Rethinking Destination Technology Integration: Insights from the DTTT Accelerate Launch
Startups play a distinctive role in advancing destination management. The personalised approach inherent to working with early-stage companies means solutions emerge from a genuine understanding of destination needs.
Startups play a distinctive role in advancing destination management. The personalised approach inherent to working with early-stage companies means solutions emerge from a genuine understanding of destination needs. This particularly matters now, as destinations grapple with rapid technological change whilst operating with limited resources and specialist expertise. Startups can move quickly, iterate based on real feedback and build partnerships where both parties learn together rather than following rigid vendor-client relationships.
The DTTT Accelerate launch at the Quarter Café London Trends Hub on 5th November brought together six technology startups reshaping how destinations develop and deliver visitor experiences. Moderated by DTTT Founder & CEO, Nick Hall, the discussions explored two critical challenges facing the tourism industry:
How AI can cut through digital noise to create genuinely personalised discovery experiences.
How technology connects visitors with local culture through engaging, playful interactions.
Intelligence as Infrastructure
The conversation around AI in tourism often centres on visitor-facing applications, such as chatbots and itinerary generators. Yet, while these are often designed for personalisation, the actual experience is often far from achieving this. Discussing the concept of 'Intelligence as Infrastructure', Noelia Losantos Diaz, CMO & Co-founder of Identify Travel, Larry Kron, President & Founder of Simplified.Travel, and Xose Manuel Feijoo, Co-founder & CEO at Boldest.io, addressed the pressing challenge of visitors facing infinite scrolling and algorithmic overload when researching destinations. This means that travellers regularly struggle to find the clarity, relevance and emotional connection required for meaningful trip planning. The panel explored how interactive discovery infrastructure can transform this challenge.
Building for Context and Capability
The distinction between AI as a tool and AI as infrastructure became clear through the different approaches each startup has taken. Larry explained how Simplified.Travel creates detailed itineraries in minutes, but the technical capability to generate content quickly revealed a deeper challenge. Getting meaningful context from travellers is the essential first step for creating robust recommendations. With generic prompts asking what someone wants to do typically yielding limited responses, the real value emerges from drawing out more detail about group size, preferences, dislikes and travel style.
More critically, generative AI has a tendency to hallucinate when public information is sparse, particularly for rural or lesser-known locations. This fundamentally affects the trustworthiness of AI tools. In many cases, DMOs have more information available about these locations than is currently accessible through mainstream LLMs. Using Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to incorporate destination-specific knowledge bases ensures AI recommendations draw on verified information about hidden gems and the local destination offer rather than fabricating details. This approach demonstrates how AI infrastructure requires genuine partnership between technology providers and destinations to function effectively. Neither can succeed alone.
Rather than focusing on itinerary generation, Xose recognised how the sheer volume of content about destinations is overwhelming. With 16 million websites using maps that fail to inspire action, most destination content is static and overlooked. The challenge, as Xose framed it, is not creating more content but making existing content more engaging and easy to convert. This is where AI offers the opportunity to boost productivity by enabling self-paced discovery as opposed to passive consumption.
Xose's thinking about AI infrastructure reveals something about how smaller companies are approaching AI differently to large businesses. As Boldest operates with limited resources, the focus is not on building everything from scratch but on using AI strategically to accomplish more with less. This work centres on visualising content through interactive map platforms, making exploration intuitive and engaging for visitors.
The philosophy behind 'MapCraft AI', as Xose explained it, reflects a clear division of labour. AI excels at aggregating and organising millions of pieces of content, but the contextual understanding and storytelling that make experiences meaningful still require human input. Without human storytelling, the result would lack the emotional resonance that drives engagement and eventual conversion. This balance between automation and human curation emerged as a recurring theme, with AI viewed as fundamentally changing what small companies can achieve, not by replacing human creativity but by handling the technical complexity that once required large teams.
The Human Side of AI
Noelia brought a practical perspective on working with technology teams and helping DMOs to understand data complexity. Having initially started as an app before pivoting to a B2B model, Identify Travel offers two main products focused on making destination discovery more engaging and fun.
