Strategic AI Partnerships: An Opportunity for DMOs?
With travel being one of the most precious moments in people's lives, it's no wonder that the tourism sector is one of the most featured in AI product launches. This raises the question of how DMOs can establish partnerships with AI developers to adapt to changing search behaviours.
It is widely known that the travel planning process can be highly stressful, with a recent survey by YouGov finding that approximately 70% of British, American and UAE travellers find at least one aspect of booking to be stressful. Planning a trip is a very time-consuming process, with travellers demanding a more intuitive search process with intelligent live support. This is where generative AI is expected to play a significant role in improving pre-trip experiences. Despite being at a relatively early stage in transforming how travellers interact with inspirational travel content, research shows the initial positivity surrounding AI's potential for supporting trip planning.
With travel being one of the most precious moments in people's lives, it's no wonder that the tourism sector is one of the most featured in AI product launches. The recent preview of Microsoft Copilot's voice and vision feature is just one example, showing how aesthetic appeal will soon become a core part of the AI-enabled future for trip planning. This raises the question of how DMOs and the wider tourism sector can establish partnerships with AI developers to feature their full content libraries.
Being among the first sectors to be disrupted, destinations need to be prepared for the rise of AI search. Over one-third of British and American travellers already find these interfaces helpful, with the UAE (77%) showing much stronger preferences for AI-enabled trip planning. While many destinations are investing in widgets that integrate external AI trip planners on their websites, they require significant investment for full integration of these plug-ins. These tools may be helpful for travellers who are using destination websites, but the acquisition of visitors is a growing challenge given the increasing usage of generative AI in daily life. This is changing how the destination discovery process comes to fruition.
Overcoming the feeling of information overload, generative AI is now able to provide concise overviews that help travellers get to grips with the boundless travel opportunities available to them. With AI integrations also increasingly common in the latest smartphones, AI search will also become crucial for mobile visitors. At the Digital Tourism Think Tank, we see this as an opportunity for collective innovation, where DMOs and AI developers can work together to achieve mutual objectives and ensure the reliability of content shared with those browsing the Internet. This cross-industry collaboration will be vital for ensuring that the content displayed about destinations is both detailed and inspirational.
Identifying Business Opportunities
Semrush's analysis demonstrates the rapid rise in ChatGPT usage; from 264.7 million in December 2022 to 4.7 billion in January 2025. Alongside this, with AI overviews being prominently featured at the top of search engine results, the position of the dominant tech players has been made clear. AI is here to stay and it will soon become a mainstay of the travel planning process. Instead of being reluctant to embrace this future, the door has been opened for DMOs to adapt their content distribution strategies to improve their digital visibility. When searching Google for the "best place to visit in April for sun" or "Spain holiday" the AI overview, currently prioritises travel blogs and tour operator websites, raising a concern that OTAs may become more influential in destination selection. From this perspective, DMOs have a few options for adapting to this new reality:
Ramp up marketing efforts to maintain top-of-mind recall, requiring continuous investment in content development and creative ideas.
Establish stronger partnerships with OTAs to drive bookings.
Develop an AI-first funnel to attract traffic through this new format of information searches.
Taking the latter option as a long-term approach, there is vast potential for DMOs to build upon existing AI infrastructure and establish new partnerships to position their reputable guidance more prominently. This would be particularly relevant to make DMOs the leading voice when visitors have a specific destination in mind. Such partnerships will prime DMOs to increase their website traffic and enable enhanced discovery of lesser-known attractions and experiences. On the other hand, it also means significant investment in optimising online presence for AI, ensuring that content is structured and informative enough for AI algorithms to understand and recommend.
Tripadvisor's partnership with Perplexity is just one example of how collaboration can create mutual benefits. Compensating Tripadvisor for providing data from business listings that are unavailable to search engines, including summaries of user reviews, photos and opening hours, a licensing agreement with Perplexity shows the value of structured data within the travel search process. Gaining better insights into travellers' opinions, Perplexity aims to transform this information into a user graph network to group people with similar interests and provide recommendations.
