI:
- AI can offer valuable insights into which tours you should invest marketing spend in and which don’t justify a large budget.
- AI can use historical data to leverage customer behaviors and external factors to predict demand for different tours at different times.
- For companies that leverage vehicles or technology during experiences, AI can predict the maintenance of transportation and equipment, reducing the risk of breakdowns and ensuring smooth tours.
Want more tips specific to adventure companies?
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