How to Use AI For Tourism Marketing

Artificial Intelligence is a top trend in every space right now. It is transcending digital and becoming part of the conversation for just about everything we do. Of course, this hot topic is coming up in our meetings with clients and vendors, and internally on our team. Reactions to AI range from excitement to fear, confusion to apathy. Today I’ll share with you why we’re excited, not afraid. Let’s take a look at how to use AI for tourism marketing.

How we use AI

We see AI as a tool. It’s a powerful tool, no doubt, but this is not Terminator. ChatGPT and tools like it are simply that – tools. It cannot replace our unique human creativity and critical thinking skills. AI is used to supplement creativity, find efficiencies and assist productivity. We always thoroughly review and edit anything produced with AI assistance.

Anything done with AI still needs a human touch – or even a heavy hand – in editing. My favorite way to talk about AI is as “our digital intern.” Not an intern specializing in tech, but rather a technology tool that acts as an intern! Just as you would check someone else’s work for accuracy, typos, style and brand voice, the same goes for your AI tools.

Drafts

AI is a great tool for writing first drafts. ChatGPT and another popular AI tool for marketers called Jasper, are known for their writing “skills.” Tell the tool your main points and other supporting information like style and tone, and it will spit out a pretty good first draft.

Naming

It’s also great for coming up with fun, clever names and snappy headlines and email subject lines. So often, we spend time coming up with the “just right” name for an event or themed itinerary when we could be planning the event or mapping out the itinerary (not pieces I would totally trust AI with just yet). AI is great at these – try it out and see what you get!

Summarizing

Another fantastic use for AI tools is creating summaries. Feed in your meeting notes, research notes or long-form feedback from your audience and ask AI for a summary. It can also pull out some themes to organize your thoughts or a report.

How we don’t use AI

We never use AI to create a final version of anything. Even those snappy headlines in the example above will need tweaking. This can often look like a conversation with AI, giving it feedback to come up with better and better versions until you find one you like. Sometimes, it’s straight editing. One other tactic for editing AI content is to have AI draft a few versions, then weave your favorite parts together into a human-touched final version.

Privacy

Unless you have the paid version of ChatGPT and have enabled privacy settings, the recommendations we’re hearing now is to never enter proprietary information into an AI tool. So that means no client, sensitive or proprietary data goes in to AI. The tools are designed to learn from all the data entered, so it’s best not to feed in anything that isn’t already accessible publicly.

Visuals

We are also shying away from AI-generated imagery for final, consumer-facing visuals at this point. Controversy over how the AI tools learned to create art centers around copyright concerns for artists. However, there are great AI tools for editing images, cutting together videos and other graphics. Admittedly, we have dabbled in AI-generated images before and they will still show up in some proposals from time to time.

AI Tools for Tourism Marketing Innovation & Creativity

Our favorite tools for content are Jasper and ChatGPT, and those are a great place to start as you are experimenting in using AI for tourism marketing purposes. They write well and take direction on the project, just as if you were delegating it to someone. You just get the result in seconds instead of hours or days! There are so many resources available right now on creative ways to use AI

There are so many tools to try out, and so many different uses. From Seamless.AI for sales prospecting, to PressPal by MuckRack for PR and Yoodli speech coach. Scribe AI can write down your processes (like how you use collaboration in your organization…) and all the big names in tech are developing their own. You may have already seen that Google, Zoom and Microsoft have AI tools now available.