5 practical ways for tour operators to leverage generative AI right now

Tour operators are already putting generative AI to work. Marketing teams draft and refine copy with it, product teams pressure-test itinerary ideas, and operations teams use it to summarize internal documentation and speed up decision-making.

Across industries, 78% of companies now report using AI technologies in at least one business function as of 2025, reflecting the broader normalization of the technology in everyday enterprise work. Executive usage also continues to rise: 82% report regular weekly use and nearly half (46%) now use AI daily — a notable increase year over year, according to the 2025 AI Adoption Report published by the Wharton School and GBK Collective.

That shift is increasingly visible on the consumer side. Roughly four in ten travelers now use AI-based tools during trip planning, with a majority open to broader use, making AI-assisted discovery a standard part of the travel journey. 

The real shift isn’t access to AI — it’s knowing where to deploy it. Teams now treat AI as a practical tool for growth, using it to increase output, reduce routine work, and improve responsiveness across the organization. 

The question for most operators is no longer whether to use generative AI, but how to move from isolated wins to repeatable advantage.

The five examples below show where teams see value today — and how those use cases are evolving.

1. Automating marketing copy and content drafting.

Content production has become one of the most resource-intensive functions inside tour operators. Destination pages, tour descriptions, email campaigns, and social content all need to be produced at scale — often across multiple regions and languages.

In practice, many marketing teams are using general-purpose tools such as ChatGPT, Jasper, and Copy.ai to generate first drafts, test variations, and adapt messaging for different audiences. Across marketing and knowledge-work teams, organizations adopting generative AI report 30–50% reductions in initial draft time for repeatable formats like campaign emails and standardized content, according to Bain & Company. 

AI is most often used as a starting point rather than a final output, with human review ensuring accuracy, tone, and compliance — particularly for regulated destinations and complex itineraries.

How this evolves: Operators gain the most when content connects directly to structured product data and other branded content. Teams that link content to pricing, inventory, and itinerary logic scale faster without creating fragmented messaging across markets or channels.

2. Handling inquiries with AI-powered chatbots

Inquiry management remains a pressure point for tour operators, particularly during peak booking windows and outside standard business hours. Generative AI now allows operators to deploy chatbots that respond in natural language while maintaining brand tone.

Operators experimenting in this area typically build on large language models such as ChatGPT or similar APIs, layering them with internal data and CRM integrations. These bots can answer common questions, qualify leads, and route inquiries to the appropriate teams, helping maintain responsiveness without adding headcount.

More mature implementations connect directly to CRM systems and booking platforms, allowing responses to reflect real-time availability or customer history.

What this enables: Integration determines impact. Bots that pull from real-time operational data, such as departure capacity and pricing, reduce friction across the booking journey. Bots that operate in isolation shift work downstream to sales and operations teams.

3. Accelerating destination research and updates. 

Maintaining up-to-date destination knowledge is a constant challenge, particularly as visa policies, entry requirements, and local regulations evolve.

Product and marketing teams increasingly rely on tools like ChatGPT to summarize destination updates, synthesize regulatory changes, and produce internal briefing notes. Prompts such as “What’s changed for travelers visiting Morocco in 2026?” can generate structured overviews in seconds, which teams then validate against official sources.

This approach has shortened destination onboarding timelines and enabled faster updates to customer-facing content, especially for operators managing large and diverse destination portfolios.

How operators should think about it: AI supports expertise at scale. By handling ongoing research and updates, it gives destination specialists more time to focus on experience design, differentiation, and high-touch customer interactions that lead to conversions.

4. Centralizing internal knowledge and training. 

As organizations grow, internal knowledge often becomes fragmented across SOPs, supplier manuals, and training documents. Some tour operators are addressing this by training internal AI assistants on existing materials. 

These systems are frequently built using general-purpose models — again, tools like ChatGPT or enterprise equivalents — configured to search and summarize internal documentation. Staff can ask operational questions in plain language and receive context-aware responses without escalating to senior team members. 

At the same time, newer agent-based tools like Claude Cowork are emerging that let AI act more like a digital teammate: given access to designated folders or task contexts, the system can organize files, generate reports, extract data, and even break large goals into subtasks and execute them autonomously, effectively supporting internal task management and coordination across teams.

This shift allows travel operations teams not only to find answers faster but also to delegate routine task execution to AI — from consolidating training materials to drafting deliverables or organizing project workloads — reducing internal friction and improving consistency. The result is faster onboarding, more efficient team workflows, and a more consistent application of operational standards across departments. 

What this points to: Data structure shapes results. Operators with centralized systems and clear workflows extract far more value from AI than those layering it onto fragmented tools and documents.

5. AI-assisted demand forecasting and product planning.

While more experimental, some operators are beginning to use generative AI to explore booking data, seasonality patterns, and customer behavior.

In these cases, AI tools are typically used alongside existing analytics platforms rather than replacing them. Teams may use conversational interfaces to interrogate CRM or booking data, identify trends, and generate hypotheses for further analysis.

Used carefully, this can help product and commercial teams move more quickly from data to insight, particularly during early-stage planning and scenario testing.

How this evolves: Insight alone does not drive results. Execution depends on data quality and operational structure. Platforms like Kaptio, designed for the complexity of multi-day experiences, turn AI-generated insight into action.

Experimentation Is Already Shaping Competitive Advantage

Most tour operators do not yet have formal AI roadmaps, but progress is increasingly driven by small, contained experiments rather than large-scale programs. Teams are starting with clear use cases, measuring impact, and expanding based on results.

What’s emerging is a more pragmatic phase of AI adoption in travel, focused on operational utility rather than ambition. As generative tools mature and integrate more closely with core systems, their influence on daily workflows will continue to grow.

Human creativity, judgment, and local expertise remain central to tour design. AI’s role is to extend the capacity of those teams by freeing up time, improving consistency, and supporting more responsive decision-making in a complex operating environment.

The operators experimenting today are quietly establishing the baseline for how modern tour businesses will operate in the years ahead.

The long-term value of generative AI will increasingly depend on the underlying systems tour operators use to manage data, workflows, and complexity. Set up a meeting with Kaptio to learn more.