Using AI Tools for Tourism Marketing
SUMMARY: AI tools can help tourism businesses edit their own writing, analyze research, repurpose content, and draft technical elements like meta descriptions to summarize web content. However, AI should not be used to create your marketing content from scratch. Travel is an emotional, story-based experience that AI cannot authentically capture. Rely on your own expertise, always verify facts, and never use AI-generated imagery for real places or experiences. Use AI as an assistant, not a replacement.
Discussions about AI use in business and marketing are everywhere, and the advice is often overwhelming. Some sources say AI will revolutionize everything; others warn against using it at all. It can be hard for tourism businesses to figure out where to start.
AI tools are now accessible and affordable, and some marketing tasks that once required more support can now be done on your own laptop. But marketing still requires a strategy, your judgment and knowledge of your place and your guests, and it requires that your business build trust through real-world communication.
So, where can AI actually help with marketing?
The quality of what AI produces depends on how clearly you ask for it. A prompt is the instruction or question you give an AI tool to tell it what you want. Often it takes several prompts to refine and get things right. AI tools work best for specific, well-defined tasks, including:
- Research and competitive analysis: Tools like ChatGPT (OpenAI), Claude AI (Anthropic), and Perplexity AI can analyze competitor websites, summarize documents, and identify tourism trends. These tools are helpful when you need to understand what other businesses are doing or make sense of industry research.
- Content editing and refinement: Upload your brand’s style guide, tone-of-voice documents or explain your tone of voice to the AI tool before you use it. AI can tighten sentences, improve grammar, and adjust tone in content you’ve already written. This is not the same as having AI write from scratch. Rather, draft content outlines and write the content yourself, then use AI to refine it.
- Repurposing existing content: Turn blog posts into social captions or adapt website copy for email. Start with your own copy and tell the tool to work only with what you’ve provided.
- Translation support: WeGlot, DeepL and Google Translate can provide first-pass translations for international visitors. Always have translations reviewed by someone fluent in both languages.
- Data and review analysis: AI can identify patterns in guest feedback or summarize reviews to spot themes, helping you understand what guests appreciate and where you might improve.
- Technical SEO tasks: AI can draft meta descriptions or generate alt text for images. Always review and edit everything for accuracy.
IMPORTANT: To protect your privacy, intellectual property, and competitive advantage, make sure you have disabled the AI tool’s ability to train its model with your content before sharing any sensitive or proprietary information. For most tools, this option is often found under “Settings” and the “Privacy,” “Data Controls,” or “Activity” sections.(As a reminder, turn off the tool’s data training setting before getting started
Tourism Tip: Use AI for tasks that take time but don’t require your on-the-ground expertise. Test it on one specific task for a week, then evaluate whether it saves time without compromising quality. For example, ask AI to help you align seasonal campaigns with channel-specific best practices or to refine tour descriptions.
Where AI falls short (and why that matters)
It invents information: AI tools “hallucinate” by generating facts, dates, statistics, and quotes with complete confidence. These hallucinations can be dangerous for tourism content about things like trail conditions, safety, or cultural practices. Always verify important information. In prompts, add: “Only use information I’ve provided. Do not add facts from your training data. If uncertain, say so explicitly” or “Cite sources for factual claims. Mark unverified information.”
It lacks local and lived expertise: AI cannot know your place, your guests, or the questions people ask as well as you do. AI-generated content often feels generic because it lacks the specific details and experiences that make your story interesting.
It can produce content people can spot: Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Claude are trained on massive amounts of text and generate responses by predicting the next words based on patterns. They don’t write from experience or emotion. Without specific prompts, LLM writing falls into predictable traps: an overly formal tone, generic content, overly fluffy or clichéd language, lists without context, abstract descriptions in place of concrete details, and many other pitfalls.
Travellers can tell when content lacks your real insights, and so can Google. Travel is emotional, rooted in specific moments, sensory details, and knowledge gained season after season. AI can describe a sunset but can’t tell the story of your guest’s experience watching it, or convey what it feels like to wake up in your lodge on a winter morning. Machine-written marketing loses the heart that makes people book with you.
Tourism Tip: Before publishing AI-assisted content, ask a colleague who knows your business to read it and tell you, “Does this feel like us?” If they can’t tell whether it came from you or from a competitor down the road, rewrite it. Your guests book with you for reasons specific to your experience, so make sure your content reflects that.
Ethical considerations and current best practices
Using AI tools raises questions about transparency, representation, respect, and environmental impact. Here are a few considerations.
Labelling AI-generated content: Standards for when to mention AI use are still developing, but transparency builds trust. If you’ve used AI to generate substantial portions of content, particularly anything presenting analysis or expertise, consider disclosing that. For social media, a disclosure might look like: “Drafted with AI assistance.” For websites: include a note in your editorial standards explaining how you use AI tools. When AI is used only for editing content you wrote yourself, disclosure is less critical.
In fact, we used AI to help organize ideas and refine language in this article. But the content and drafting were provided by a professional writer and editor with extensive experience in the BC tourism industry, digital marketing, and AI tools.