With granular destination data valuable beyond DMOs, investing in data intelligence opens new opportunities to drive future success through AI partnerships. Forming detailed data strategies that extract the inherent value from data and outline who can access it in different formats will become new drivers of destination competitiveness. Recognising the value of being visible in large language models, strong data intelligence could pose new opportunities for diversifying DMO funding. Such partnerships would not only provide consistent revenue for DMOs, placing some budget resiliency in case of political and economic challenges constraining traditional funding mechanisms, but also play a strong role in segmenting audiences and strengthening the diversity of information about the best places to explore.
Initial analysis shows how partnerships between travel brands and AI developers have already been successful in attracting high intent traffic. Despite cooperation opportunities still being in the early stages of development, this enables an openness to exploring different ways of creating value and establishing a stronger rationale for following this model. With AI referrals growing exponentially, taking this approach of an AI-first funnel could be a highly strategic move given that 27% of Americans (29% of Zillenials — Gen Z and Millenials combined) have already used AI instead of the traditional search engine. With a similar uptake between Zillenials and the national average, the power of AI search cannot be ignored by DMOs. Combined with a 54% increase in the number of search results viewed when searching for information and only 12% believing that search engine ads were relevant — considerably lower than other channels — the likelihood of AI search's continued growth becomes even more likely as traditional search engines become viewed as less relevant. Even in the UK, where there is a lag time from gaining access to the latest AI developments, the role of AI search in the UK is showing signs of developing, with 13% uptake (19% among Zillenials).
Several DMOs have already embraced the transformative potential of establishing AI partnerships. These collaborations use data from DMO websites on 'things to do' to create less generic recommendations and build a stronger connection between travellers and destinations by designing a more customised itinerary based on understanding personal preferences. Examples of this proactive approach can be seen in both Madrid and Dublin. For example, Madrid Destino leveraged Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service to develop their AI virtual assistant, VisitMadridGPT, observing a significant improvement in personalised experiences and in-depth analysis of tourist preferences. Providing tailored responses in over 95 languages, being an early adopter has advanced Madrid's reputation as a smart tourism destination and enabled insights into content preferences that shape the DMO's marketing strategy.
Similarly, Dublin City Council, designated as the European Capital of Smart Tourism for 2024, partnered with OpenAI to create "A Day in Dublin", an AI-powered itinerary planner driven by GPT-4. This trip itinerary planner crafts personalised suggestions by using an automated chat function to ask specific questions that ascertain visitor interests and create a user profile. Advanced data analytics then performs data matching, aligning the identified preferences and interests with attractions, events and restaurants, complementing each suggestion with AI-powered itinerary descriptions. The very act of partnering with a leading AI research company such as OpenAI has generated considerable PR value and showcases Dublin's commitment to innovation and its dedication to providing an enhanced and personalised visitor experience.
While both examples represent a case of DMOs partnering with AI developers to launch a separate chatbot, it is not a far-fetched idea that these partnerships can become a two-way integration, building upon the pre-trained models to feed AI search with new content. Instead of solely leveraging pre-trained AI models to provide information, these collaborations could develop mechanisms to feed new, curated content back into the AI search capabilities. Such reciprocal relationships would move beyond a simple chatbot interface to create a dynamic and evolving knowledge ecosystem, continuously learning from user interactions and DMO-provided data to enhance the overall quality and personalisation of AI-powered tourism support.
Given AI search may soon become the main driver of travel inspiration, it is also worth considering whether dedicated AI chatbots may soon need to evolve. Purely text-based chatbots are likely to see their value diminish as travellers no longer need to go to destination websites to receive personalised recommendations. This requires DMOs to be alert to changing trends and consider innovative ways to support conversational marketing through external platforms, such as establishing strong partnerships with the providers of the main AI search engines. However, the role of DMO chatbots is unlikely to become completely void. Where there are opportunities for additional value creation, a dedicated chatbot may bring substantial benefits for improving user experiences. This could take the form of a map interface, as in the case of A Day in Dublin's prototype, or through integrating additional imagery to complement text-based travel recommendations, as in the case of the Tourism Authority of Thailand's recently launched TATAI System — developed in partnership with Google.
