You probably already heard about AI, and you might even have experimented with AI.
As more and more business adapt AI technology in their business processes and workflows, understanding how to leverage these tools for your own business optimization is crucial if you want to stay competitive. In this guide, we'll explore how platforms like Google's Gemini, ChatGPT, and Microsoft CoPilot can transform your tourism business operations. But will also share how you can look at other solutions to improve the profitability of your business with AI
What is AI ?
Where AI stands for Artificial Intelligence it is a technique where humans try to code software to let a computer mimic human intelligence. The AI we use with the chat interfaces we see popping up all around is called Generative AI. A smart piece of software that can create content like text, audio, video based on a large language model that has many parameters and an enormous amount data that it analyzed and discovered patterns in. This way it can predict the a next most likely output in the form of text, sounds, or pixels, images, codes etc, assisting a user in creating content.
Use cases can be help me write an email to a customer who requested; , help me write a social media caption, help me write a blog.
Generative AI creates content based on a prompt which is an instruction you give in a chat interface. It takes some practice to get the best results.
AI can also be a very good feedback system, talking with AI can make your ideas better, because it can see blind spots or gives interesting suggestions to think longer about.
It can also help with suggestion and explain what are best decisions to take.
Hallucination
Because AI predicts a next word, and if there are no proper guardrails and guidelines to stop and help the AI predicting a next word and it doesn't have the right input to properly predict the next word, it will make up a possible outcome by itself. This is called hallucinating and because it predicts a next word, what it comes up with can seem very very logical and completely in line with what you are working on, making it sometimes hard to filter out an hallucination. This means you need to very alert to that and actively ask the system to stay within facts.
Starting with AI: First Steps
An answer on where to start with AI first might be a funny one; let AI help you to implement AI in your business. By starting to work with a generative AI solution of a tool you like; experiment with Google's Gemini, Chat GPT and Microsoft Co Pilot and ask questions like: how can i implement AI in my business processes.
As with human co-workers, to help them to get the best out of their work a strategy with a clear vision and concrete (SMART) goals are essential to let humans but also AI systems collaborate in an organisation.
The Caribbean Hotel & Tourism Association wrote a handy AI Guidebook for there members
Optimizing Tourism Business Processes with AI
To decide how AI can be useful for your tourism company you need to know what AI is good in. Doing repetitive digital work, analyzing big chunks of data, personalized communications, customer care.
Searching for constraints and bottlenecks
When investing money you want to look at where you have constraints and bottlenecks in your company, can digital and ai solutions help you ? It helps to map out your processes and find these bottlenecks. AI is good in analyzing, putting the right information in templates, help with creative processes, but also as a helpdesk for example for employers to ask about guidelines and sops of your company.
Available Data Sources
When you are implementing AI you need to be sure the questions asked are based on available information. When this information is lacking, AI will fill in those details itself, leading to made up answers that might not make any sense. You can prevent this by using guardrails that should stop the AI generating answers when there is not enough info, however this can be hard and needs serious testing, because AI wants to please you. When you start Using AI, start with those parts of your business you have organized your data best for. And start organizing data properly for areas you want to use AI for in the future.
Ideas to start with as a tourism business are market research, strategic planning, copy writing, idea generation, itinerary building, creating press releases and marketing communication as a whole.
When creating new experience you can think how digital communication could enhance an experience. AI can mimic for example historical people which can enhance an experience significantly.
Start experimenting, try to automate parts of your workflow with AI, see what works, where do things go fasters, can you amplify learning in your tourism business.
Start a pilot, and then implement the workflow.
When starting make sure you have data to stir the AI with, directional guidelines for the AI, like strategy, SOP instructions, set of working prompts and templates to standardize the AI responses in the way you want.
Encourage team members to use AI and share their best practices
See using AI as a shared journey, take the lead as a manager and encourage to share best practices and ideas with each other, maybe in weekly team meeting. Don't give loose accounts, but use team accounts so that learnings and trained AI system stay in the office.
