AI Tourism Innovator Weekly Digest #45: Actionable AI Insights for Travel Tech & Tourism Brands

Hey Travel-Tech & Tourism Pros,

1. Otto The Agent launches an AI executive assistant for business travel

Source & Date: BusinessWire - 4 Dec 2025

What’s happening:

Otto The Agent, an AI-powered assistant built by former leaders from Expedia, Egencia, and Concur, has launched publicly after nine months in closed beta. It connects to calendars and travel profiles, then plans, books, and rebooks flights and hotels through a conversational interface. It’s already being piloted inside corporate travel programmes.

Why it matters:

This goes straight after the classic TMC search box and manual agent workflows. For travel tech platforms, it signals growing demand for API-first, AI-friendly infrastructure. For travel brands, it shows a future where a large share of business trips are shaped by digital assistants optimising for convenience, loyalty, and policy.

Actionable insight:

For travel tech companies: position your product as “agent-ready.” Document how AI assistants can query your inventory, fares, or content safely, and what context they need (policy rules, preferences, exceptions). For travel brands (hotels, airlines, OTAs): review how your corporate offers and perks appear in GDS/TMC feeds and APIs. If you want Otto-style tools to surface you, your rates and benefits must be clear, structured, and competitive.

💡 Prompt: “Write a one-page integration concept showing how our [TMC / OTA / hotel chain] could expose inventory and rules to an AI assistant like Otto, including sample API endpoints and safety limits.”

2. Greece makes AI a core pillar of its tourism strategy

Source & Date: Greek City Times - 25 Nov 2025

What’s happening:

Greek Tourism Minister Olga Kefalogianni announced a set of AI-driven initiatives: a full redesign of the VisitGreece portal with next-generation AI for personalised content, plus specialised digital platforms for niche tourism segments such as mountain, agritourism, gastronomy, diving, and wellness. AI will power recommendations, content personalisation, and analytics to better understand demand and protect destinations.

Why it matters:

This is a national-level commitment to AI-led tourism. It creates demand for tools that support personalisation at scale, smart content delivery, and sustainability indicators across many regions and product types.

Actionable insight:

For travel tech companies: if you serve DMOs or governments, prepare a short “AI for NTOs” offer. Focus on content structuring, recommendation engines, demand analysis, and data-sharing frameworks that can fit into national platforms. For travel brands in Greece and similar markets: treat these projects as future distribution and insight channels. Start aligning your product data (categories, seasonality, pricing, capacity, sustainability attributes) so it can plug straight into national AI portals.

💡 Prompt: “Draft a 2-page proposal for how our [DMC / regional DMO] could plug its products and data into a national AI tourism portal like VisitGreece 2.0.”

3. CROMO: AI and gaming for cultural heritage and slow tourism

Source & Date: QuantumNet - 3 Dec 2025

What’s happening:

QuantumNet presented CROMO, a participatory platform that combines gaming mechanics and AI to support cultural heritage along the Appian Way in southern Italy. Visitors and locals upload geolocated photos and reports; AI helps structure this content so authorities can monitor sites, spot risks, and plan conservation, while tourists engage through gamified experiences.

Why it matters:

This is AI for heritage and destination management, not just marketing. It links visitor engagement, data collection, and local authority decisions in one loop. For destinations dealing with overtourism and preservation challenges, this model is very relevant.

Actionable insight:

For travel tech: consider heritage and slow-tourism use cases as a clear niche. Build modules for geolocated reporting, photo analysis, and risk scoring that public bodies and DMOs can adopt. For destinations and cultural routes: start with one corridor (a historic path or coastal route). Design a simple “report and play” experience that rewards visitors who share useful data (photos, feedback) and feeds that into your maintenance and planning processes.

💡 Prompt: “Outline a mobile experience where visitors to a cultural route submit photos and short notes, and an AI system turns that into structured alerts and insights for local authorities.”

4. McKinsey: agentic AI will remove friction across travel

Source & Date: McKinsey - 4 Dec 2025

What’s happening:

In a new podcast and article, McKinsey outlines how agentic AI could transform travel by handling multi-step tasks end-to-end: searching, comparing, booking, rebooking, and support. AI agents sit across channels and suppliers, orchestrating logistics in the background while humans focus on higher-value work.