While we believe AI partnerships are the future, the question remains, how can DMOs foster lasting and productive relationships with AI developers? Active partnerships are often the route to expanded cooperation, allowing organisations to build upon existing trust. These collaborations accelerate the adoption of new technologies to design strategies built on the latest digital advancements. However, at the same time, such partnerships may naturally favour those already possessing a strong digital foundation and deepen digital divides. On the other hand, start-ups represent interesting opportunities to be more creative. Their specialised focus brings crucial expertise, combined with the ability to rapidly prototype and explore solutions. Frequently possessing the relevant contacts for major technology providers, start-ups can help facilitate connections with major technology providers while sharing their own independent opinion.
With the vast number of DMOs across the world, effectively capitalising on the value of AI partnerships will likely need national and state tourism organisations to assume a coordinating role. Having this central communication will streamline interactions with AI developers and ensure that both large and small destinations gain equal opportunities for visibility. This unified approach, while potentially reshaping existing DMO relationships, fosters a powerful collective of destinations capable of providing AI platforms with comprehensive content, diverse visual representations and up-to-date information like seasonal recommendations and opening hours. Establishing this relationship not only strengthens connections with business stakeholders, who benefit from enhanced visibility in AI searches, but also encourages more frequent content updates to improve the accuracy of search results.
Developing an industry standard for API sharing of destination content will streamline such AI partnerships by leveraging the expertise of DMOs about their own destinations. This could take the form of sharing granular content tags for better personalisation, improving the ranking of content based on the recency of updates or even designing a weighting that incorporates the crowding levels of attractions. At the same time, with image-based AI search soon around the corner, exemplified by Microsoft Copilot, we see the connection of digital asset management systems with written destination content being a crucial component that will determine the extent to which DMOs can provide valuable support for AI developers and achieve improved discovery and travel planning that positions DMOs more strongly in the process.
It is widely known that the travel planning process can be highly stressful, with a recent survey by YouGov finding that approximately 70% of British, American and UAE travellers find at least one aspect of booking to be stressful. Planning a trip is a very time-consuming process, with travellers demanding a more intuitive search process with intelligent live support. This is where generative AI is expected to play a significant role in improving pre-trip experiences. Despite being at a relatively early stage in transforming how travellers interact with inspirational travel content, research shows the initial positivity surrounding AI's potential for supporting trip planning.
With travel being one of the most precious moments in people's lives, it's no wonder that the tourism sector is one of the most featured in AI product launches. The recent preview of Microsoft Copilot's voice and vision feature is just one example, showing how aesthetic appeal will soon become a core part of the AI-enabled future for trip planning. This raises the question of how DMOs and the wider tourism sector can establish partnerships with AI developers to feature their full content libraries.
Being among the first sectors to be disrupted, destinations need to be prepared for the rise of AI search. Over one-third of British and American travellers already find these interfaces helpful, with the UAE (77%) showing much stronger preferences for AI-enabled trip planning. While many destinations are investing in widgets that integrate external AI trip planners on their websites, they require significant investment for full integration of these plug-ins. These tools may be helpful for travellers who are using destination websites, but the acquisition of visitors is a growing challenge given the increasing usage of generative AI in daily life. This is changing how the destination discovery process comes to fruition.
Overcoming the feeling of information overload, generative AI is now able to provide concise overviews that help travellers get to grips with the boundless travel opportunities available to them. With AI integrations also increasingly common in the latest smartphones, AI search will also become crucial for mobile visitors. At the Digital Tourism Think Tank, we see this as an opportunity for collective innovation, where DMOs and AI developers can work together to achieve mutual objectives and ensure the reliability of content shared with those browsing the Internet. This cross-industry collaboration will be vital for ensuring that the content displayed about destinations is both detailed and inspirational.
