Artificial Intelligence for Tour Operators: What Your Travel Business Needs to Know (and Do) Now

The world of artificial intelligence for tour operators is not what it used to be. Gone are the days of simpler, happier times of pre-2023, when the only basic choice you had was either to introduce the latest large language model (LLM) from OpenAI or to have your AI solution developed by a tech company.

Now we have the entire family of LLMs from Anthropic, Google introducing new AI features and implementing its Gemini everywhere from smartphones to cars, and China making waves in the global tech community with its cost-effective DeepSeek. The AI landscape of today is a competitive field for tech providers, with new AI capabilities and new AI models hitting the headlines as you read this sentence. The challenges resulting from the breakneck speed of AI adoption are both internal and external, as you must not only implement an AI tool for your own business but also adapt to existing AI solutions, such as AI Overviews, to ensure your brand’s visibility.

In this article, we are attempting to make a snapshot of recent advancements in AI for the tour operator business. We will start our AI-themed journey with the summary of the latest presentation from Google and guide you through the possible measures you can take to compete in the environment where your rivals are both your peer travel companies and AI algorithms. Additionally, we’ll talk about some promising use cases for tour operators and what defines the choice of an AI tool for businesses like yours. Read on to gain a deeper understanding of a technology that few people fully understand.

How Is Google Reshaping the Travel Business with Tech?

To grasp the sheer scope of technological advancements lately, let’s have a look at the key takeaways from Google I/O 2025, Google’s biggest developer conference held in May, in the context of AI for the tour operator business.

AI Mode and Deep Search

One thing is crystal clear from this conference — we are moving from traditional typing of our questions in search engines towards an AI-powered future of search. We no longer need ten blue links in search results because AI can summarize and synthesize the answer we are looking for. And that AI response will increasingly impact what will be promoted and booked. Since the emergence of online booking, this is probably the biggest shift for tour businesses.

More than 1.5 users are now using AI Overviews, with the service available in 200 countries and territories. The feature will soon be extended with AI Mode, where travelers will be able to input longer and more complex queries. AI Mode will be available as a separate tab next to the regular tabs, such as All, Images, and Video.

AI Overviews in Action

This shift signals the end of the era of the “top ten links” in favor of a single output considered by Google to be “the truth.” Now imagine how it will be both challenging and rewarding to land on that AI Overview field. Content clarity, structure, visual appeal, and general quality now will have to serve both regular humans and AI algorithms to catch their attention.

If AI Mode alone is not enough of a challenge for you, how about Deep Search? With this feature, Google is adding personalization to AI Mode. If a user connects to other apps in the ecosystem (Google Docs or Gmail), the AI-driven search mode can have access to personal documents and be able to provide individualistic responses.

Agentic AI

Project Mariner, an AI agent by Google, is designed to “interact with the web and get stuff done.” The potential of this AI for tour operators is currently vivid through its agentic checkout feature. Imagine your potential traveler has been looking for a tour but decides not to proceed; the agentic checkout functionality will monitor the price, and if there is a price drop, it can notify your traveler to buy the tour with just one tap.

From Research to Booking within One Window

With AI Mode further evolving, AI will remember the broader context of your traveler’s search journey. Going down from “three-day trip to Rome” to “recommend a restaurant,” the traveler will be reading all responses within the same window. Importantly, the responses will integrate information from Google Travel and Google Things to Do, meaning that at various points, there will be links to bookable services or products, and bookings could be completed in AI Mode within the same window. For now, such links to services or product providers are organic, but their placement may become paid in the future.

This is a great opportunity for travel suppliers to boost direct bookings and establish authority for themselves, leaving third-party endorsements in the past.

Other Notable Tech Announcements

Seeing is believing. Check what Voesis Studios could create with Veo 3 — coverage of a car show that never happened!

Please keep in mind that some of the announced tools have a limited release depending on your subscription, language, or region, while some are still under development.

In any case, it was one of the hottest presentations from Google that demonstrates the immense potential of artificial intelligence for tour operators as well. For more details from the tech giant, we invite you to rewind the conference video below.

How to Act When AI Disrupts Your Travel Business Model

At the same time, the pace of technology can harm tour operators because AI providers add more features to their publicly available models that can disrupt traditional product creation and distribution chains. The trick here is to identify how you can turn AI into a competitive advantage. For instance, itinerary creation and travel planning can become a regular responsibility for standard LLMs, and it will be quite hard to achieve competitive differentiation here. Instead, you can concentrate on the following measures:

• Apply AI to areas that are heavy in operations. You’ll cut costs through automation and save time for your employees for more creative tasks requiring genuine human input.
• Cultivate an AI-friendly workplace within your business. Introduce AI into your operations gently and politely so that after some time you will have AI supporters and the talent to manage AI-powered operations.
• Make use of your company’s insights, e.g., user interactions, to fine-tune specialized models. This way, general-purpose AI for tour operators, which your competitors are likely to use as well, will soon start lagging behind, while you are able to play the long game.
• Data is the new oil. And with so much data in the travel industry, it’s essential to make sure it is clean, structured, and up-to-date. Otherwise, even the most advanced AI tool will generate poor results.
• Watch out for new AI releases. If you happen to use LLMs, your tech team should follow the latest developments and make upgrades in a timely manner. Knowledge is power, while time is of the essence in this tech race.
• Study how LLMs are indexing, processing, and serving web sources to users. We used to design our content for both humans and search engines. However, AI-based tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude see and consume content differently (see the table below).