Why it matters:

This frames AI agents as a strategic topic for boards, not just a tech experiment. It gives air cover for travel tech teams to move beyond chatbots and into deeper automation, with clear expectations around data engineering, API security, and human oversight.

Actionable insight:

For travel tech: define your first two “agentic use cases” (for example, handling disruptions, managing credit/vouchers, automating supplier follow-ups). Don’t pitch “AI everywhere”; start with well-bounded tasks with clear KPIs. For travel brands: ask your suppliers what agentic use cases they already support. You don’t need to build the AI layer yourself, but you should influence which tasks it takes over and what data it needs.

💡 Prompt: “Design an agentic AI workflow that monitors a traveller’s full trip, predicts issues (delays, strikes, weather), and preps options for a human agent to approve in one click.”

5. “AI-powered Smart Tourism 2.0” a new model for destinations

Source & Date: Electronic Markets - 4 Dec 2025

What’s happening:

A new invited paper in Electronic Markets introduces an updated AI-powered Smart Tourism 2.0 model. It looks back at a decade of smart tourism and argues that AI and immersive tech now sit at the centre of how destinations manage data, experience design, and “phygital” interactions between visitors and place.

Why it matters:

This gives DMOs and tech vendors a vocabulary and structure for talking about AI in governance, experience, and business models, not just chatbots or campaigns. It’s useful material for strategy decks, tenders, and funding applications.

Actionable insight:

For destinations and DMOs: pick three elements from the model you can turn into pilots in 2026 (for example, real-time experience dashboards, AI-assisted planning tools for residents and visitors, or shared data hubs with local operators). For travel tech: map your product features against the Smart Tourism 2.0 layers (data, experience, business models). Use that framing in sales conversations with public-sector clients.

💡 Prompt: “Summarise the Smart Tourism 2.0 model in 400 words for a non-technical DMO board, and suggest three pilot projects we could run in 2026.”

6. Amadeus Travel Trends 2026: AI-driven personalisation becomes default

Source & Date: Amadeus - 4 Dec 2025

What’s happening:

Amadeus and Globetrender released Travel Trends 2026, highlighting shifts such as “Pet-first travel”, “Travel Mixology”, and “Pick ’n’ Stays”. One key thread runs through the report: as AI accelerates, hyper-personalisation becomes the standard expectation. Travellers will gravitate to providers that match the speed and precision of their AI assistants.

Why it matters:

This report will circulate in boardrooms and shape budgets. It backs the argument that content, data structure, and recommendation quality must be priorities for travel brands and tech vendors in 2026.

Actionable insight:

For travel tech: use this report as validation for investment in AI-powered recommendations, dynamic packaging, and personalisation engines. Build case studies that show revenue per search or per user lift when you personalise. For travel brands: decide where you’ll personalise first in 2026 (pre-trip email flows, OTA descriptions, direct site offers, or in-destination suggestions), and pick one stack or partner to start with.

💡 Prompt: “Create a 3-step personalisation roadmap for a mid-size hotel group or tour operator inspired by the Amadeus Travel Trends 2026 report.”

7. Napa wineries see AI assistants shaping real visitor demand

Source & Date: San Francisco Chronicle - 6 Dec 2025

What’s happening:

A feature on Napa Valley reports that millennials and Gen Z now often use ChatGPT, Gemini, and similar tools to choose wineries. One data point: a majority of younger travellers use AI in some stage of trip planning. Wineries and regional players note that AI suggestions tend to favour big, well-known brands, and sometimes surface outdated or impractical recommendations.

Why it matters:

This is a micro case that reflects a wider trend: AI systems already influence where people go, even for niche segments like wine tourism. Bias towards big, well-documented brands is clear. Smaller players and regional DMOs will have to work harder on AI-ready content and prompts.

Actionable insight:

For wineries, attractions, and local operators: audit how you appear when you ask AI tools simple questions like “plan a wine weekend in [region].” If you never show up, you have a content and structure problem, not just a marketing problem. For DMOs: create “AI packs” for priority clusters (wine routes, coastal areas, city quarters) with structured lists of high-quality venues, short descriptions, and clear URLs that AI assistants can reuse.

💡 Prompt: “Ask an AI assistant to plan a themed trip in your region (wine, hiking, culture). Note the brands and places it suggests, then list 10 actions your DMO or business could take to appear in those suggestions next time.”

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Kind regards, Ivan Ivanovic - AI Tourism Innovator | Visit my website