The discussion highlighted an important consideration that Noelia articulated clearly about the role of technology in visitor experiences. Emotions need to come from people. While AI can handle repetitive operational work efficiently, finding the same answers for the same questions, human interactions enhance experiences in ways that cannot be replicated by technology. Tour guides, for example, possess hidden knowledge and contextual expertise. As information becomes more widely available through AI systems, Noelia noted, the value proposition of guides might seem diminished at first glance. Yet their role in creating collective, emotionally resonant experiences remains distinct from individual digital discovery. A guide can understand the diverse interests of a group, adapting storytelling based on interest to create shared moments.
Finding the right balance becomes critical for destinations using AI tools. The best implementation uses technology to handle tasks it does well, whilst preserving space for the human connections that make travel meaningful.
Destination Discovery and Commercial Bias
Looking at how AI influences the destination discovery funnel revealed both opportunities and concerns that destinations need to consider carefully. Larry explained how Simplified.Travel developed a conversational algorithm that works with meaningful information in DMO systems, connecting it to visitor context. The practical application became clear through a specific case where a film company needed recommendations for locations resembling an 1800s setting. While the popular LLMs provided 3 days of great content, they then started to hallucinate.
This realisation led Simplified.Travel to create an AI agent called 'Scout' that filters out hallucinations and identifies content gaps for destinations. This is where the partnership model becomes essential. Developing a clear feedback loop helps destinations refine their approach, even turning these hallucinations into experience development opportunities, as occurred when Simplified.Travel worked with a tour operator in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas.
Xose's perspective on destination discovery centred, as he framed it, on building confidence before conversion. When visitors can explore content visually through interactive maps, seeing relationships between different experiences and locations, they develop confidence about what to book. This is fundamentally different from scrolling through lists of disconnected information, with the ultimate aim for human decision-making informed by clarity rather than algorithmic suggestion alone.
As AI becomes more natively embedded in how people research and discover destinations, the ability to present content in ways that are immediately engaging and navigable becomes critical. However, the discussion also touched on an uncomfortable reality. Advertising will eventually integrate into AI platforms, leading to commercial bias influencing recommendations. Even well-intentioned efforts like diverting visitors away from hotspots come with inherent assumptions about where people should go and whose interests are being served. Questions about transparency and commercial influence will only become more important in the coming years.
The Five-Year Horizon
When asked to consider what AI might be able to achieve in five years' time, the panel acknowledged that five years represents a long timeframe in technology development. For Noelia and Identify Travel, AI will become more deeply rooted in company operations. Success will require adopting the right skills to understand how staff and technology work together effectively. The infrastructure conversation ultimately returns to capabilities: not just what AI can do, but how organisations build the capacity to use it well.
Larry shared how Simplified.Travel is exploring ways to tease out emotional cues through prompts, potentially incorporating visual data to build recommendations with greater emotional intelligence. The concept of live itineraries that tie into fitness trackers also emerged as a possibility, adapting suggestions as people move through their day based on energy levels, weather changes or spontaneous interests.
Yet these possibilities come with clear constraints. GDPR requirements mean responsible data management and explicit consent remain essential. The technology may enable highly personalised recommendations, but regulatory and ethical frameworks will shape what is actually viable in practice. Larry was clear that the capability to do something technically does not mean it should be implemented without proper consent structures.
Connecting Intelligence to Experience
The discussion revealed how AI enables better discovery and planning, but Noelia's work with Identify Travel demonstrates how this leads to enhanced visitor engagement in destinations. Through AI-powered recommendations and gamified digital guides that leverage GPS navigation, friction is removed for a seamless travel experience. This approach illustrates how AI infrastructure does not stop at discovery and booking, but extends into how visitors actually experience destinations and how that experience generates intelligence for continuous improvement.
Identify Travel's digital passport solutions exemplify how gamification extends across multiple touchpoints within a destination. By enabling visitors to collect stamps from different locations, the platform encourages exploration beyond primary attractions whilst providing destinations with clear data about visitor flows across their territory. This multi-site engagement approach helps destinations understand how visitors move through regions and identify opportunities to divert holidaymakers towards underutilised areas or experiences that would benefit from greater visibility.
These self-guided tours provide destinations with valuable analytics about visitor behaviour, revealing what people actually visit and experience rather than relying on assumptions or incomplete data. This evidence changes how DMOs make decisions about investment, marketing and experience development. The data feeds back into the intelligent infrastructure, creating a loop where engagement generates insights that improve future experiences.
