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Destinations

AI visibility for local destination organisations

72% of destination leaders say that failing to adopt AI within two years risks their destination becoming irrelevant, while 22% have shipped any AI planning capability. Awareness is not the constraint at local level, which changes what a two-person team should do first.

What the data says

Start with what destination leaders say about themselves, because it is unusually blunt. 72% believe that failing to adopt AI within two years risks their destination becoming irrelevant, from a survey of 103 DMO leaders in April 2026. In the same study, 22% offered AI trip-planning capability on their own website. Nearly three-quarters name the risk; roughly a fifth have shipped anything. That is not a belief problem, and at local level it is worth saying plainly: the constraint is capacity, and a strategy document does not add any.

The money is not arriving either. 41% of destination marketers increased digital spend and 13% cut it, with the remainder holding steady or not reporting. At local level the practical version of that is one or two people, a campaign calendar and a website nobody has restructured since the last redesign. Any honest recommendation has to fit inside those constraints, which rules out most of what this part of the sector is currently being sold.

What a local body has that larger organisations do not is specific, current, granular knowledge of a small area — which is exactly the material models are worst at. 37% of AI users across 33 markets research local experiences before travelling, 40% of US travellers say they discovered a destination through AI, and 29% changed their plans on an AI recommendation. Experiences and small places are a fragmented long tail with no authoritative aggregator, which means one well-written, current page about a nine-kilometre walk, a Tuesday market or a transhumance festival can be the best available source rather than the thousandth.

So the useful work is in being the reference rather than in building a tool. A planner is a procurement; being correctly and specifically described is editorial work already within a small team's skills. And the risk those 72% are naming is not really that a competitor ships a better product. It is that when a traveller asks an assistant about the area, something less accurate answers — and at this scale, the thing that answers is usually a regional or national page written by someone who has never walked the route.

Three things to do

  1. 1

    Write the five pages only you can write

    The walk with its real distance and gradient, what is open in which month, how to get here without a car, the Tuesday market and what is actually sold there, the festival with its real date and what happens at it. Specific, current, dated, in plain text. Nobody else holds this material, which is why it is worth more than another campaign page.

  2. 2

    Name the operators properly

    Local visibility is operator visibility. List the accommodation, the producers and the guides with their real names, locations and opening patterns, and keep the list current. A model answering about your area will quote whatever names it can find, so it is worth making sure they are the right ones and that they came from you.

  3. 3

    Check what answers in your place

    Ask two assistants about your area as a traveller would, and note what they say and where it came from. The common finding at this scale is that a thin paragraph on a regional or national page is being cited instead of you. That tells you precisely which page of your own needs to exist.

The evidence on this page

Every figure above comes from one of these indicators. Each one links to its publisher, field period and sample, so you can check the reading for yourself.

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