AI is the window to tourism. Who gets discovered?
Artificial intelligence is more than a tool for travel planning. It is becoming an arbiter of attention, visitor flows and economic opportunity. The question of what it will make visible, who will benefit, and who gets to shape the answer is consequential for the tourism industry.
By Pamela Pompas Oreiro, Coordinator, European Experience Alliance
A new gateway to tourism
For decades, the first step in planning a trip was a guidebook, a travel agent or a search box. Now, AI assistants play that role: travellers can ask for a weekend built around contemporary art or a food tour away from the busiest streets or activities suitable for a family on a rainy afternoon, and receive a ready-made set of recommendations in seconds.
This is no longer a marginal behaviour. Skift Research reports that nearly one-third of travellers use AI extensively for trip planning, a share that rose by 17 percentage points and more than doubled in a single year.[1]
The shift is more significant than a faster search. Traditional search asks people to scan, then compare and decide for themselves; an AI assistant on the other hand can collapse that process into a single, structured answer. In doing so, it becomes more than a tool for navigating tourism supply, but rather a gateway that can determine which providers enter the traveller’s consideration set at all.
For Europe’s experience sector, that creates three connected questions:
What will the new window show?
Who will benefit from what it shows?
And who will help shape the systems deciding the answer?
Local guides, museums, attractions, tour and activity operators turn Europe’s culture, history, flavours and geographical diversity into something people can discover and participate in. Yet this ecosystem is extraordinarily varied and fragmented: it includes organisations of every size, many rooted in one place and increasingly reliant on digital intermediaries to reach travellers. Whether AI reveals that variety or compresses it into a familiar shortlist will help determine the future of the sector.
What the window shows
AI can broaden discovery; it can interpret a traveller’s interests, overcome language barriers and connect demand with smaller businesses or cultural organisations that might otherwise be overlooked. But personalised does not automatically mean diverse. If the same highly visible or commercially dominant options provide the strongest digital signals, AI can reproduce a familiar shortlist in more conversational language.
A large-scale comparison found that an AI answer displayed an average of 3.4 domains, compared with 7.3 domains in conventional search results. An AI system may draw on a broad pool of information while still presenting the traveller with a short, apparently authoritative selection.[2]
That authority changes behaviour. In a Pew Research Center analysis of nearly 69,000 Google searches, users clicked a conventional result in 8% of visits when an AI summary appeared, compared with 15% when no summary was present. The unexpected workshop, neighbourhood tour or local cultural venue may therefore never enter the consideration set.[3]
The question is not simply whether AI can personalise a trip. It is whether personalisation expands meaningful choice or creates the illusion of variety while directing travellers towards more of the same.
Who benefits from what it shows
What appears in an AI answer does not remain on the screen. Recommendations influence which businesses receive bookings, where visitor spending lands and which neighbourhoods travellers explore. Digital visibility has economic and spatial consequences, it is part of the infrastructure that determines market access. A family-run workshop, independent guide or small museum may offer exactly what a traveller wants, but that match creates no value if the provider is absent from the answer.
The same applies to places. Recommending districts already carrying the greatest tourism load can intensify pressure; representing a broader range of credible experiences can distribute attention more widely. AI discovery is distribution power: it influences who gets a customer, which communities benefit from visitor spending and how much of a destination travellers believe there is to see.
Who helps shape the window
Recognising that power is not an argument against AI. Better tools can make planning easier and create new routes to market. The challenge is to ensure that innovation strengthens Europe’s experience economy rather than making its businesses and places easier to overlook.
That requires the people and organisations that create local experiences. Providers know which information travellers need, where discovery systems fail and what makes an experience authentic to a place. Their expertise can improve the data, evaluation and safeguards on which useful recommendations depend.
Participation is not a request for special treatment, but rather a requirement for better systems. Technology companies need representative data and testing; destinations need to make diverse supply legible without turning every hidden place into an overcrowded hotspot; providers need workable ways to supply accurate information, correct errors and challenge persistent inaccuracies.
As AI becomes the new gateway to tourism, the businesses and communities that give a destination its character cannot be treated merely as inventory, but should help shape the window.
A wider window onto Europe
World Tourism Day 2026 is an opportunity to put these questions at the centre of the debate. The digital redesign of tourism will shape what travellers consider, which businesses can reach them and which parts of Europe benefit from their attention.
The task is not to slow technology that can make travel better, but to build an AI ecosystem that expands meaningful choice, represents smaller providers accurately and treats Europe’s local diversity as an asset rather than noise to be filtered out.
For the European Experience Alliance, AI-powered discovery is part of tourism’s economic infrastructure. Technology companies, destinations, policymakers and local providers should work together on the data, evaluation, correction mechanisms and governance needed to make it fairer and more useful.
Europe needs a digital window wide enough to reveal the local businesses, cultural organisations, neighbourhoods and encounters that make people want to travel in the first place.
AI is becoming the window to tourism. Now is the moment to decide how much of Europe it will allow the world to see.
[1] Skift Research, “State of Travel 2026”; see also Skift, “Skift Global Forum 2026: Five Decisions in the Room,” 9 September 2026, https://skift.com/2026/09/09/skift-global-forum-2026-five-decisions-in-the-room/.
[2] Peixian Zhang, Qiming Ye, Zifan Peng, Kiran Garimella, and Gareth Tyson, “Source Coverage and Citation Bias in LLM-Based vs. Traditional Search Engines,” arXiv preprint, arXiv:2512.09483, December 2025, https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2512.09483.
[3] Pew Research Center, “Google Users Are Less Likely to Click on Links When an AI Summary Appears in the Results,” 22 July 2025, https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/07/22/google-users-are-less-likely-to-click-on-links-when-an-ai-summary-appears-in-the-results/.