Building Experience Ecosystems Through Gamification
The second discussion further explored how technology creates meaningful visitor experiences through purposeful design and playful engagement. Viktor Waal, Founder of spotAR, Olivér Szabó, Managing Director of EcoHopper, and Daniel Ferrer, CEO of eXplorins, examined how technology connects visitors with local culture through experience-based gamification that generates value for both visitors and destinations. The conversation revealed how purposeful design, from cultural preservation to granular personalisation, shapes experiences that feel authentic whilst generating the data and insights DMOs need to continue improving their understanding of visitor behaviour within their destination.
Purpose-Driven Experience Design
Purpose can be considered from many distinct angles, revealing how different motivations can all lead to meaningful visitor experiences. Viktor from SpotAR explained his focus on preserving cultural heritage and making it accessible without barriers. He described using WebAR to create historical experiences that are easy for users to access, building a platform that enables destinations to create their own tours and routes. The mission, as Viktor articulated it, centres on a belief that every destination has its own cultural story that should be championed and shared. Without deliberate efforts to capture and share this knowledge, it simply disappears.
Viktor traced the evolution of AR technology over ten years, from early apps requiring downloads to today's WebAR that works through browsers. This accessibility matters profoundly for his mission. Examples of SpotAR's work include demonstrating historical processes like salt-making in the 1500s or providing step-by-step tutorials on traditional crafts like bell-making. In Goslar, Germany, the company even used AR to create a portal into the past by converting historical photographs into 360-degree spheres and allowing visitors to step into that moment. Importantly, SpotAR provides destinations with the platform and tools to create their own tours and routes, giving DMOs greater control over their cultural storytelling.
Viktor raised a question about whether AR is best experienced collectively or individually, pointing to a tension worth exploring. Viktor's perspective opened up a different way of looking at technology as something that could also be experienced collectively. Perhaps that is actually when it can be experienced at its best, because it becomes a participatory process where technology augments conversation and storytelling, often creating stronger memories and deeper connections to place.
Oliver takes a different approach, focusing on connecting people with sustainable travel choices. His purpose, as he explained it, centres on helping visitors have fun whilst showing their positive handprint rather than focusing solely on reducing footprints. The observation that people do what they are passionate about became central to Oliver's thinking, so connecting sustainability to enjoyable experiences becomes essential rather than making it feel like sacrifice or obligation.
Oliver described how EcoHopper now collects sustainable accommodation, attractions and events across 18,000 locations in 17 cities. The philosophy reflects his personal desire to help people do what they are passionate about. There is a refreshing honesty in this view that challenges much conventional tourism marketing. It suggests that authentic sustainability is not about certifications and checklists, but about connecting visitors with genuine local passion and purpose.
Daniel articulated a similar perspective that resonated throughout the discussion. Authentic experience remains physical, involving interactions with real people. This fundamental belief shapes how he thinks about technology's role. Technology adds a layer that enables touchpoints and can nudge visitors towards decisions without forcing them, but it cannot replace the core human interactions that make travel meaningful.
Technology Enabling Scalability
The eXplorins approach, as Daniel described it, focuses on bringing together different touchpoints in the visitor journey, allowing small individual businesses to scale direct bookings by incorporating blockchain as an enabler. The concept ties into a broader trend of granularisation, where highly personalised, one-to-one experiences become viable through technology.
Using tokenisation to create a unified system across the visitor journey, every activity a traveller undertakes, from booking accommodation to participating in experiences, gets funnelled into tokens that build towards rewards. This approach creates an efficient data feedback system that tracks the entire sales process whilst giving visitors tangible recognition for their engagement. As visitors explore destinations, they earn points for unique activities that can later be redeemed for rewards designed to reinforce local value rather than simply offering discounts. This model transforms scattered interactions into a cohesive, gamified journey whilst generating valuable data about what visitors actually do and value.
What makes this approach particularly interesting is Daniel's emphasis on enablement. In heavily marketed destinations, visibility often requires significant budgets. Instead, technology provides a way for SMEs to reach audiences without needing scale in the traditional sense. This democratisation of access represents a genuine shift in how the visitor economy functions.
Creating Data Exchange Through Gamification
Experiences created through gamification generate user data, enabling more intelligent recommendations over time. This creates a potentially virtuous cycle where engagement produces insights that support better experiences in the future.
