“In today’s increasingly digital business landscape, tourism businesses are discovering the transformative power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to enhance their operations and competitiveness. From automating routine tasks to gaining valuable insights from data analytics, leveraging AI can be a game-changer for tourism businesses looking to scale and thrive in a rapidly evolving marketplace. In this blog post, we will explore the various ways in which AI can be harnessed by businesses to drive growth, efficiency, and innovation.”
Here’s a pretty obvious secret – that small intro was written by AI. With a simple prompt of “Write a three-sentence intro to a blog post about “Leveraging AI as a tourism business,” the above was completed in under three seconds. Is it accurate? Yes. Is it interesting? Not really. Would this intro be deemed satisfactory to our writing team? Definitely not.
This intro covers the main point of this blog post – current AI tools can take you far, but they can’t take you to an end product, yet. There are several ways that AI tools can aid your small business, even if it’s far from perfect. AI has strengths and limitations but does present opportunities to streamline your small business. 
What is AI in Regard to Destination Marketing?
AI is a common hot topic that is hard for anyone with a Wi-Fi connection to avoid. Caught somewhere between a concern and a buzzword, many people aren’t privy to what AI actually is.
AI, or artificial intelligence, is an overarching term for technology copying human-like intelligence. This includes machines performing problem-solving, communication, reasoning, and decision-making skills to help aid human tasks.
AI has digital hands in every industry around the globe, so let’s focus on the definitions, explanations, tasks and information that most impact small businesses.
Why Destination Marketing Should Leverage AI
Tourism Businesses Have Teams With Many Hats
One of the realities of many businesses is that every employee steps up to handle several positions to make up for limited staffing. Your team needs to tackle several tasks in a short amount of time to keep things running smoothly. AI can take some of the brunt for more remedial, repetitive, simple-yet-time-sucking tasks.
AI Can Help Build the Foundation of Campaigns and Your Digital Presence
One of the tasks that commonly falls to the back burner for many tourism businesses is staying on top of content calendars, monthly campaigns, and your overall digital presence. AI can create a great start on developing campaign strategies in just a few moments. From posting cadence to budget allocation to content topics, AI will create a plan in any format you need to tweak and make your own.
Minimize Time Spent on Messaging and Content Creation
Sometimes, the majority of time spent on writing tasks is getting past writer’s block. Whether you have a blank head or just can’t get your idea from brain to paper, leveraging AI can help you sort through ideas (or lack thereof) to skip over a painful initial creation period and get to the meat of creating content.
AI Can Help Streamline Business for Remote Workers
Have employees tuning in from afar? AI can help make people feel closer. AI-driven virtual assistants and chatbots can provide support when you or your in-person team can’t. Remote employees have access to the information and assistance they need, regardless of their time zone or working hours.
Ways Tourism Businesses Can Use AI
Research and Data Organization
From Google Analytics to spreadsheets to social insight platforms to booking systems and about a dozen other examples, there are a lot of numbers to look at to feel informed about the status of your business. Manually summarizing all of the info from these platforms can become a good chunk of your time.
With AI involved, it only takes a few minutes to scrape, combine and summarize several platforms’ information into an easily digestible report. Good AI can even offer helpful analyses of what the data means and what actions you should take.
Graphics and Visuals
AI isn’t just limited to words! You don’t need to be a designer to create simple, straightforward, branded graphics for campaigns, websites, social media, or print media. Not every example will be a winner, so a human designer is your best bet if you need something formal. Yet, AI can create compelling visuals for last-minute designs, complete simple Photoshop tasks, and improve on lackluster images.
Copy
Don’t get held up on an empty page any longer! From social post copy to product descriptions to blog posts to website copy and more, AI is a great tool. AI won’t produce a finished product, but you can bounce ideas back and forth to build a good foundation of information to work with.
Social Media Planning
AI is a great way for tourism businesses to create a comprehensive social media calendar without spending hours creating the format. Whether you want a document or grid calendar, AI will spit out something you can copy/paste and run with. From listing important holidays to showing an easy way to stay present on multiple platforms, it will take minutes to do hours (or even days) of work.
For example, you need to create a Black Friday or Small Business Saturday campaign. When should you start promoting? Where should you post? How many times do you need to call it out? What should you mention in posts? Should you offer a discount? These are the questions AI can take a first stab at, and you can decide if the answers make sense for your business.
Customer Communication
Answering common customer questions is a classic time suck for tourism businesses. Instead of manually writing and answering each email, DM or text, leverage AI to respond quickly and easily. This can be done through a chatbot on the website to catch the most common questions. Thoughtfully created Chatbots can handle up to 80% of standard inquiries. You can also use AI to draft quick and accurate responses for anyone who still contacts your team.
Sentiment Analysis
Contact forms, DMs, emails, review platforms, and chatbots are a treasure trove of information. Manually going through each one is a next-to-impossible task. AI can be the muscle in completing this analysis and getting to the gems of actionable insights. From commonly missed company information to common complaints or identifying star team members who get the most positive feedback, this is a great way to discover granular or big-picture strengths and weaknesses.
Think of it as an entry-level writing and research assistant. You’ll let it take the first pass at things, but it will likely need to be reviewed for accuracy and quality.
If you have a mountain of small repetitive writing tasks like product descriptions, you can write the first iteration and give that and a list of products for AI to run with. You’ll need to make tweaks, but it will cut down immensely on projects that don’t require a heavy hand of creativity.
Limitations of AI
AI Doesn’t Produce a Finished Product
AI is only so good at this stage. It can get you started on your task, but it will also always require a detailed review and, most likely, a lot of updates.
- Copy produced by AI can be formulaic and inauthentic. If your reader or viewer can tell that a robot wrote what they are reading, they won’t give it the time of day. Especially for companies that pride themselves on being approachable, fun, and authentic, it’s important to add personality and a human touch to anything AI generates.
- Information AI shares can be incorrect or over-simplified. Always fact-check anything AI summarizes. Most of the time, you’ll find at least a few inaccuracies that would have been embarrassing to share – especially if you’re promoting your company as a leader in the industry.
- Information pulled straight from AI can be considered plagiarism. Since AI bases all its info on digital content that is already created, you are inherently taking info from other sources every time you use it. AI often doesn’t change the information enough to be sufficiently unique – placing it in a plagiarism gray area at best.
Research Limitations
As much as it seems to be, AI isn’t a know-all-tell-all tool.
- Some AI tools can’t leverage current information to answer questions. For example, the free version of Chat GPT only scrapes publicly available information up to September 2021. Anytime you need more recent data, this tool is obsolete.
- It can be difficult to understand how AI came to the conclusions it came to or where it got the data. If you’re creating a resource where you need to cite your sources, it will be challenging with content produced by AI.
“In conclusion, this post delves into the potential of AI for destination marketing to enhance efficiency and productivity, outlining the various ways in which AI can be harnessed to address operational challenges. However, it also highlights the limitations and the need for human oversight in leveraging AI, particularly in terms of content authenticity, accuracy, and the challenges associated with obtaining up-to-date information.”
Ok, we tried the AI-generated content again. Yikes.
In conclusion, AI is a great research assistant, not the CEO of your company. It can help your team in endless ways but don’t give it more credit than it’s worth. If you need help past what a robot can offer, reach out to us! Our team (of real humans) can help you grow your small business.
Want more tips specific to adventure companies?
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