Identifying Business Opportunities
Semrush's analysis demonstrates the rapid rise in ChatGPT usage; from 264.7 million in December 2022 to 4.7 billion in January 2025. Alongside this, with AI overviews being prominently featured at the top of search engine results, the position of the dominant tech players has been made clear. AI is here to stay and it will soon become a mainstay of the travel planning process. Instead of being reluctant to embrace this future, the door has been opened for DMOs to adapt their content distribution strategies to improve their digital visibility. When searching Google for the "best place to visit in April for sun" or "Spain holiday" the AI overview, currently prioritises travel blogs and tour operator websites, raising a concern that OTAs may become more influential in destination selection. From this perspective, DMOs have a few options for adapting to this new reality:
Ramp up marketing efforts to maintain top-of-mind recall, requiring continuous investment in content development and creative ideas.
Establish stronger partnerships with OTAs to drive bookings.
Develop an AI-first funnel to attract traffic through this new format of information searches.
Taking the latter option as a long-term approach, there is vast potential for DMOs to build upon existing AI infrastructure and establish new partnerships to position their reputable guidance more prominently. This would be particularly relevant to make DMOs the leading voice when visitors have a specific destination in mind. Such partnerships will prime DMOs to increase their website traffic and enable enhanced discovery of lesser-known attractions and experiences. On the other hand, it also means significant investment in optimising online presence for AI, ensuring that content is structured and informative enough for AI algorithms to understand and recommend.
Tripadvisor's partnership with Perplexity is just one example of how collaboration can create mutual benefits. Compensating Tripadvisor for providing data from business listings that are unavailable to search engines, including summaries of user reviews, photos and opening hours, a licensing agreement with Perplexity shows the value of structured data within the travel search process. Gaining better insights into travellers' opinions, Perplexity aims to transform this information into a user graph network to group people with similar interests and provide recommendations.
With granular destination data valuable beyond DMOs, investing in data intelligence opens new opportunities to drive future success through AI partnerships. Forming detailed data strategies that extract the inherent value from data and outline who can access it in different formats will become new drivers of destination competitiveness. Recognising the value of being visible in large language models, strong data intelligence could pose new opportunities for diversifying DMO funding. Such partnerships would not only provide consistent revenue for DMOs, placing some budget resiliency in case of political and economic challenges constraining traditional funding mechanisms, but also play a strong role in segmenting audiences and strengthening the diversity of information about the best places to explore.
Initial analysis shows how partnerships between travel brands and AI developers have already been successful in attracting high intent traffic. Despite cooperation opportunities still being in the early stages of development, this enables an openness to exploring different ways of creating value and establishing a stronger rationale for following this model. With AI referrals growing exponentially, taking this approach of an AI-first funnel could be a highly strategic move given that 27% of Americans (29% of Zillenials — Gen Z and Millenials combined) have already used AI instead of the traditional search engine. With a similar uptake between Zillenials and the national average, the power of AI search cannot be ignored by DMOs. Combined with a 54% increase in the number of search results viewed when searching for information and only 12% believing that search engine ads were relevant — considerably lower than other channels — the likelihood of AI search's continued growth becomes even more likely as traditional search engines become viewed as less relevant. Even in the UK, where there is a lag time from gaining access to the latest AI developments, the role of AI search in the UK is showing signs of developing, with 13% uptake (19% among Zillenials).
Several DMOs have already embraced the transformative potential of establishing AI partnerships. These collaborations use data from DMO websites on 'things to do' to create less generic recommendations and build a stronger connection between travellers and destinations by designing a more customised itinerary based on understanding personal preferences. Examples of this proactive approach can be seen in both Madrid and Dublin. For example, Madrid Destino leveraged Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service to develop their AI virtual assistant, VisitMadridGPT, observing a significant improvement in personalised experiences and in-depth analysis of tourist preferences. Providing tailored responses in over 95 languages, being an early adopter has advanced Madrid's reputation as a smart tourism destination and enabled insights into content preferences that shape the DMO's marketing strategy.