Oliver described how EcoHopper incorporates algorithms that help visitors find information they are most interested in, but he emphasised the need for visitor feedback to ensure reliability in sustainability assessments. The mix of algorithmic recommendation and human judgment helps prevent greenwashing whilst enabling people to find authentic, local experiences. This authenticity becomes a filter through which technology operates rather than an afterthought. The algorithms serve the mission of genuine connection, not the other way around.
Gamification also plays an important role in motivating people to share data because the experience provides clear value. When visitors engage with a digital tour and earn rewards, they understand the exchange. They are sharing their location and preferences in return for a curated experience. This transparency matters not just for compliance but for maintaining trust.
Viktor highlighted how SpotAR's content management system for managing points of interest demonstrates this principle in practice. By prioritising the concept of 'edutainment', where content is both entertaining and educational, rewards add a vital dimension to visitor engagement. Using quizzes to earn puzzle pieces that unlock physical rewards at tourist offices, the delight comes not just from the content itself but from the satisfaction brought by a sense of achievement. This is an essential component for creating memorable experiences that visitors want to share.
The conversation revealed how creating playful experiences generates value beyond entertainment. Daniel articulated this clearly by contrasting how discussions about data and AI have moved beyond questions about whether to use AI to questions about who owns and controls data. The question now, as Daniel framed it, is whether destinations and smaller operators can build something on top of existing infrastructure developed by the leading technology companies, and whether the data generated feeds back into systems they control or exclusively benefits external platforms.
The Shape of Technology in Creating Meaning
When asked about the essence of using technology to shape meaningful experiences, the responses revealed complementary perspectives rooted in each founder's personal philosophy. For Oliver, the answer was straightforward: technology should help people create completely personalised experiences that are individually meaningful but can be shared with loved ones. The experience belongs to the visitor, not to the destination or the platform. This reflects Oliver's broader belief that tourism should empower visitors to discover what resonates with them personally.
Viktor noted developments in 3D content generation, particularly from China, where platforms like Tencent offer completely free tools for creating 3D models from images. While these models cannot be used directly for AR due to the need to optimise polygons — the geometric building blocks for composing 3D computer graphics — the rapid development of these capabilities means the process of creating content that once took months can now happen much more quickly. Yet, Viktor was clear that the specialist work of reducing and optimising models still requires human expertise. He also gave an overview of how AI speeds up content creation, using existing point-of-interest data to generate short descriptions and quiz questions as well as creating audio using ElevenLabs.
Similarly, Daniel highlighted how the design process itself has fundamentally changed. Interfaces can be developed in dramatically shorter timeframes. As a result, eXplorins are actively considering rebuilding entire systems because the speed at which development can happen has changed so radically. While the tools are available and development is faster, testing and iteration have become even more critical. Speed without strategic thinking and proper testing creates more problems rather than solving them. This means teams need to be increasingly agile and prepared to rethink their entire approach to design and development.
Looking Forward
Across both discussions, a clear consensus emerged that technology functions best as an enabler rather than a replacement for human connection. While development timelines are accelerating, the contextual understanding, emotional resonance and storytelling that make experiences meaningful still require human expertise.
The conversations also revealed consensus about partnership, transparency and trust as prerequisites for success. The genuine collaboration of DMOs and startups will be the driver of effective solutions that solve real destination challenges in a period where visitors are increasingly raising their expectations as technology creates new ways of experiencing destinations. Through these interactions, the entire ecosystem becomes more intelligent as DMOs gain valuable data and insights directly from satisfied visitors engaging with content in new ways.
The companies participating in DTTT Accelerate demonstrate strategic thinking about how emerging technologies, from AI and AR to blockchain and gamification, are reshaping the experience economy. With this future actively being built now, success depends on destinations recognising that technology investment means committing to collaborative partnerships and transparent communication.
Startups working closely with DMOs often identify strategic positioning opportunities that destinations themselves cannot see clearly. With so many technological possibilities available, DMOs often feel overwhelmed about where to invest resources. The startups that succeed in this space are those that move beyond simply delivering technology to helping destinations understand how different technologies connect to create cohesive visitor journeys. This requires strong relationships built on mutual learning rather than transactional vendor-client dynamics. When destinations engage with startups as strategic partners who understand both the technology and the tourism context, they gain not just tools but the strategic clarity needed to use those tools effectively.
