AI visibility for travel & tourism

Travel planning has become a conversation with AI. "Plan me a week in Cornwall with kids." "Best boutique tour operator for Japan." "Which travel agent specialises in luxury safaris?" The engine answers with named businesses, itineraries and recommendations, and those names get the booking enquiry.

The audience is vast. OpenAI reports that 900 million people use ChatGPT every week (OpenAI, December 2025), and a growing share use it to plan trips. Conductor found that 37% of consumers now start their searches with AI rather than Google (Conductor, 2025). For travel, that early AI recommendation often decides the whole shortlist.

The engine builds its answer from reviews, travel guides and media coverage, your own destination and trip content, and how all of that compares to other operators and agents serving the same trip. A generic "tailor-made holidays" page gives the engine little to quote. Specific, well-reviewed trip content gives it plenty.

Google AI Overviews now appear on the majority of searches, and Similarweb reports that 69% of Google searches end without a click (Similarweb, 2024). A traveller can plan an entire trip and pick a provider from the AI answer without visiting a single operator site. If your business is not in that answer, you are not in their plan.

Travel is the sector where AI planning has moved fastest, partly because the task suits it. A traveller can describe their party, their budget, their dates and their tastes in a sentence, and the engine returns a shaped itinerary with named places to stay and operators to book. That itinerary is a series of recommendations, and each one is a slot. Hotels, tour operators, agents and attractions are all competing to be the name the engine writes into the plan.

There is a seasonal rhythm to this that other sectors do not have. Demand for a ski operator, a summer villa or a Christmas-market break peaks and fades on a predictable cycle, and so do the queries. A snapshot taken in the off-season can badly misread how you perform when it counts. Visibility for travel is best understood as a moving picture, tracked against the windows when your travellers are actually planning and booking.

AI engines recommend travel businesses that are specific, visibly trusted and consistent about the destinations and trip types they serve. A vague "we go everywhere" operator is hard to place. A named specialist with strong reviews is easy. The Known & Cited framework scores this across three dimensions.

• AI Visibility (40%). How often the engines name your business when a traveller asks where to stay, who to book with or what to do. We test by destination, trip type and traveller profile, from family breaks to luxury and adventure, and record where you appear and where a rival does instead.
• Source Quality (30%). Whether the evidence behind your name is strong. Genuine reviews, travel media coverage, guide and directory listings, awards and accreditations such as ABTA or ATOL all carry weight. Thin or inconsistent listings leave the engine little to trust.
• Narrative Fit (30%). Whether the story the engines tell matches your positioning. If you want to be known as a high-end tailor-made specialist but the web frames you as a budget package seller, the engine sends you the wrong travellers. We measure that gap and show how to close it.

Travel businesses often win on a flagship destination but stay invisible for the trips they most want to grow, or have great reviews that no engine connects to a specific itinerary. We find which dimension is costing you bookings and fix that first.

We run your business through the three engines that matter: ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity. Each gets a sector prompt set written for travel, covering destination searches, trip-type and traveller-profile queries, "who should I book with" questions, itinerary planning prompts, and direct comparisons against named competing operators and agents. We run these in structured research waves so the picture is repeatable across seasons.

Every result is scored 0 to 100 and placed in one of five bands: Ghost (0 to 10), Whisper (11 to 30), Emerging (31 to 50), Cited (51 to 75), and Known and Cited (76 to 100). The score breaks down across our 12-pillar framework, so you can see which destinations and trip types you win and which a competitor owns. The full approach is on our methodology page.

This gives you a clear map of your AI market: the prompts you win, the operators taking the recommendations you want, and the reviews, media and content the engines trust. The work that follows targets the trips where the bookings are.

The 12 pillars are where travel businesses often find a surprise. An operator may assume its problem is awareness, when the real issue is that the engine cannot tell its flagship adventure trips apart from its standard packages, so it never gets cited for the high-value itineraries it most wants to sell. The pillar breakdown separates a visibility problem from a narrative problem, which matters because the two need very different fixes and the wrong one wastes a season.

Every engagement starts with a free Exec Brief. We run a focused set of travel prompts across the three engines, score you, place you in a band, and show the gap between your business and the competitors winning your destination and trip-type answers. You see the real recommendations AI is giving travellers planning your kind of trip today.

The full AI Visibility Strategy goes deeper. You get a complete 0 to 100 score across all 12 pillars, a comparison against your chosen competing operators, a prioritised list of the reviews, media and trip content that would lift your score, and a plan to change the answer. Cadence is bespoke: Annual, Bi-Annual or Quarterly research waves, all bespoke priced to the number of destinations and trip types you want tracked. Quarterly suits businesses with strong seasonal swings.

The report is shaped around the trips you sell. It names the destinations where the engines recommend you, the ones where a rival has the answer, and the reviews, travel media and itinerary content that would lift you for the high-value trips you want to grow. A frequent finding is that a business is well cited for its best-known destination but silent on the newer routes it is trying to build, so the plan concentrates effort where the next bookings will come from rather than where they already arrive.

The Exec Brief is free and carries no obligation. Start here to see what AI says about your business. To see a worked example first, visit see it in action.