Deciding What to Build
Should destinations build their own AI presence, or focus on providing high-quality data for others to build on?
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Building means controlling the experience. A destination that owns its AI touchpoints — whether a conversational website interface, a voice layer or a data-powered booking flow — owns the relationship with the visitor and the data flowing through it.
Building means competing with companies whose entire business is the interface layer. Destinations win by providing the cleanest, most structured, most machine-readable data and letting others compete on the front end.
The "build it ourselves" case assumes you can compete with companies that do nothing else. The "just provide good data" case assumes data quality alone wins the visitor's attention. Are either of those assumptions holding up in your experience?
How do destinations avoid hyper-fragmentation if every region builds its own AI experience?
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Local differentiation is the point. Each destination should reflect its own character through its AI presence, whether that is a conversational guide, a data layer or a voice experience. Convergence on shared infrastructure does not serve the visitor.
Fragmentation buries useful experiences under hundreds of parallel projects with overlapping scope. Visitors do not navigate by DMO boundary. Pooled investment in fewer, better-connected products serves everyone more effectively.
Would you give up your own AI interface to participate in a regional one, even if it meant ceding brand control over how your destination is presented?
If your AI presence deters certain audience segments, is that a problem or a self-selecting filter?
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AI-first touchpoints signal a destination that values digital fluency and attract the visitor profile that matches it. Audiences that self-exclude from AI-mediated experiences are making a choice about the kind of trip they want.
Deterring audiences through interface choices is never a neutral outcome. Older travellers, less digitally connected visitors and accessibility-sensitive audiences should not be filtered out by how a destination chooses to present itself.
Which audience segments are your current AI touchpoints quietly making harder to serve? Would you change that if you could quantify it?
Once the initial hype normalises, how will the heavy investments destinations are making in AI experiences today be perceived in hindsight?
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The destinations building now are acquiring capability, not just deploying tools. The teams that learn to build AI experiences in this cycle will be able to build the next generation. The investment is in organisational capacity as much as the product.
AI interface fatigue is a real risk. Destinations that over-invested in products visitors never meaningfully used will be left with hard-to-decommission experiences and difficult conversations about what the return actually was.
How much of your current AI experience investment would you commit again, knowing what you know now? What does that number tell you?
Take this back to your team
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