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Startups play a distinctive role in advancing destination management. The personalised approach inherent to working with early-stage companies means solutions emerge from a genuine understanding of destination needs. This particularly matters now, as destinations grapple with rapid technological change whilst operating with limited resources and specialist expertise. Startups can move quickly, iterate based on real feedback and build partnerships where both parties learn together rather than following rigid vendor-client relationships.
The DTTT Accelerate launch at the Quarter Café London Trends Hub on 5th November brought together six technology startups reshaping how destinations develop and deliver visitor experiences. Moderated by DTTT Founder & CEO, Nick Hall, the discussions explored two critical challenges facing the tourism industry:
How AI can cut through digital noise to create genuinely personalised discovery experiences.
How technology connects visitors with local culture through engaging, playful interactions.
Intelligence as Infrastructure
The conversation around AI in tourism often centres on visitor-facing applications, such as chatbots and itinerary generators. Yet, while these are often designed for personalisation, the actual experience is often far from achieving this. Discussing the concept of 'Intelligence as Infrastructure', Noelia Losantos Diaz, CMO & Co-founder of Identify Travel, Larry Kron, President & Founder of Simplified.Travel, and Xose Manuel Feijoo, Co-founder & CEO at Boldest.io, addressed the pressing challenge of visitors facing infinite scrolling and algorithmic overload when researching destinations. This means that travellers regularly struggle to find the clarity, relevance and emotional connection required for meaningful trip planning. The panel explored how interactive discovery infrastructure can transform this challenge.
Building for Context and Capability
The distinction between AI as a tool and AI as infrastructure became clear through the different approaches each startup has taken. Larry explained how Simplified.Travel creates detailed itineraries in minutes, but the technical capability to generate content quickly revealed a deeper challenge. Getting meaningful context from travellers is the essential first step for creating robust recommendations. With generic prompts asking what someone wants to do typically yielding limited responses, the real value emerges from drawing out more detail about group size, preferences, dislikes and travel style.
More critically, generative AI has a tendency to hallucinate when public information is sparse, particularly for rural or lesser-known locations. This fundamentally affects the trustworthiness of AI tools. In many cases, DMOs have more information available about these locations than is currently accessible through mainstream LLMs. Using Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to incorporate destination-specific knowledge bases ensures AI recommendations draw on verified information about hidden gems and the local destination offer rather than fabricating details. This approach demonstrates how AI infrastructure requires genuine partnership between technology providers and destinations to function effectively. Neither can succeed alone.
Rather than focusing on itinerary generation, Xose recognised how the sheer volume of content about destinations is overwhelming. With 16 million websites using maps that fail to inspire action, most destination content is static and overlooked. The challenge, as Xose framed it, is not creating more content but making existing content more engaging and easy to convert. This is where AI offers the opportunity to boost productivity by enabling self-paced discovery as opposed to passive consumption.
Xose's thinking about AI infrastructure reveals something about how smaller companies are approaching AI differently to large businesses. As Boldest operates with limited resources, the focus is not on building everything from scratch but on using AI strategically to accomplish more with less. This work centres on visualising content through interactive map platforms, making exploration intuitive and engaging for visitors.
The philosophy behind 'MapCraft AI', as Xose explained it, reflects a clear division of labour. AI excels at aggregating and organising millions of pieces of content, but the contextual understanding and storytelling that make experiences meaningful still require human input. Without human storytelling, the result would lack the emotional resonance that drives engagement and eventual conversion. This balance between automation and human curation emerged as a recurring theme, with AI viewed as fundamentally changing what small companies can achieve, not by replacing human creativity but by handling the technical complexity that once required large teams.
The Human Side of AI
Noelia brought a practical perspective on working with technology teams and helping DMOs to understand data complexity. Having initially started as an app before pivoting to a B2B model, Identify Travel offers two main products focused on making destination discovery more engaging and fun.
The discussion highlighted an important consideration that Noelia articulated clearly about the role of technology in visitor experiences. Emotions need to come from people. While AI can handle repetitive operational work efficiently, finding the same answers for the same questions, human interactions enhance experiences in ways that cannot be replicated by technology. Tour guides, for example, possess hidden knowledge and contextual expertise. As information becomes more widely available through AI systems, Noelia noted, the value proposition of guides might seem diminished at first glance. Yet their role in creating collective, emotionally resonant experiences remains distinct from individual digital discovery. A guide can understand the diverse interests of a group, adapting storytelling based on interest to create shared moments.
