- Santiago Rodriguez, PhD Tourism
- Oct 19
- 6 min read
AI & Strategic Tourism: How To Be Effective (Includes AI Expert)
In today’s tourism sector, professionals face the challenge of developing strategies that truly connect with high-value visitors.
And in a context of unpredictable trends and shifting visitor preferences, crafting a targeted, successful strategy becomes a high-stakes task.
Travel brands and Destination Marketing Organizations (DMOs) often lack clear insights into consumer behaviors and market dynamics, making it difficult to be strategic for future growth.
Why Is This Important?
Tourism professionals need strategic direction to stay competitive.
A well-defined strategy helps businesses prioritize efforts, allocate resources efficiently, and align their offerings with market demand.
Without it, resources are misdirected, and businesses fail to maximize their potential.
And as global tourism becomes more sophisticated, destinations must refine their approach and engage visitors with tailored messaging.
A generic approach no longer works.
The Consequences of Ignoring Strategy.
Without a well-defined strategy, destinations and travel brands risk missing out on high-value visitors, underperforming in marketing efforts, and making costly operational decisions.
Ignoring strategy can have devastating consequences for both small and large organizations.
For big businesses, the risk lies in wasting significant resources on unfocused marketing, misaligned goals, and inefficient operations.
This can lead to stagnation, loss of market share, and missed opportunities for growth in an increasingly competitive landscape.
Smaller businesses, on the other hand, may face more immediate repercussions, such as financial strain, inability to attract customers, or disappearance.
How Others Try to Solve It And Fail.
Traditionally, tourism professionals rely on a mix of instinct, historical trends, their own experience, and generic market research to create strategies.
While these methods can be helpful, they are often based on incomplete or outdated information.
The challenge is further amplified when businesses are over-reliant on costly, traditional expert advice or over-invest in tools that don’t provide actionable insights.
Many times, these solutions overlook the local nuances and fail to align with the specific, real-world challenges tourism professionals face.
Additionally, expert advisors often miss the mark in capturing the unique context of a destination, leading to strategies that feel disconnected from local realities and ultimately fail to deliver sustainable results.
The Right Way to Tackle It: The Importance of Strategy
Addressing this problem requires a more professional, technical approach.
Developing a strategy that resonates with high-value visitors must be rooted in market segmentation, data analysis, and relevant content for effective promotion.
Tourism professionals must prioritize understanding visitor personas, predicting travel patterns, and identifying the needs of specific segments to craft effective strategies.
Traditionally, creating an effective strategy required hiring professionals with the budget and time to gather market data and segment the audience.
In the AI era, travel brands and DMOs can now leverage their own experienced staff to steer AI.
With the right critical thinking and AI training, experienced in-house staff can use AI to build
targeted strategies by combining human expertise with AI's ability to search, process, and integrate vast amounts of data.
How To Leverage AI for Strategic Action.
One simple solution is the AI Tourism Expert, which is a ChatGPT-based free-access tool designed to elevate the strategic capabilities of tourism professionals without the hurdle.
This AI tool provides detailed guidance and expert support in tourism in areas like strategy, visitor personas, data analysis, planning, coaching, product development & more.
Its goal is to help travel brands & destinations create strategies or help in the process of attracting high-value visitors, engage stakeholders & use tourism as a tool for sustained success.
The beauty of AI Tourism Expert lies in its ability to not replace human expertise but to enhance it.
It amplifies tourism professionals' capacity to understand market trends, segment visitors effectively, and design strategies that align with current and future tourism dynamics.
With AI Tourism Expert, professionals can navigate through complexity, extract clear thoughts, and build customized strategies with a higher level of precision and confidence.
Access the AI Tourism Expert here: santiagor.com/free-ai-tools
9 Ways Of Using the AI Tourism Expert.
Here are 9 ideas for how you can use AI to help you strategically:
🌍 Support on How to use AI in tourism: To start with, the AI Tourism Expert can guide you with ideas and implementation plans for your own case, uncover new AI application opportunities, or show you how to automate repetitive tasks.
