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Destinations

AI visibility for regional tourism boards

In April 2026 one study measured both sides of the same market in the same month: 54% of US travellers had planned a trip with AI, and 22% of destination organisations offered AI trip planning on their own website. The 32-point gap is two measurements, not a projection.

What the data says

The destination sector's AI gap is unusually well evidenced, because Sojern fielded its traveller survey and its DMO survey concurrently in April 2026. 54% of US travellers had used AI to plan a trip, from a panel of 1,006 US adults. 22% of destination organisations offered AI trip-planning capability on their own website, from 103 DMO leaders globally. 63% of US travellers said they would use an AI trip planner on a destination website if one existed.

A 41-point gap between stated demand and available supply, measured at the same time by the same instrument, is about as clean an evidence base as destination marketing gets.

The content layer is moving faster than the product layer, and for a regional body that is the right order. 64% of destination organisations now create AI-formatted content — lists, FAQs, structured answers — per Sojern's survey of 359 destination marketers worldwide.

That figure is quoted from the publisher's summary rather than the full report, so we carry it at medium confidence and flag it wherever it appears. Even allowing for that, the direction is clear and the logic is sound: being correctly described in an answer is cheaper and faster than shipping a planner, and only 26% of destination organisations have a documented AI strategy with which to sequence the two.

A regional board's particular difficulty is that it is rarely the thing being asked about. Travellers ask about a city inside the region, a lake, a wine, a walk, a film location. 40% of US travellers report discovering a destination through AI, and discovery at that level attaches to a named place rather than to an administrative boundary.

For a region the practical reading is that visibility has to be built place by place and theme by theme, with the region acting as the connective tissue that makes the relationships explicit: which valley, how far from which airport, what is open in which month.

None of this arrives with new money. 41% of destination marketers increased digital spend and 13% cut it, with the rest holding or not reporting.

The allocation is moving inside a line that mostly did not grow, which means the honest version of an AI visibility programme is a reallocation proposal — competing against campaign spend whose metrics everyone in the room already understands. Being able to put a measured baseline on the table is what makes that argument winnable.

Three things to do

  1. 1

    Build the place pages the questions actually name

    Audit which towns, valleys, routes and themes inside your region travellers ask about, then check whether each has a page of its own with explicit facts: distances, seasons, access, what it is known for, what is nearby. Regions typically have strong campaign content and thin place content, and it is the latter that gets retrieved.

  2. 2

    Write the connective facts down

    A model needs to be told that your region contains these towns, that this town is forty minutes from that airport, that the pass closes in November. Put the relationships in text rather than leaving them implied by a map or a filter. This is the part only a regional body is positioned to do.

  3. 3

    Baseline before you reallocate

    Run a fixed question set across your main places and themes, in your main source-market languages, and record the result. Repeat it quarterly. A reallocation argument made against a measured baseline survives a budget meeting; one made from sector statistics generally does not.

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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