Finding the right balance becomes critical for destinations using AI tools. The best implementation uses technology to handle tasks it does well, whilst preserving space for the human connections that make travel meaningful.
Destination Discovery and Commercial Bias
Looking at how AI influences the destination discovery funnel revealed both opportunities and concerns that destinations need to consider carefully. Larry explained how Simplified.Travel developed a conversational algorithm that works with meaningful information in DMO systems, connecting it to visitor context. The practical application became clear through a specific case where a film company needed recommendations for locations resembling an 1800s setting. While the popular LLMs provided 3 days of great content, they then started to hallucinate.
This realisation led Simplified.Travel to create an AI agent called 'Scout' that filters out hallucinations and identifies content gaps for destinations. This is where the partnership model becomes essential. Developing a clear feedback loop helps destinations refine their approach, even turning these hallucinations into experience development opportunities, as occurred when Simplified.Travel worked with a tour operator in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas.
Xose's perspective on destination discovery centred, as he framed it, on building confidence before conversion. When visitors can explore content visually through interactive maps, seeing relationships between different experiences and locations, they develop confidence about what to book. This is fundamentally different from scrolling through lists of disconnected information, with the ultimate aim for human decision-making informed by clarity rather than algorithmic suggestion alone.
As AI becomes more natively embedded in how people research and discover destinations, the ability to present content in ways that are immediately engaging and navigable becomes critical. However, the discussion also touched on an uncomfortable reality. Advertising will eventually integrate into AI platforms, leading to commercial bias influencing recommendations. Even well-intentioned efforts like diverting visitors away from hotspots come with inherent assumptions about where people should go and whose interests are being served. Questions about transparency and commercial influence will only become more important in the coming years.
The Five-Year Horizon
When asked to consider what AI might be able to achieve in five years' time, the panel acknowledged that five years represents a long timeframe in technology development. For Noelia and Identify Travel, AI will become more deeply rooted in company operations. Success will require adopting the right skills to understand how staff and technology work together effectively. The infrastructure conversation ultimately returns to capabilities: not just what AI can do, but how organisations build the capacity to use it well.
Larry shared how Simplified.Travel is exploring ways to tease out emotional cues through prompts, potentially incorporating visual data to build recommendations with greater emotional intelligence. The concept of live itineraries that tie into fitness trackers also emerged as a possibility, adapting suggestions as people move through their day based on energy levels, weather changes or spontaneous interests.
Yet these possibilities come with clear constraints. GDPR requirements mean responsible data management and explicit consent remain essential. The technology may enable highly personalised recommendations, but regulatory and ethical frameworks will shape what is actually viable in practice. Larry was clear that the capability to do something technically does not mean it should be implemented without proper consent structures.
Connecting Intelligence to Experience
The discussion revealed how AI enables better discovery and planning, but Noelia's work with Identify Travel demonstrates how this leads to enhanced visitor engagement in destinations. Through AI-powered recommendations and gamified digital guides that leverage GPS navigation, friction is removed for a seamless travel experience. This approach illustrates how AI infrastructure does not stop at discovery and booking, but extends into how visitors actually experience destinations and how that experience generates intelligence for continuous improvement.
Identify Travel's digital passport solutions exemplify how gamification extends across multiple touchpoints within a destination. By enabling visitors to collect stamps from different locations, the platform encourages exploration beyond primary attractions whilst providing destinations with clear data about visitor flows across their territory. This multi-site engagement approach helps destinations understand how visitors move through regions and identify opportunities to divert holidaymakers towards underutilised areas or experiences that would benefit from greater visibility.
These self-guided tours provide destinations with valuable analytics about visitor behaviour, revealing what people actually visit and experience rather than relying on assumptions or incomplete data. This evidence changes how DMOs make decisions about investment, marketing and experience development. The data feeds back into the intelligent infrastructure, creating a loop where engagement generates insights that improve future experiences.