Similarly, Dublin City Council, designated as the European Capital of Smart Tourism for 2024, partnered with OpenAI to create "A Day in Dublin", an AI-powered itinerary planner driven by GPT-4. This trip itinerary planner crafts personalised suggestions by using an automated chat function to ask specific questions that ascertain visitor interests and create a user profile. Advanced data analytics then performs data matching, aligning the identified preferences and interests with attractions, events and restaurants, complementing each suggestion with AI-powered itinerary descriptions. The very act of partnering with a leading AI research company such as OpenAI has generated considerable PR value and showcases Dublin's commitment to innovation and its dedication to providing an enhanced and personalised visitor experience.
While both examples represent a case of DMOs partnering with AI developers to launch a separate chatbot, it is not a far-fetched idea that these partnerships can become a two-way integration, building upon the pre-trained models to feed AI search with new content. Instead of solely leveraging pre-trained AI models to provide information, these collaborations could develop mechanisms to feed new, curated content back into the AI search capabilities. Such reciprocal relationships would move beyond a simple chatbot interface to create a dynamic and evolving knowledge ecosystem, continuously learning from user interactions and DMO-provided data to enhance the overall quality and personalisation of AI-powered tourism support.
Given AI search may soon become the main driver of travel inspiration, it is also worth considering whether dedicated AI chatbots may soon need to evolve. Purely text-based chatbots are likely to see their value diminish as travellers no longer need to go to destination websites to receive personalised recommendations. This requires DMOs to be alert to changing trends and consider innovative ways to support conversational marketing through external platforms, such as establishing strong partnerships with the providers of the main AI search engines. However, the role of DMO chatbots is unlikely to become completely void. Where there are opportunities for additional value creation, a dedicated chatbot may bring substantial benefits for improving user experiences. This could take the form of a map interface, as in the case of A Day in Dublin's prototype, or through integrating additional imagery to complement text-based travel recommendations, as in the case of the Tourism Authority of Thailand's recently launched TATAI System — developed in partnership with Google.
While we believe AI partnerships are the future, the question remains, how can DMOs foster lasting and productive relationships with AI developers? Active partnerships are often the route to expanded cooperation, allowing organisations to build upon existing trust. These collaborations accelerate the adoption of new technologies to design strategies built on the latest digital advancements. However, at the same time, such partnerships may naturally favour those already possessing a strong digital foundation and deepen digital divides. On the other hand, start-ups represent interesting opportunities to be more creative. Their specialised focus brings crucial expertise, combined with the ability to rapidly prototype and explore solutions. Frequently possessing the relevant contacts for major technology providers, start-ups can help facilitate connections with major technology providers while sharing their own independent opinion.
With the vast number of DMOs across the world, effectively capitalising on the value of AI partnerships will likely need national and state tourism organisations to assume a coordinating role. Having this central communication will streamline interactions with AI developers and ensure that both large and small destinations gain equal opportunities for visibility. This unified approach, while potentially reshaping existing DMO relationships, fosters a powerful collective of destinations capable of providing AI platforms with comprehensive content, diverse visual representations and up-to-date information like seasonal recommendations and opening hours. Establishing this relationship not only strengthens connections with business stakeholders, who benefit from enhanced visibility in AI searches, but also encourages more frequent content updates to improve the accuracy of search results.
Developing an industry standard for API sharing of destination content will streamline such AI partnerships by leveraging the expertise of DMOs about their own destinations. This could take the form of sharing granular content tags for better personalisation, improving the ranking of content based on the recency of updates or even designing a weighting that incorporates the crowding levels of attractions. At the same time, with image-based AI search soon around the corner, exemplified by Microsoft Copilot, we see the connection of digital asset management systems with written destination content being a crucial component that will determine the extent to which DMOs can provide valuable support for AI developers and achieve improved discovery and travel planning that positions DMOs more strongly in the process.
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