🎯 Generate visitor personas: The AI Tourism Expert can help you generate detailed personas that guide product design and marketing decisions based either on online information it searches for you, or on your own data.
💼 Career mentoring & coaching: The AI Tourism Expert can act as an on-demand mentor, providing personalized career advice, leadership guidance, and coaching recommendations to help you strengthen your professional positioning.
🏞️ Tourism product development: The AI Tourism Expert can help you brainstorm and identify experience gaps, analyze visitor feedback, and generate creative product ideas that match emerging traveler expectations, improving both authenticity and profitability.
🧭 Tourism planning and strategy: The AI Tourism Expert can synthesize your existing data, search online for new relevant data, forecast market shifts, and suggest action plans that support long-term sustainable growth while aligning stakeholder interests.
💡 How to attract your ideal visitors: The AI Tourism Expert can analyze your context and growth goals and help you craft the messages and branding strategies as well as the step-by-step plan that draws high-value travelers.
🌱 Practical sustainability strategies: The AI Tourism Expert can assist you with building practical and relevant initiatives considering the social, economic and political context that create real value for your company and destination.
AI Tourism Expert quick demo
Concrete Use Cases of the AI Tourism Expert.
For A Destination Marketing Organization (DMO)
A DMO can use AI Tourism Expert to analyze past visitor behavior, regional trends, and emerging markets based either on existing data or new data that the AI itself can search for online.
The tool would help identify high-value visitor segments that the destination hasn't been targeting effectively.
For example, if the DMO traditionally focused on European tourists but noticed that international tourists from Asia are showing increasing interest, AI Tourism Expert could suggest refining marketing strategies to tailor content to these new segments.
By targeting these emerging markets more strategically, the DMO can increase bookings and expand its global reach.
For Tour Operators
For a tour operator, AI Tourism Expert can provide insights into which types of tours are trending based on historical visitor data.
If a tour operator specializes in guided cultural tours, the tool could identify specific visitor preferences (e.g., younger travelers preferring adventure tours over traditional cultural experiences).
By adjusting their offerings or creating new packages that cater to these insights, the tour operator can boost engagement and sales.
Additionally, the tool could help optimize pricing strategies and suggest the best times for promotions.
For Hotels
For a hotel, AI Tourism Expert can assist in refining the marketing strategy by analyzing guest data and local trends.
If the hotel is located in a region that attracts both business travelers and vacationers, the tool can suggest ways to personalize marketing campaigns for each segment.
For example, the hotel could craft tailored packages for business travelers during the week and leisure packages for families on weekends.
By understanding and targeting these specific segments, the hotel can improve occupancy rates and maximize revenue.
These use cases highlight how AI Tourism Expert can help different tourism professionals use data-driven insights to refine their strategies, optimize resource allocation, and ultimately attract the right visitors for long-term success.
Call-To-Action
Ready to take your tourism strategy to the next level?
Try AI Tourism Expert today and start leveraging enhanced strategies that craft your path to success 👉 santiagor.com/free-ai-tools
Conclusion
In the fast-evolving world of tourism, strategic guidance has never been more critical.
The AI Tourism Expert not only helps you craft actionable strategies based on visitors' trends but also empowers your in-house staff expertise to stay ahead of the curve.
By using this tool, destinations and travel brands can move from reactive decision-making to proactive, data-driven strategies on a budget, ensuring that they can continually attract the right visitors and achieve sustained growth.
Remember, AI is not perfect, and it is only a tool (a VERY powerful one, though). Therefore, the quality of its outcomes depends on the quality of the user. Practice to learn how to steer it in the most beneficial way, as if you were leading a group of experts, and you will achieve results as you have never imagined.
WHENEVER YOU'RE READY, HERE ARE MORE WAYS I CAN HELP YOU.
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