Building Experience Ecosystems Through Gamification
The second discussion further explored how technology creates meaningful visitor experiences through purposeful design and playful engagement. Viktor Waal, Founder of spotAR, Olivér Szabó, Managing Director of EcoHopper, and Daniel Ferrer, CEO of eXplorins, examined how technology connects visitors with local culture through experience-based gamification that generates value for both visitors and destinations. The conversation revealed how purposeful design, from cultural preservation to granular personalisation, shapes experiences that feel authentic whilst generating the data and insights DMOs need to continue improving their understanding of visitor behaviour within their destination.
Purpose-Driven Experience Design
Purpose can be considered from many distinct angles, revealing how different motivations can all lead to meaningful visitor experiences. Viktor from SpotAR explained his focus on preserving cultural heritage and making it accessible without barriers. He described using WebAR to create historical experiences that are easy for users to access, building a platform that enables destinations to create their own tours and routes. The mission, as Viktor articulated it, centres on a belief that every destination has its own cultural story that should be championed and shared. Without deliberate efforts to capture and share this knowledge, it simply disappears.
Viktor traced the evolution of AR technology over ten years, from early apps requiring downloads to today's WebAR that works through browsers. This accessibility matters profoundly for his mission. Examples of SpotAR's work include demonstrating historical processes like salt-making in the 1500s or providing step-by-step tutorials on traditional crafts like bell-making. In Goslar, Germany, the company even used AR to create a portal into the past by converting historical photographs into 360-degree spheres and allowing visitors to step into that moment. Importantly, SpotAR provides destinations with the platform and tools to create their own tours and routes, giving DMOs greater control over their cultural storytelling.
Viktor raised a question about whether AR is best experienced collectively or individually, pointing to a tension worth exploring. Viktor's perspective opened up a different way of looking at technology as something that could also be experienced collectively. Perhaps that is actually when it can be experienced at its best, because it becomes a participatory process where technology augments conversation and storytelling, often creating stronger memories and deeper connections to place.
Oliver takes a different approach, focusing on connecting people with sustainable travel choices. His purpose, as he explained it, centres on helping visitors have fun whilst showing their positive handprint rather than focusing solely on reducing footprints. The observation that people do what they are passionate about became central to Oliver's thinking, so connecting sustainability to enjoyable experiences becomes essential rather than making it feel like sacrifice or obligation.
Oliver described how EcoHopper now collects sustainable accommodation, attractions and events across 18,000 locations in 17 cities. The philosophy reflects his personal desire to help people do what they are passionate about. There is a refreshing honesty in this view that challenges much conventional tourism marketing. It suggests that authentic sustainability is not about certifications and checklists, but about connecting visitors with genuine local passion and purpose.
Daniel articulated a similar perspective that resonated throughout the discussion. Authentic experience remains physical, involving interactions with real people. This fundamental belief shapes how he thinks about technology's role. Technology adds a layer that enables touchpoints and can nudge visitors towards decisions without forcing them, but it cannot replace the core human interactions that make travel meaningful.
Technology Enabling Scalability
The eXplorins approach, as Daniel described it, focuses on bringing together different touchpoints in the visitor journey, allowing small individual businesses to scale direct bookings by incorporating blockchain as an enabler. The concept ties into a broader trend of granularisation, where highly personalised, one-to-one experiences become viable through technology.
Using tokenisation to create a unified system across the visitor journey, every activity a traveller undertakes, from booking accommodation to participating in experiences, gets funnelled into tokens that build towards rewards. This approach creates an efficient data feedback system that tracks the entire sales process whilst giving visitors tangible recognition for their engagement. As visitors explore destinations, they earn points for unique activities that can later be redeemed for rewards designed to reinforce local value rather than simply offering discounts. This model transforms scattered interactions into a cohesive, gamified journey whilst generating valuable data about what visitors actually do and value.
What makes this approach particularly interesting is Daniel's emphasis on enablement. In heavily marketed destinations, visibility often requires significant budgets. Instead, technology provides a way for SMEs to reach audiences without needing scale in the traditional sense. This democratisation of access represents a genuine shift in how the visitor economy functions.
Creating Data Exchange Through Gamification
Experiences created through gamification generate user data, enabling more intelligent recommendations over time. This creates a potentially virtuous cycle where engagement produces insights that support better experiences in the future.
