If traveling has seemed more expensive lately, it’s not a mirage: The Travel Price Index — which monitors travel-related costs like transportation, lodging, recreation and dining — is up 9.8% year-over-year, with travel expenses regularly outpacing inflation.
Increasing travel costs are one reason why many consumers are changing their approach to travel. Top 10 lists recommending the same tourist attractions aren’t cutting it. Given their limited time and budgets, travelers increasingly desire immersive vacations that showcase unique cultural and historical experiences. To find trips that fit the bill, many of them are turning to AI.
Thanks to the advent of the AI travel agent, today’s travelers can use chatbots and other AI tools to plan trips that deepen their engagement with destinations, local communities and cultural opportunities. In that way, emerging technologies are removing generic tourism and putting visitors on a path to tailored, impactful experiences, observes Duarte Morais, a professor of equitable and sustainable tourism at North Carolina State University.
“I believe AI can play a valuable role in helping make tourism experiences more meaningful, personalized and culturally connected — but primarily as a tool that supports people rather than replaces them,” Morais told The Forecast in an interview.
The P1t AI Protocol: How Trip Planning AI Boosts Tourism
Along with colleague Gene Brothers, professor emeritus at NC State’s College of Natural Resources, Morais is co-founder of People-first Tourism and P1tLab, an action-research unit focused on improving tourism experiences.
Through the P1tLab, Morais, Brothers and their team have used AI to analyze feedback from travelers who have visited microentrepreneurs across North Carolina. Their analysis provides business owners with rich insights that they can use to continuously improve their tourism offerings.
AI is particularly helping in identifying patterns and summarizing large amounts of unstructured visitor feedback, Morais noted. “In this context, AI did not create the experiences,” he said. “Rather, it helped local people better understand their guests and refine experiences that were already rooted in local culture, their knowledge and human connection.”
Morais and Brothers created the People-first Tourism AI Protocol based on their analyses, a body of scholarship showing how tourism microentrepreneurship provides meaningful experiences to visitors while bringing economic, social and cultural benefits to destination communities.
“We were curious whether AI travel tools could help travelers discover these kinds of experiences,” Morais said.
The protocol evolved through multiple rounds of experimentation. Morais and the P1tLab team initially asked AI tools to provide recommendations using the organization’s principles. Though AI seemed to gather the spirit of the request, it typically returned frequently reviewed and commercially prominent results.
“It understood the principles conceptually, but did not consistently apply them when generating recommendations,” explained Morais, who noted how the protocol evolved throughout.
At first, there was a longer list of principles and instructions. Along the way, items were combined, refined or eliminated to arrive at the current version. To test outcomes, researchers used destinations they knew well and compared recommendations with and without the protocol.
Among P1tLab’s greatest takeaways was discovering the proper way to fine-tune instructions for desired outcomes, a lesson that can apply across industries.
“One of the most important lessons from this process was that broad values were not enough,” Morais said. “We needed to translate those values into clear and actionable instructions that AI could use when making decisions about what to recommend.”
Brothers echoed that sentiment. He said early stages of the protocol might recommend things like talking to a chef at a restaurant or a lobsterman working along the water. Those weren’t realistic for tourists to do, so the next steps required some tweaking.
Brothers said five pieces of instructions are beneficial to include on top of the protocol. First, experiences should be bookable. Beyond that, you should specify a time, a location, a type of transport, and the traveler’s daily or overall budget.
Including interests helps further guide the protocol. Brothers is an avid angler, for example. While he doesn’t want to go fishing on every trip, he enjoys having conversations about fishing with locals. The protocol can point him to bait-and-tackle shops or other relevant spots that enhance his experience.
Similarly, the protocol can be helpful with excluding activities that don’t interest travelers.
“There are some events you can guide it away from,” Brothers said. “There’s no way I want to experience that. Find me a quiet little beer garden in the corner of the country rather than Oktoberfest, where they sell a billion pints of beer.”
Morais said he’s found better results when pushing AI tools beyond the initial protocol. Sometimes, a traveler might receive a class recommendation from a luxury hotel that seems authentic, but is often a curated, scripted version of local culture. Digging deeper through AI and research to find hands-on options leads guests to a more fulfilling option.
“This is why tourism microentrepreneurship matters,” Morais said. “Small-scale experiences offered by local residents can help visitors engage with places through the people who know them best, while also creating economic opportunities that strengthen communities and preserve local knowledge, traditions and ways of life.”
Added Brothers, “It’s a two-party kind of activity … People have to find it and use AI for trip planning, and it has to be pretty good. And then the destinations have to understand their end of it. They have to have things on the calendar, on a website, promoting and supporting these microentrepreneurs.”