Continues learning
Teams need time to adapt to new ways of learning, besides time to learn AI basics, they also need time to experiment. Suddenly each employer also gets the role to manage their AI, let them learn.
You need to learn to ask the right questions (prompts) to improve quality, get ideas, get feedback on work etc. Of course AI can also help with asking the right questions.
Because AI learns all the times, this might also effect your workflows, to be innovative, being flexible and having adaptive teams then can easily adjust workflows to come to better results are essential.
Centralize your AI initiatives
Set up a cloud space or internal folder where you gather your AI initiatives, centralize your AI tools and make sure that AI and your team can easily reuse and improve prompts, guiding documents, comment on workflows etc. Letting AI use the right data is key for success, make sure the AI and your team can easily access and feed the AI systems with that data.
Staying focused
Where the internet already brought countless of possibilities, this becomes even more with AI systems getting smarter, the ease to chase opportunities, create new products, content etc, can quickly deviate you from your strategy. A clear focus will help you to channel your AI activities, also use AI to validate if the choices you make are in line with your focus, and frequently review you focus will help to stay effective.
Another reason to focus and create a niche for yourself is because its the only way for a tourism organisation to appear in AI agents that recommend experiences and destinations. Consumers will shift from keyword searches in Google to very detailed instructions in an AI agent, and then give feedback on what they get as a response vs ploughing through dozens of websites. To appear in such detailed searches you need to have such content, on your website and on social media.
Prompting
It helps to refine your question as good as possible and share details about your company, but also ask the AI solution to ask you questions. The new voice solutions are ideal for this; Open AI's Chat GTP io can be used as a real consultant, just have a conversation and ask all the questions you have. You will notice AI is going to ask questions back. You find the results of your conversation back in the chat, where you could ask AI again for a summery of the most important points.
A common first use of AI is content creation. Which you can do with the same generative AI solution. You can use Generative AI to first make or sharpen your strategy, then make a communication or marketing plan and then create content in line with the strategies you made.
To make sure you get an answer in the way you want it, instruct AI about the format you want your question to be answered. For example in max 2 paragraphs, in bullet points etc.
Using Templates
It helps to define templates and company guidelines to make sure everyone is using the tool the same and consistency is assured. Please note AI still needs briefing, human feedback and editing just like you would also do when you are outsourcing.
Use AI to help you learn prompting. AI is a great teacher also for learning AI. Just ask how you can instruct the AI better, or create a clear prompt from your idea.
Because it predicts the next words, it will give general output if your input is not very specific. Therefor creativity is still enormous important. But once you get result you like, it suddenly becomes very easy to scale this and or make unlimited number of varieties of it.
Creating Content with AI
One of the most logical first steps is to let AI help you in your content creation process. AI is great in helping you to create a strategy, marketing communication plan, social media plan and helping you with social media posts.
You can feed AI with your ideas and if possible a template you like to work with and it will help you fill in your plans.
AI will help you to speed up the creation and will give you content ideas that are always aligned with your strategy and branding guidelines of destinations.
To be able to create content that is truly unique and aligned with your strategy you need to learn how to create effective instructions called prompts. In a masterclass content creation with AI that I have created together with Tove Antonissen and Peter Fabricius for CBI we used a prompting framework :
- Give a role to AI - for example be a blogger - This helps to give direction to the ai and get answers related to the given role
- Give a clear tasks - write a blog for me about the Eifel tour
- Give a format - Use max 1000 words, subheading, optimize for the keywords Eifel tour and Paris and link it to my tour about Paris
- Give context - The tone of voice you want to use, which USP's to use
- Give a goal - Let visitor click on the link to my Paris tour
It helps to create more unique content if you combine such prompt with strategic and planning document to give direction to the content. It also helps to work with fixed templates that you can improve to make sure the output is presented in the way you want. If you are giving more complex instruction to a generative AI tool, its good to define which steps you want to system to take.
To be able to create unique content, you need to some expertise and expert knowledge you have into the context of the prompt, or maybe an idea for a story. It doesn't have to be perfectly written, that's what the AI can do for you, but you do need to give the unique insights that makes the content intresting to read for your audience.
