Tourism is one of the world's largest economic sectors. According to the World Travel & Tourism Council, Travel & Tourism contributes US$11.6 trillion to the global economy, represents 9.8% of global GDP, and supports 366 million jobs worldwide.
US$11.6T
contributed to the global economy
9.8%
of global GDP
366M
jobs supported worldwide
With economic stakes this high, the discussion cannot stop at AI. It has to move to economic outcomes.
A conversation with a tourism executive last week reinforced exactly why that discussion matters. We spent over an hour talking about change in consumer behavior, AI, structured data, supplier enrichment, and what I believe will become one of the biggest shifts the tourism economy has seen in decades.
He wasn't questioning the thinking.
In fact, he said something that stayed with me.
"This is where economies are heading. Not just tourism."
Then he paused.
"Martha, I need a clear business case here."
"We enrich supplier data. Great."
"So what?"
"That's the first question the CEO will ask."
"The first question the Ministry of Finance will ask."
"The first question my board will ask."
I thought about that conversation for the rest of the weekend.
Because he was right.
No matter how compelling the thinking or methodology, every investment eventually arrives at the same place. What outcome does it create?
The business case
Governments already invest heavily in AI, digital transformation, and data.
Technology isn't the outcome.
It is the means to an outcome.
Instead of asking whether destinations need richer supplier data. Perhaps we should be asking what richer supplier data should actually achieve.
What outcome should governments expect from investing in supplier data enrichment?
When AI becomes the distribution layer
Last month's Intelligence Brief explored how AI increasingly influences who is considered, trusted and ultimately chosen.
If that's true, another question follows.
What happens when AI increasingly determines where tourism demand flows?
People will always travel. For business. For leisure. To spend time with people they love. The question isn't whether they travel.
It's where they stay.
Where they eat.
What experiences become part of their journey.
If AI increasingly shapes those decisions, it isn't only influencing discovery.
It is actively influencing how visitor spending is distributed across an entire tourism economy.
Why do the same businesses keep appearing?
Try it yourself. Open your preferred AI tool. Choose a destination. Ask where to stay. Where to eat. What to do. Who appears?
In destination after destination, the same pattern emerges.
Large hotel brands. Global booking platforms. Well-known attractions.
Businesses with strong digital footprints.
The question isn't whether they deserve to be recommended. They absolutely do. The more interesting question is this:
Are they recommended because they consistently offer the best visitor experience, or because they are the easiest for AI to understand?
Large organizations have spent years becoming machine-readable.
They have structured product information, dedicated digital teams, technical resources, and distribution strategies.
Budgets that independent businesses rarely have.
Now think about businesses that often define a destination.
The family-run boutique hotel
The neighbourhood restaurant every local recommends
The artisan workshop
The hidden café
The family-owned vineyard
The cooking class in someone's home
These businesses rarely lack quality.
They often lack digital representation. AI needs to understand them with confidence.
The Ecosystem
Imagine your destination has 10,000 tourism businesses.
AI consistently understands and recommends around 2,500 because they have stronger digital representation. The remaining 7,500 exist only partially or inconsistently across the sources AI relies on.
10,000
tourism businesses in your destination
2,500
AI consistently understands and recommends
7,500
exist only partially or inconsistently
If tourism demand is increasingly shaped inside AI conversations, what happens to the other 7,500 businesses?
Is the challenge attracting more visitors?
Or ensuring more of your visitor economy can participate in the demand that already exists?
Demand Distribution
Imagine your destination welcomes 10 million visitors every year.
Now assume AI increasingly influences where visitors stay, eat and spend.
If improving AI's understanding of the wider tourism ecosystem changed just 5% of those decisions... What would that mean for businesses that previously weren't part of the conversation? Not new visitors.
The same visitors.
Simply a different distribution of visitor spending.
That isn't a marketing question.
It's a boardroom discussion.
A hypothesis worth testing
This leads to a hypothesis. I believe our industry should begin testing.
If more of a destination tourism ecosystem becomes understandable to AI, does tourism demand become distributed across a broader range of businesses?
If the answer is yes, supplier data enrichment stops being a technology initiative. It becomes an economic imperative.
Tourism has never been about the biggest brands
Governments don't invest in tourism because of international hotel chains alone. They invest because tourism supports an entire ecosystem.
Tourism exists because it supports jobs, businesses, communities and tax revenue
But perhaps most importantly, these businesses create the experiences visitors remember. People rarely return home talking about the global hotel brand they stayed in.
They remember the French brasserie by the water where they cycled at twilight and shared a gelato. The morning, they jumped into the lake before breakfast.
The family-run bakery where the owner handed them a warm waffle after their morning run. The hidden moments that made them think, "I wish I could live here."
People return to places because of how those places made them feel.
Those moments are often created by the very businesses AI understands least.
The invisible challenge
Destinations may never see the moment demand begins to shift.
No AI platform will send a report saying:
"Today your local businesses weren't recommended."
"Today your SMEs were absent from thousands of travel conversations."
They'll only see the outcome.
Supplier enquiries soften.
Visitor spending becomes concentrated around the same businesses.
Others quietly disappear from consideration.
By then, the recommendation has already happened.
The numbers are simply the consequences.
How do you measure demand you never knew existed?
A different role for destination organizations
For decades, destination organizations have inspired people to visit.
Perhaps their next responsibility is ensuring AI can understand the destinations they represent. Not just the largest brand.
Not just the businesses already equipped for AI.
The entire visitor economy.
Because if AI increasingly becomes the interface between travelers and destinations, someone must ensure that interface reflects the entire destination.
So what?
Perhaps that was the answer to the question that stayed with me.
The business case isn't the data itself.
It's the outcome that data enables.
Whether destinations can influence demand is distributed across their entire economy. Whether more local businesses become discoverable.
Whether more communities benefit from tourism.
Whether the visitor economy becomes more competitive and more resilient.
I don't think our industry has answered those questions yet.
But I do think they're now worth asking.
Perhaps the biggest risk isn't that AI gets the answer wrong.
It's that nobody notices the businesses it leaves out.
How do you protect an economy when you can't see the conversations shaping it?
Next month
For decades, destination organizations built campaigns, websites, and content to inspire visitors. As AI increasingly becomes part of the planning journey, what becomes the purpose of a Destination Marketing Organization or Tourism Authority?
