Artificial Intelligence is changing the way travelers discover destinations, compare flights, find hotels, and book experiences. Discover how this new behavior is transforming travel marketing and what hotels and tour operators can do to adapt.
Artificial Intelligence is changing the way travelers discover destinations, compare flights, find hotels, and book experiences. What once required multiple searches across Google, travel blogs, review websites, airline websites, and OTAs can increasingly be done through a single AI-powered conversation.
This change is not only affecting travelers. It is also changing how tourism businesses need to think about marketing, SEO, content, and online visibility.
The use of AI in travel is no longer just a future trend. Travelers are already using AI to research destinations, find things to do, compare options, and make booking decisions.
According to Booking.com's 2025 Global AI Sentiment Report, based on research involving more than 37,000 consumers across 33 markets, 89% of respondents said they would like to use AI in future travel planning. The report also found that 67% had already used AI in some aspect of travel, with planning and booking among the most common uses.
Travelers are using AI for questions such as:
Instead of searching for individual answers, travelers can increasingly ask AI to connect all of these pieces into one travel plan.
Traditional search engines generally provide a list of websites. The traveler then needs to open several pages, compare information, read reviews, and make their own decision.
AI changes this process.
A traveler can describe their interests, budget, travel dates, number of people, preferred activities, and even their preferred pace of travel. The AI can then organize the information into a personalized recommendation.
For example:
"I'm traveling to Cancun for five days with my family. We want to spend time at the beach, visit Chichen Itza, do one adventure activity, and have two nice dinners. We don't want to spend too much time driving."
Instead of returning a list of ten websites, an AI assistant can potentially create a complete itinerary and explain why each recommendation fits the request.
This changes the role of the search engine from simply finding information to helping travelers make decisions.
One of the most important developments is that AI is no longer limited to inspiration and research.
Google has introduced AI-powered travel features that can help users find flight deals, build itineraries, and move from planning toward booking. Its Flight Deals feature has been rolled out globally, including Mexico, allowing travelers to describe the type of trip they are looking for and receive relevant flight options.
More recently, Google has expanded AI Mode with capabilities for comparing flights and hotels, tracking flight prices, viewing loyalty points and miles, and booking hotels directly through integrated partners.
This represents an important shift.
The traditional travel journey might look like:
Google → website → research → OTA → comparison → booking
The emerging journey can look more like:
AI assistant → recommendation → comparison → booking
The number of steps between inspiration and purchase can become much smaller.
This doesn't mean that OTAs are disappearing. In fact, many of them are actively integrating AI into their products.
Expedia, for example, has experimented with turning social media content into travel inspiration and bookable itineraries through its Trip Matching technology. The idea is to transform travel inspiration from platforms such as Instagram into something closer to a complete trip plan.
This illustrates a broader trend: the boundaries between inspiration, search, planning, and booking are becoming increasingly blurred.
Travelers may discover an idea on social media, ask AI to develop the idea into an itinerary, compare available options, and eventually complete a reservation without following the traditional research path.
This is where things become particularly interesting for hotels, tour operators, transportation companies, restaurants, and destinations.
For many years, tourism marketing has focused heavily on:
All of these channels remain important.
However, AI introduces another layer:
Will AI recommend your business when a traveler asks for a recommendation?
This is a different question from:
Does my website appear on page one of Google?
A business can have a good website and still have limited visibility in AI-generated recommendations if the information available about that business is incomplete, inconsistent, poorly structured, or difficult for AI systems to understand.
Traditional SEO often focuses on specific search queries.
For example, a Cancun tour operator might target:
These keywords are still valuable.
But travelers increasingly ask much more conversational questions:
"What's a good private tour from Cancun for a family with young children?"
Or:
"I want to visit Chichen Itza but I don't want to spend the entire day in a large group. What are my options?"
These questions don't necessarily correspond to one specific keyword.
AI needs to understand context, intent, entities, relationships, reputation, and relevance.
This makes high-quality, well-structured information increasingly important.
Reviews have always influenced travel decisions, but their role may become even more important in an AI-driven travel environment.
Booking.com's research found that travelers are interested in AI recommendations, but trust remains an important issue. Only 6% of respondents in its 2025 study said they fully trust AI.
