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We’re more than just another consultancy. We are founding partners of byTheNetwork, an award-winning, global network of 34 independent agencies; covering 34+ key markets worldwide.
To reap the full rewards, however, travel brands need in place measures to mitigate AI’s downside: the loss of the thrill and excitement of serendipitous travel which occurs when fortunate events are allowed to happen by chance.
Not so long ago, the spark of travel began with a story – a friend’s gushing recommendation, a dog-eared guidebook knowingly passed on, or a whispered tip from a local. Not anymore. Today, more often than not, it begins with a prompt.
“Plan me a 5-day itinerary for Lisbon with great food and hidden gems,” we type into our bot of choice. In return, we receive a polished list of suggestions, complete with maps, booking links, and Instagram-ready experiences.
Generative AI is the new coded compass.
It’s flattening the travel landscape and sending us on the same well-worn paths – becoming at once our travel agent, stylist, translator, and concierge. With it comes convenience. But there’s also a creeping sense that something vital might be getting lost along the way.
Every generation of technology promises to simplify, to streamline, to optimise. And in travel, has often meant trading mystery for efficiency.
The rise of GPS navigation replaced the folded paper map and the joy of a scenic wrong turn with the certainty of a blue dot on a screen. Online booking platforms replaced the unpredictability of walking into a local inn and asking for a room with instant reservations, polished photos, and guest reviews.
With Gen AI, the balance tips dramatically. You no longer need to scroll through Trip Advisor forums or ask Reddit where locals eat. Instead, AI offers you a plan. It predicts your tastes, pre-empts your questions, and fills your itinerary with Goldilocks choices that are just right.
Its itineraries are frictionless but friction is where the real stories live– the lost luggage, the language barriers, the wrong turn that leads you to stumble across an epic street festival – these are the quiet mishaps that turn a trip into a tale you’ll tell for years.
This is why some of the smartest travel brands are now rediscovering the joys of friction. And they are doing so in one of three ways: going beyond the algorithm’s usual suspects, challenging the lens of global tastes, and adapting storytelling to be prompt-ready:
AI can’t discover, it can only recombine. This means when thousands ask it for the best tacos in Mexico City or the quietest beach in Crete, it returns the same answers over and over again.
The very tools meant to personalise travel can end up funnelling everyone to the same narrow set of “authentic” experiences.
The algorithmically amplified stampede to the same “secret” spots made famous by an invisible consensus of scraped content now makes news. But it also creates deeper problems of overcrowding, environmental degradation, cultural flattening, and community backlash.
To counter this, travel brands and tourism boards have an opportunity and responsibility to intervene.
By building AI-friendly datasets that promote geographic and seasonal dispersion, brands can steer travellers away from hot zones and toward lesser-known regions. Think beyond the hero cities and influencer trails. Make the margins of the map compelling.
One brand leading the way is VisitScotland, which has built an AI-friendly content ecosystem designed to promote dispersion.
Rather than doubling down on Edinburgh and the Highlands, the board actively highlights lesser-known regions like Dumfries and Galloway or the Outer Hebrides, using rich local storytelling and structured content to make these areas more visible to AI discovery tools.
VisitScotland’s approach offers a model for how travel brands can support sustainability, cultural nuance, and exploration beyond the algorithm’s usual suspects.
AI’s training data is often English-language, Western-authored, and SEO-optimised.
So, inevitably, it reflects a certain worldview.
It’s a code that replicates a homogenised feed of recommendations that may ignore local context, misrepresent cultures, and reproduce biases. A homestay in Bali becomes a yoga retreat. A souk in Marrakech becomes a great place for Instagram photos.
The rich specificity of a place is sanded down into a consumable slice of someone else’s narrative.
This hollowing out of cultural equity is a real problem. When travel recommendations are filtered through the lens of global tastes and monolithic tech infrastructures, we risk turning entire regions into thematic backdrops for Western wellness, romance, or adventure.
To counter this, travel brands must think critically about how their content is structured and where their data lives. Are local voices being surfaced? Are recommendations context-sensitive? Is there space for the place to speak for itself?
Intrepid Travel offers a world class example. The company curates itineraries in collaboration with local guides, giving them not only a role in shaping routes but also in telling their own stories. Local guides that are a bridge between the tourist and the country, equal parts educators, carers and organisers.
Intrepid’s digital content leans heavily on local photography, native-language place names, and cultural context that resists generic, SEO-driven descriptions. By ensuring its information is both human-led and machine-readable, Intrepid gives AI models richer material to work with, making it more likely that a chatbot or itinerary generator surfaces experiences that are truly grounded in place. For other brands, the lesson is clear: build your data around the voices and perspectives you most want travellers to encounter.
In the Gen AI era, travel discovery begins not with your website, but with a query.
Ask “Where should I go next spring that’s warm but not too touristy?”, for example, and the AI answers. If your destination, hotel, or experience isn’t encoded into its knowledge base or optimised for the right signals it may as well not exist.
This is the new frontier of travel branding. Where building prompts, embedding keywords and integrating APIs are the new travel stories.
You’re becoming a system integrator, feeding the algorithm what it needs to see you. But that doesn’t mean abandoning creativity. On the contrary, the challenge is to craft narratives so distinctive and data-rich they survive the generative remix.
To become algorithmically irresistible means understanding how AI indexes culture, content, and trust.
Smart brands will create modular, machine-readable storytelling: clear descriptions, rich metadata, diverse visual content, local nuance. Even smarter ones will invest in partnerships with locals, creators, and technologists to keep the signal from being drowned by the noise.
It’s already happening in pockets.
Japan National Tourism Organization, for example, blends precision metadata with deep cultural storytelling, making rural prefectures and lesser-known traditions algorithmically visible to global travellers. It does this by creating structured, multilingual content tagged with exact geolocation data, seasonal references, and niche activity categories, so an AI tool parsing travel queries can connect a “spring countryside cycling route” directly to a little-visited valley in Shikoku.
At the same time, it invests in richly produced editorial features like short films, immersive photo essays, and local guide profiles that bring depth and authenticity to these places. The combination ensures that discovery tools can both find the destination in the data and sell it through story. The more brands that adopt this approach, the more human the algorithm starts to feel.
The more brands that adopt this approach, the more human the algorithm starts to feel.
AI has made trip planning easier, but also more deterministic. It can nudge us toward comfort and convenience, but away from complexity and connection.
For brand owners, the task now is to build a future where the algorithm amplifies serendipity instead of replacing it. Where AI helps us wander well, rather than wander less. Where travel remains an act of curiosity, not just consumption.
The imperatives are clear. Get prompt ready. Embrace AI as a channel, not just a tool. But don’t forget the human layer—the stray conversation, the poetic misstep, the memory made not despite the chaos, but because of it.
Because in the end, the best trips can’t be planned.
→ Over 20 years experience across APAC and the UK helping redefine some of the world’s most iconic and effective brands, and leading complex research and segmentation projects from Budget Direct, Big4, Crime Stoppers, RACV and CommBank.