A Social Platform for Personalized Travel
The P1t AI Protocol evolved from noticing needed improvements within the tourism industry. Tony Jefferson, founder of TravelingSession.com, built his platform from another observation: Many tourism efforts promote destinations as if all people travel in the same way.
A veteran, Jefferson experienced several interesting, unique places he’d never heard of during his military career. When he visited mainstream tourist attractions, however, he found them underwhelming. He realized broad recommendations only align with a subset of travelers.
“If I’m someone who hangs out in the bars until 3 or 4 o’clock in the morning, and you’re someone who’s in bed at 8 o’clock, we’re going to have two different perspectives of the same city,” said Jefferson, who designed TravelingSession.com as a social platform for personalized travel discovery.
The platform started as a travel blog where Jefferson shared his own experiences before introducing the ability for users to rate destinations. In the early days, he largely coded on top of existing WordPress plugins. It was functional, but not scalable.
One day, after breaking the site, Jefferson moved to a managed server and hired developer help to continue adding features and improve the user interface. Today, users can define travel styles and map where they’ve been, matching with similar styles. The platform’s proprietary rating engine calculates a personalized travel rating based on a visitor’s priorities. Destinations also get unlocked through featured travelers, showcasing lesser-known spots tailored to personal preferences.
Jefferson said the distinction between inspiration and discovery is key. He believes passion and perspective are what truly shapes travel.
“Right now, everything is travel inspiration,” Jefferson said. “You see something on Facebook or Instagram or TikTok, and you’re seeing that because it’s popular. That doesn’t mean it’s right for you. It just means a whole bunch of other people like it. We want to shift [travel discovery] to what exactly is it you’re looking for in the travel destination?”
Jefferson predicts that AI search visibility will change how those in the travel industry operate.
“People aren’t searching for ‘Paris content creators.’ Now, you’re going to look for Paris content creators that talk about family-friendly trips and food tours,” he said.
“People in the travel industry need to be very specific about what it is they offer and what their expertise is.”
Pairing Technology with Human Interaction
Morais, Brothers and Jefferson believe the discovery element of travel needs to continue improving to create memorable, immersive experiences. With that same goal in mind, platforms and destinations around the world are incorporating AI and technology to enhance user journeys.
Here are just a few examples:
During the initial phase of trip planning, AI travel agent platform Layla helps by creating personalized itineraries in minutes. To date, it’s developed more than 2 million trips for users, from family-friendly European tours to honeymoons in Jordan. The trips are tailor-made to reflect user preferences, with options to discover hidden gems and budget-friendly alternatives.
The tourism-focused AI platform Dexibit works with tourism attractions and destinations to analyze visitor behavior. Its AI and machine learning models train on historic data, almanacs that continuously grow and Dexibit’s own industry data to help with revenue, attrition and other forecasts. Attraction operators can spin qualitative feedback into more personalized experiences, whether in the form of loyalty upgrades and perks or identifying mobility patterns for users to avoid long lines and weather delays.
Travel apps like GPSmyCity and Shaka Guide offer city-specific text and audio guidance on when to turn to see a destination, including recommendations on off-the-beaten path sights, shops and eateries.
Museums are incorporating GPS and geolocation technology into audio guides, with content playing automatically as visitors approach an exhibit or artifact. Kraków’s Czartoryski Museum, for instance, has Leonardo Da Vinci’s “Lady with an Ermine” on display in a cozy room. Visitors step inside the room and hear the painting’s inspiration and history — spoken in their native language — while admiring its majestic beauty.
Sustaining Local Communities with Travel AI
In the last 20 years, social media and other technologies have helped commoditize travel and fuel overtourism. AI might help reverse the trend by boosting less-traveled destinations and supporting more beneficial forms of tourism, suggested Morais, who has been chronicling advancements and lessons from the P1t AI Protocol alongside personal experiences, hoping to broaden how people approach their travels.
“Difficulty in finding useful information about destinations has been a big factor preventing prospective tourists from breaking through the noise created by the tourism and hospitality industry,” Morais said. “I am cautiously optimistic that the advent of AI solutions may at last facilitate the mutually fulfilling connection between visitors and their guests.”
Brothers likewise said that the protocol has kept him excited about travel. If AI can keep money within local economies and help tourists speak more authentically and respectfully with locals, it could enhance how visitors understand a place, he noted.
“I’m motivated to help people have better travel experiences,” Brothers said. “And while they’re traveling, to be responsible to the communities they visit.”
Joey Held is a writer, podcaster and author based in Austin, Texas, and the founder of Fun Fact Friyay and Wacky Travel. Connect with him on LinkedIn or BlueSky.
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