This means AI-generated recommendations still need signals that help establish credibility.
Reviews are one of those signals.
A tour operator with hundreds of detailed reviews describing punctuality, guides, transportation, organization, and overall experience provides much more context than a company with only a basic website and a short description.
For tourism businesses, this reinforces the importance of consistently delivering a good customer experience and actively building a strong online reputation.
The rise of AI does not mean that businesses should stop producing content.
Quite the opposite.
However, generic content created simply to target keywords may become less useful.
Travelers—and AI systems—benefit from content that provides real information, experience, context, and expertise.
For example, instead of writing:
"The best things to do in Cancun"
a tourism business could create more useful content such as:
This type of content answers specific questions and demonstrates knowledge of the destination.
That expertise can be valuable both to travelers and to AI systems looking for reliable information.
Another important element is how information is technically structured.
Hotels, tours, attractions, restaurants, destinations, reviews, FAQs, articles, organizations, and local businesses can all benefit from structured data when applicable.
Structured information helps search engines understand what a page represents and how different pieces of information relate to each other.
For example, a tour page should make it clear that it represents a tour, while also communicating information such as:
The better a website communicates its information to machines while maintaining a good experience for humans, the easier it becomes for digital platforms to understand the business.
AI is not replacing social media either.
Social platforms continue to play an important role in travel inspiration.
Expedia's 2025 Traveler Value Index found that 61% of travelers get trip ideas from social platforms, while 73% said influencer recommendations influence their booking decisions.
Expedia has also found that video can have a particularly strong influence on travel inspiration, with its research indicating that video influenced travelers substantially more than static images.
This creates an increasingly interconnected ecosystem:
Social media → inspiration → AI → planning → search → booking → reviews
A traveler may discover a destination through a Reel, ask an AI assistant to create an itinerary, search for available tours, compare hotels, and eventually make a reservation.
For tourism businesses, being present in only one of these stages may no longer be enough.
The traditional travel funnel was relatively linear:
Inspiration → Search → Website → Comparison → Booking → Trip → Review
The new journey can be much more fluid:
Social media → AI → Search → Reviews → AI recommendation → OTA or direct website → Booking → Experience → Review
Travelers can move between platforms multiple times, and AI can increasingly connect the different stages.
This means that tourism businesses need to think beyond individual channels.
The goal is not simply to rank on Google, or have a good OTA listing, or maintain an active Instagram account.
The goal is to build a digital presence that is consistent, useful, trustworthy, and discoverable across the entire travel ecosystem.
Hotels, tour operators, transportation companies, and other tourism businesses can start preparing for this change today.
Google remains an important source of travel traffic. SEO is not disappearing.
Answer the questions travelers actually ask instead of producing generic articles simply to target keywords.
Encourage genuine customer reviews and maintain accurate profiles across important travel platforms.
Help search engines and digital systems understand your business, products, services, locations, reviews, and other relevant information.
Your business name, descriptions, contact information, destinations, services, prices, and policies should be accurate and consistent across your website and third-party platforms.
Create content that demonstrates genuine knowledge of the destinations where you operate.
OTAs, Google, social media, direct bookings, referrals, email, and AI-driven discovery can all play different roles in your distribution strategy.
AI can help travelers make decisions, but the actual travel experience is still delivered by people.
Great guides, drivers, hotel staff, customer service teams, and local experts remain an important part of what makes a travel business memorable.
Artificial Intelligence is not simply creating another marketing channel.
It is changing the way travelers move through the entire purchasing process.
Instead of searching for ten websites and making a decision themselves, travelers can increasingly describe what they want and let AI help them narrow down the possibilities.
For tourism businesses, this means visibility will increasingly depend not only on where a company appears in search results, but also on how well its business, reputation, content, and services can be understood by AI systems.
Traditional SEO will remain important. OTAs will remain important. Social media will remain important.
But a new layer is being added to the travel ecosystem: AI-driven discovery and recommendations.
The businesses that prepare for this change will need to think beyond keywords and rankings. They will need to build a strong digital presence, provide useful information, maintain a good reputation, and make their business easy for both travelers and intelligent systems to understand.
The future of travel marketing may not be about getting travelers to find your website.
It may increasingly be about making sure AI knows when your business is the right answer.