We help DMOs anchor their strategy, identify and mitigate risks, advance AI capabilities through self-paced and in-person training sessions and build the practical tools required to take AI from an automated process to an augmented workflow.
Research we have conducted with our community indicates that the transition away from traditional search is already under way. The impact is heavily influenced by a destination's brand authority, digital maturity and market composition. However, across the industry, long-standing digital strategies are breaking down.
Overall traffic decline reported by a third of surveyed destinations, marking a fundamental disruption to visitor discovery.
Peak-season organic search contribution for highly exposed destinations has fallen from 70% to 30%, completely altering how they attract visitors.
Using AI simply to mass-produce marketing copy leads to repetitive messaging that weakens trust. We frame AI as a foundational capability rather than a quick fix. By focusing on direction first, we help you build an enduring operational advantage that separates your destination from the competition.
AI cannot simply be appended to your existing setup. Isolated pilots quickly fragment and lose momentum. By deeply integrating the technology, your team builds from a shared position, ensuring every new capability strengthens the entire destination strategy.
As routine administrative tasks and basic outputs are streamlined, your team gains the space to apply high-level oversight: the judgement that decides where AI enhances creativity and where the human voice must lead. True value lies in strategic framing, human judgement and taking accountability for the accuracy and tone of your destination’s voice.
Travellers are fundamentally changing how they plan, increasingly relying on AI assistants to build their itineraries. Ensuring your destination is visible and accurately represented within these systems is a core strategic challenge. It requires high-level governance and deliberate data positioning, established long before a marketing campaign is ever designed.
Our methodology is to build capabilities alongside your team, ensuring that skills and knowledge remain within your DMO long after our engagement concludes. We focus on the tangible outcomes at every stage of our work in order to leave behind practical tools, structured data and workflows that you own entirely.
We benchmark your current digital maturity, audit your existing content architecture and map your destination's exposure to AI search platforms. We then provide your leadership team with the clear insights and data required to make confident governance decisions.
Working directly alongside your team, we build practical operational tools and structure your data. We rapidly co-design prototype solutions, testing them against a robust strategic framework to ensure they meet your destination's specific operational needs.
We deliver full capability transfer. We equip your team with the documentation, training and operating know-how necessary to manage, update and scale your new AI infrastructure entirely independently.
We focus on converting high-level strategy into practical, day-to-day operational skills, ensuring that AI can deliver long-term value. Whether the objective is to align a single DMO or to upskill an entire sector, our training provides the clear structure needed to operate with absolute confidence.
Flexible, foundational training built to establish a shared operational standard across teams.
Establish the vital baseline vocabulary and core technical skills required across your entire workforce, removing the ambiguity around automated systems and giving your team the practical boundaries to handle tools safely, day-to-day.
Move abstract ethical principles into daily, measurable practice. Staff learn to apply our sector-wide compliance framework so content, data and public communications meet rigorous accountability standards.
Flexible, foundational training built to establish a shared operational standard across teams.
High-intensity, collaborative workshops designed to solve complex strategic challenges in real time.
Interactive sessions align a destination’s whole visitor economy, giving hoteliers, experience providers and local tourism stakeholders the hands-on skills to stay visible in AI searches.
We focus on leadership alignment, risk mitigation and policy design by mapping your technical maturity and optimising internal workflows to improve efficiency and productivity.
High-intensity, collaborative workshops designed to solve complex strategic challenges in real time.
For destinations, critical factors like transparency, the impact on team workflows, environmental costs and content integrity must be addressed from the outset. We anchor this process in the AI Transparency Framework, a sector-wide standard on ethical AI use we have shaped together with our destination community. By using this framework, we make ethical choices visible, measurable and fully accountable to your stakeholders and visitors.
How clearly the integration of automated tools is communicated to the audiences and communities encountering them.
Balancing output efficiency with team development, ensuring technical gains complement.
An indicative disclosure scale for communicating the relative energy intensity of AI use. Applicable to any piece of work, any output type and any level of AI activity.
A transparent, four-level assessment indicating the exact balance of human curation and automated generation behind your imagery.
Where the organisation is today.
What the team can actually do.
The effect on the people doing the work.
We audit your existing workflows and data structures against our framework to give a transparent overview of your digital maturity. This diagnostic shows you exactly where your destination is performing well, where it may be exposed and precisely what requires your attention first.