Oliver described how EcoHopper incorporates algorithms that help visitors find information they are most interested in, but he emphasised the need for visitor feedback to ensure reliability in sustainability assessments. The mix of algorithmic recommendation and human judgment helps prevent greenwashing whilst enabling people to find authentic, local experiences. This authenticity becomes a filter through which technology operates rather than an afterthought. The algorithms serve the mission of genuine connection, not the other way around.
Gamification also plays an important role in motivating people to share data because the experience provides clear value. When visitors engage with a digital tour and earn rewards, they understand the exchange. They are sharing their location and preferences in return for a curated experience. This transparency matters not just for compliance but for maintaining trust.
Viktor highlighted how SpotAR's content management system for managing points of interest demonstrates this principle in practice. By prioritising the concept of 'edutainment', where content is both entertaining and educational, rewards add a vital dimension to visitor engagement. Using quizzes to earn puzzle pieces that unlock physical rewards at tourist offices, the delight comes not just from the content itself but from the satisfaction brought by a sense of achievement. This is an essential component for creating memorable experiences that visitors want to share.
The conversation revealed how creating playful experiences generates value beyond entertainment. Daniel articulated this clearly by contrasting how discussions about data and AI have moved beyond questions about whether to use AI to questions about who owns and controls data. The question now, as Daniel framed it, is whether destinations and smaller operators can build something on top of existing infrastructure developed by the leading technology companies, and whether the data generated feeds back into systems they control or exclusively benefits external platforms.
The Shape of Technology in Creating Meaning
When asked about the essence of using technology to shape meaningful experiences, the responses revealed complementary perspectives rooted in each founder's personal philosophy. For Oliver, the answer was straightforward: technology should help people create completely personalised experiences that are individually meaningful but can be shared with loved ones. The experience belongs to the visitor, not to the destination or the platform. This reflects Oliver's broader belief that tourism should empower visitors to discover what resonates with them personally.
Viktor noted developments in 3D content generation, particularly from China, where platforms like Tencent offer completely free tools for creating 3D models from images. While these models cannot be used directly for AR due to the need to optimise polygons — the geometric building blocks for composing 3D computer graphics — the rapid development of these capabilities means the process of creating content that once took months can now happen much more quickly. Yet, Viktor was clear that the specialist work of reducing and optimising models still requires human expertise. He also gave an overview of how AI speeds up content creation, using existing point-of-interest data to generate short descriptions and quiz questions as well as creating audio using ElevenLabs.
Similarly, Daniel highlighted how the design process itself has fundamentally changed. Interfaces can be developed in dramatically shorter timeframes. As a result, eXplorins are actively considering rebuilding entire systems because the speed at which development can happen has changed so radically. While the tools are available and development is faster, testing and iteration have become even more critical. Speed without strategic thinking and proper testing creates more problems rather than solving them. This means teams need to be increasingly agile and prepared to rethink their entire approach to design and development.
Looking Forward
Across both discussions, a clear consensus emerged that technology functions best as an enabler rather than a replacement for human connection. While development timelines are accelerating, the contextual understanding, emotional resonance and storytelling that make experiences meaningful still require human expertise.
The conversations also revealed consensus about partnership, transparency and trust as prerequisites for success. The genuine collaboration of DMOs and startups will be the driver of effective solutions that solve real destination challenges in a period where visitors are increasingly raising their expectations as technology creates new ways of experiencing destinations. Through these interactions, the entire ecosystem becomes more intelligent as DMOs gain valuable data and insights directly from satisfied visitors engaging with content in new ways.
The companies participating in DTTT Accelerate demonstrate strategic thinking about how emerging technologies, from AI and AR to blockchain and gamification, are reshaping the experience economy. With this future actively being built now, success depends on destinations recognising that technology investment means committing to collaborative partnerships and transparent communication.
Startups working closely with DMOs often identify strategic positioning opportunities that destinations themselves cannot see clearly. With so many technological possibilities available, DMOs often feel overwhelmed about where to invest resources. The startups that succeed in this space are those that move beyond simply delivering technology to helping destinations understand how different technologies connect to create cohesive visitor journeys. This requires strong relationships built on mutual learning rather than transactional vendor-client dynamics. When destinations engage with startups as strategic partners who understand both the technology and the tourism context, they gain not just tools but the strategic clarity needed to use those tools effectively.
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