AI-generated imagery and video: Fake photos erode trust in our industry. AI tools often fail to accurately represent Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour because the data used to train them often relies on stereotypes or excludes diverse faces entirely.
So always choose real photos of people and your experiences. If you use AI for a creative concept or background that isn’t part of your tour, make sure to label it clearly. Most importantly, never use AI to represent the real people, local places, or cultural experiences you are selling to your visitors.
Environmental impact of AI tools: AI systems require significant energy and water to operate. Every query, image, or text generation draws on data centres that consume substantial resources. Use AI tools thoughtfully and run queries when they genuinely add value. For tourism businesses increasingly focused on stewardship and sustainability, being mindful about AI use aligns with the environmental values many of you already uphold.
Why AI Struggles with Culture and Ethics: AI tools are trained mostly on Western data. They can “write” about Indigenous cultures or global traditions, but they don’t actually understand the protocols, permissions, or sacred relationships behind them.
In the tourism industry, using AI to describe First Nations, Inuit, or Métis cultures (or any sacred tradition) risks digital extraction. Essentially, AI “scrapes” Indigenous knowledge without giving anything back to the community.
AI Can’t Check for Cultural Safety: AI is great at copying patterns, but it’s terrible at knowing what’s okay to share and what isn’t. It will confidently produce text that might violate cultural protocols or repeat harmful stereotypes.
How to Work Responsibly:
- Prioritize Real Voices over “Fast” Content: AI can guess what a cultural experience feels like, but it can’t replace the lived experience of a local community member, Elder, or cultural guide. Whenever possible, seek insights from the people who actually live the culture you are discussing.
- Accuracy and Naming: In BC, it’s important to name the specific and unceded Traditional Territories where you operate correctly. For example: “The xʷməθkʷəy̓əm Musqueam Indian Band, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw Squamish Nation, and səlilwətaɬ Tsleil-Waututh Nation.” AI often gets these names wrong, compacts them, and refers to them all as “Nations” when they may not self-identify as such. Always double-check against official websites.
- Keep it Real with Visuals: Avoid using AI to “invent” people, traditional attire, or cultural art. Whether it’s a carved welcome pole, a Lunar New Year celebration, or a local cultural festival, using a real (even if imperfect) photo is essential.
- The “Vibe Check”: Before you publish, ask: “Is this our story to tell, or are we just letting an algorithm guess at it?” If the content feels like a generic stereotype, it’s better to strip it back to the facts you know for sure.
Tourism Tip: AI is a fine assistant for organizing your own notes after you’ve done the real work of collaborating with others.
Recommended tools for specific tasks
Most tourism businesses only need a few AI tools. Here are some options:
- For research and analysis, ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity AI offer free tiers sufficient for most small businesses. Perplexity is great at citing sources, which is useful for research.
- For editing and writing support: Try ChatGPT, Claude, and Grammarly. Grammarly integrates into your website browser and Microsoft Word.
- For translation, Destination BC uses WeGlot, which excels at auto-translation and allows users to manually optimize and customize translations. DeepL is considered more accurate than Google Translate. Both offer free and paid tiers. Always have translations reviewed by a fluent speaker.
- For image editing: Adobe Express and Canva offer AI features for tasks such as background removal. These work with photos you already have, not image generation.
- For accessibility: ChatGPT and Claude can draft alt text for images. Always review for accuracy.
Validation and fact-checking practices
AI tools make it easy to produce content quickly, but speed is only valuable if the content is accurate.
- Verify every piece of information: Check facts against your own records, official sources, or your direct knowledge. If you can’t verify it, don’t publish it.
- Run your own quality check: Does it sound like you? Verify all information about your region, services, policies, or pricing.
- Get a second set of eyes: Have team members review AI-assisted content. Test new captions or subject lines. If guests seem confused and you get questions about it, the content needs work.
Tourism Tip: Keep a simple checklist near your workspace: Have I verified all facts? Does this sound like me? Would I say this to a guest in person? If the answer to all three is yes, you’re ready to publish. If not, keep editing.
A FINAL REMINDER: Before you get started, it’s worth the five minutes to confirm your data training settings are turned off across every AI tool you plan to use. This platform-by-platform guide makes it straightforward.
Bringing it all together
AI tools can help with specific marketing tasks when used thoughtfully. They work best as editing and research assistants, not as content creators. Nothing can replace your expertise and knowledge. The goal isn’t to keep up with technology for its own sake. It’s to free up your time for the work that actually matters: delivering excellent experiences for your guests and building relationships with your community.
Digital tools and platforms used in tourism marketing evolve quickly. Features, algorithms, interfaces, AI, and even how travellers find or engage with your content may change over time. This article is designed to remain relevant to tourism businesses in BC, but processes, settings, and terminology can change. For the most accurate and current information, always check the official documentation or help pages of the tools and platforms you use to share, advertise, or manage your tourism business online.
Last updated: May, 2026