Talk it through →We adjust our framework’s benchmarks to align with your strategic objectives. Rather than enforcing a one-size-fits-all metric, we ensure the assessment mirrors how your DMO operates, delivering data that integrates naturally into your existing reporting structures.
Talk it through →When your destination has critical priorities that sit outside our existing frameworks, we can build the necessary tools to measure them. We collaborate openly with your team to develop custom assessment criteria, ensuring the process remains fully transparent and directly aligned with your long-term strategy.
Talk it through →No destination should navigate this transition alone. We convene the sector's leading practitioners and executives to pressure-test frameworks and align on shared operational standards for the responsible integration of AI in destination management and marketing. This collaborative work is delivered through our two key flagship events:
Our flagship working event, where destinations collaboratively build, test and agree the operational standards for AI in tourism.
The defining gathering for destination brand and marketing leadership, with a invitation-only working day for senior leaders to address the strategic challenges facing destinations, a full day of keynotes from globally leading destinations and a members-only workstream exporing the key trends.
Success relies on three foundational elements: a clear strategic position, robust governance frameworks that inspire stakeholder trust and the internal capacity to sustain them. Here is how forward-thinking destinations are structuring this transition alongside our team.
We conducted a comprehensive, data-led diagnostic across the entire organisation to map existing AI usage. The findings revealed that while 91% of staff were already using AI tools, only 8% felt confident in their approach, exposing a critical structural gap. The audit identified that indexing and structuring internal knowledge was the essential first step to guarantee information accuracy and eliminate data risks.
We evaluated the distinct digital maturity and operational capacity of each department. The analysis revealed a strong internal appetite for formal guidelines, secure access to AI tools and consistent content standards. Crucially, 80% of staff were willing to commit to skill development, allowing us to design a tailored upskilling framework matched to their day-to-day operational workflows.
We established a risk-proportionate governance model that scales oversight based on the stakes of the work, preventing administrative delays. A central steering committee now manages legal, compliance and data security, supported by an internal network of peer champions to distribute knowledge. This policy environment is anchored by five proprietary frameworks that embed clear transparency and accountability metrics directly into daily workflows.
The strategy is operationalised through a phased, three-part roadmap that deliberately prioritises internal stability before external execution. The initial phase deploys the governance framework, structures core organisational data and delivers immediate operational efficiencies. Subsequent phases systematically transition each department toward documented, automated workflows, concluding with long-term optimisations for global AI search visibility.
The AI Impact Programme delivered a full-day workshop adapted for LVEP cohorts across every region of England. It paired hands-on role-specific tools with a handbook, a prompt library and a glossary, then sustained momentum through online follow-up roundtables so new skills stuck.
Destination Intelligence sets a practical evidence-based direction for AI-enabled efficiencies tailored to a regional tourism economy. It maps the AI landscape across four themes: a new operating environment, where AI makes a real difference, the new visitor journey and collective destination intelligence. Each is grounded in case studies and a curated set of tools SMEs can start using immediately.
OpenAI’s Apps SDK introduces a standardised framework for connecting AI tools across systems, providing practical implications for how destination organisations develop and integrate their digital infrastructure.
AI is transforming how destinations align influencer activity with commercial outcomes, enabling personalised content strategies that link engagement directly to conversions.
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is emerging as the cornerstone for DMOs seeking to remain credible knowledge sources, particularly as AI-driven search becomes the primary method for destination discovery.
An examination of destination organisations achieving measurable results with AI, providing practical lessons for teams at various stages of their adoption journeys.
AI-generated summaries now regularly appear before any website is visited and organic traffic has dropped measurably across many destinations. This identifies which types of content are most at risk, where resilience is strongest and what the data is actually showing.
The destinations best positioned for this shift are already adapting. This part of the series examines how leading organisations are moving from conventional search optimisation to building genuine authority in AI discovery, covering content approaches, technical infrastructure and channel strategy.
AI agents are moving from concept to practice, with direct implications for how DMOs plan, produce and manage work. This piece sets out what the shift looks like in practice and where organisations should be paying attention first.
A grounded comparison of the leading AI agent tools available to destination organisations today, examining their capabilities, limitations and where each fits within a DMO’s operational needs.
Share your destination's current AI priorities with us. During an introductory conversation, we’ll discuss how our frameworks align with your goals, helping define the correct strategic pathway forward for your destination.
Research, frameworks and field notes on destination transformation. No noise.
Industry research, open frameworks and field-tested practice on how destinations lead through AI, sustainability and brand. Since 2012.