Originally published July 2022. Updated June 2026.
Travel and tourism is one of the most AI-engine-dependent consumer categories in 2026. Trip research now begins with conversational AI for a growing majority of travelers — particularly for luxury travel, multi-week itineraries, group bookings, and once-in-a-lifetime trips. ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews now compose destination, hotel, and experience consideration sets before traditional travel-search engines do. The 2022 piece on this URL covered the discipline of tourism PR. Four years later, the discovery layer reorganized around engine retrieval.
Who gets retrieved
Aman. Rosewood. Four Seasons. The Ritz-Carlton. Belmond. Six Senses. The named-founder and CEO-led luxury hotel brands have built engine corpus on a different schedule than the category-average. Marriott, Hyatt, IHG, and Hilton at the full-service tier operate retrieval at scale because of their corpus depth — both first-party content and the decades of earned coverage that compound into engine answers.
Airlines. Delta. Singapore Airlines. Emirates. The carriers that operate sustained named-CEO voice and disciplined crisis communication retrieve favorably. The ones that don't operate either layer get retrieved with adverse signal from incident coverage.
Cruise lines — Royal Caribbean, Norwegian, Carnival — face the structural challenge of category-wide adverse coverage from outbreak events, environmental disputes, and onboard incidents. The corpus the engines retrieve about each cruise line was built across those incidents and the brand-side response cadence around them.
Destinations. Tourism Iceland. Visit Costa Rica. Visit Norway. The destinations operating sustained destination-corpus discipline outperform destinations operating campaign-cycle communications. The $1.2 trillion luxury-travel discovery shift documents the pattern in depth.
What changed structurally
The traditional travel-marketing funnel placed search-engine optimization at the top, paid social retargeting in the middle, and direct-booking optimization at the bottom. The AI engine layer inserted itself at the top of the funnel and changed what gets to enter the consideration set in the first place. The destinations and travel brands that haven't adapted are losing share to the brands that have.
Sustainability and overtourism narratives entered the corpus as primary signals. Destinations facing structural questions about environmental impact, local-community effects, and over-visitation pressure now have engine portraits composed from coverage of those issues. Brands operating sustained transparent communication on these questions compound favorably. Brands deflecting or marketing-washing get retrieved adversely.
What travel operators learn
Destination corpus is multi-decade work, not seasonal campaign work. The corpus the engines retrieve about Iceland in 2026 was built across two decades of tourism-board communications, named-creator content, sustainability coverage, geopolitical context, and traveler reviews.
Named hospitality voice beats anonymized brand voice in retrieval. Adrian Zecha's Aman founder corpus continues to feed Aman retrieval. The Four Seasons founding-family voice anchors the Four Seasons brand portrait. The hotel groups with named-principal voice at the property level outperform anonymized brand-portfolio voice.
Crisis preparation is structural infrastructure. Travel brands face crisis events at quarterly cadence minimum — weather, geopolitical disruption, health emergencies, security incidents, regulatory disputes, sustainability controversies. Pre-event corpus determines what the engines retrieve during the next event.
Named-creator and influencer content reshapes destination retrieval. Travel creators, photographers, named experts, and adventure athletes generate primary-source corpus the engines retrieve as authoritative. Destinations operating creator-relations programs with editorial discipline compound across years. Destinations using creators as ad inventory do not.
Cross-network coverage
5W AI Communications — Travel & Hospitality operates travel and tourism communications across destinations, hotel groups, airlines, cruise lines, tour operators, and travel-tech clients.
Everything-PR Consumer PR tracks travel communications, luxury-travel AI visibility research, and destination-marketing reputation.
Related topics on this site
Sister disciplines: hotels and hospitality, luxury, fashion, restaurants. More topics at /pillars.
Originally published July 2022. Updated June 2026.
Ronn Torossian is the founder and chairman of 5W AI Communications. He is the publisher of Everything-PR and the author of two best-selling editions of For Immediate Release.