It helps to realise that AI is a kind of conservative and risk avoiding, which can make the text very general and statements kind of neetral.
Giving Feedback with AI
The real magic starts when you start giving feedback to a response, and you interact with the system to create something together.
Humanize the content
You will notice a lot of AI created content looks a kind of the same, and its not hard to detect a text is written with AI. To prevent this you can do a few things;
- Use a strategy and marketing comminication plan - A strategy and marketing communication plan help to allign content you generate with your strategy.
- Create a tone of voice - Building a unique tone of voice that states how you want the AI to write makes the AI content more in line with your company.
- Use tools like Grammarly or Wordtune to help you rewrite the AI generated texts in your own style
- Feed your edited texts back to the AI system, so that it can tune your tone of voice for better results
- Keep an example document of texts you are most proud of - so the AI system can analyze your writing style and write the same
- Use analytics data to learn and understand what works and doesn't work. For example A/B testing on headlines.
From Segmenting to Personalisation
With the help of AI, also smaller tourism organisations can finally create newsletters, targeted at different segments, for example solo travellers, family travellers, b2b buyers in different niche segments. AI can help you rewrite the texts. Use data and trend reports to ground the AI to stir your segmentation. Eventually you want to grow to a one on one conversation on scale, where you want have customised interactions with people based on what they clicked, stored data about the person.
A first step can be to create AI generated personas use market information from for example CBI and combine with data you gathered about your customers and online reviews.
Analyzing your data with AI
Another logical step is to analyze your data with the help of AI. Feed AI with website and other analytics and let it find opportunities or places to improve based on your strategy. AI is great in helping you to analyse data, you can upload market reports, websites of competitors and other information to ask questions about that information. For example what is the value proposition of my competitor and how does that compare to my value proposition, where are there opportunities for me when you look at my SWOT.
Doing Research with AI
AI is great for research, and can help you to reduce cost, save time and our make insights available you could never afford. Use AI to get quickly get insights about the latest travel trends, demand and let AI identify opportunities for you. Let AI scan the latest tourism news for portals as Tourism Update, Market Information from institutions like CBI and or the latest travel trends we collected.
You can do research about market trends, but also competitors, AI tools that can be useful, or anything else, you might have spend some time Googling on. Travelers use research to get ideas on what to do for their next holiday.
Using AI as a consultant or advisor
A fascinating application of Generative AI is that you can give the AI roles like tourism advisors, a Gen Z customers, an employee and use those perspectives to help you make your strategies and ideas better, improve your itinerary, company policies and more.
Marketing with AI
Doing marketing good is expensive and complex, you need to guide a traveler along a customer journey through multiple channels with spot on niche content. AI can simplify this process by creating targeted content for each stage of the customer journey segmented towards multiple segments and eventually a one on one personalized communication. By structuring your plans and content in such a way that its easy for AI to work with you can improve and automate parts of your marketing workflows.
AI is popping up in a lot of marketing tools like for example the Influencer Marketing AI tool that helps you connect to influencers that best suit your business or marketing campaign.
An interesting feature to use with AI is that you can quickly generate different versions of ads and then test which ones work best and with which audiences, creating valuable feedback loops.
ChatBots
Chatbots are a super handy feature, that can take away a lot of time you have to spend on support or sales questions. Especially for repetitive questions, a chat bot is ideal. They work fairly simple, you upload all the content of your website into the bot and or upload support documents and or all the answers you previously gave to customers. For advise on experiences and itineraries you need to be a bit more careful what type of Chatbot to use. Especially if you are a smaller company that doesn't offer a lot of different options, you might end up with a chatbot that will say you don't have what the customer is searching for.
To tackle that you need a Chatbot that undertstands the intent between the question of the customer and your products. If someone is searching for a Roman experience, that might be intrested in history, and if you don't have this Roman experience you can offer 3 other historical experiences you might have as an alternative.
Security & Privacy
When your are selecting tools think about what happens with your data, does the product have a no train on your data and prompts policy to make sure your intellectual property doesn't leak to others.