For more practical guidelines on how to improve your brand’s visibility in AI responses, we recommend the latest piece from Phocuswire.

Promising Use Cases of AI for Tour Operators

The entire travel tech stack is getting an AI pill. The technology has found its way into many areas of the tour business, making life easier both for travel companies and travelers alike. Below are a few AI use cases that are already making waves.

That’s only a sneak peek at the uses of AI in the tour operator business. In the image below, you’ll find even more tasks you can relegate to AI. Some of them surely look familiar to you. And don’t forget another piece from GP Solutions where we discuss some of them in more detail.

Your Use Case Determines Your AI Tool

Previously, our expert already shared her opinion of the best strategy to approach the implementation of AI for tour operators. Please refresh your memory with our article.

This time, we would like to narrow it down to the strategy for selecting an AI model for your business, because not all AI models are created equal. Your choice as a tour operator should be defined by the nature of the tasks you want to entrust to your AI app and your budget.

Generative AI models have the so-called context window — the number of tokens you can enter or retrieve within the span of a single interaction. Tokens are basic units of text, e.g., words or punctuation marks. By imposing such limits, tech companies control user access and govern their costs.

In March 2025, Google released Gemini 2.5 with the longest context window among its competitors — 1 million tokens. Compare to 128k tokens from the DeepSeek-R1 model. That is why, if your business and tasks you want to hand over to AI involve processing vast databases of content, this parameter should be your crucial factor in model choice.

OpenAI’s GPT-4o, on its part, has the most powerful reasoning model. Reasoning in the case of AI is a model’s ability to break down a problem and demonstrate its chain of thought before it delivers you an answer. It is designed to offer up guarantees against hallucinations so that the user could look into the black box nature of AI results and render its answers as more trustworthy.

Even the smartest models can make mistakes. Remember that disclaimer below ChatGPT’s chat window, “ChatGPT can make mistakes. Check important info”? Unlike with text generations, code discrepancies may have far costlier consequences. If you intend to apply AI for code development, Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 model may be a smart choice because it has gained trust among the developer community due to its “thoughtful” AI behavioral patterns. It is capable of producing complex code via an intuitive interface, but the result will have fewer harmful consequences compared to its competitors’ output.

If you seek to generate photorealistic images to market your travel products and destinations, have a look at OpenAI’s 4o image generation, Google’s Gemini 2.0 Flash, and the good old Midjourney that is still offering the best customization functionality for the images it produces.

However, keep in mind that as these models are evolving, it may come time to switch to another, more cost-effective alternative at a negligible cost. The intense competition may lead to the situation when AI models have no competitive advantage but pricing per token.

Large-scale enterprises may even face the situation when they’d better use several models for each individual use scenario, yielding results from each AI model’s strengths. Let’s take the example of Booking.com, who were among the pioneers in AI for the travel industry and launched AI Trip Planner back in 2023 that operated on existing ML models and was partially backed by ChatGPT API. Two years later, the company partners with OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS, Google, and other open-source models. They welcome into their network only those models that have proven their performance over time and adhere to strict standards for privacy and security. The company stresses that integration with AI models goes far beyond simply accessing them, since they have to work with both structured (pricing, availability) and unstructured (reviews, queries in real-time) data. Each model passes through rigorous testing for performance and compliance with external and internal regulations. The process is very strict and complex, as you might imagine. However, as Booking.com stresses, they deliver value in those areas where it will bring the most value for their customers. That is why, for you, as a tour operator, it is essential to understand where your principal use cases for AI lie and how technology can boost your particular operations.

If you are afraid to invest in AI and lose because you lack relevant expertise to make this choice on your own, it will be a wise step to consult a travel software vendor like GP Solutions, which has experience with AI integrations.

Accept the Change before It’s Too Late

During the conference we discussed in the beginning, Pichai mentioned AI 92 times and Gemini 95 times. “The opportunity with AI is truly as big as it gets,” he said in closing. Here, again, time is of the essence. As a tour operator, you need to act fast to address these transformational changes because the forward-thinking competitors of yours won’t wait.

Do your research to get a clear picture of what’s on offer in AI for tour operators, identify tasks where AI can unleash its powers in the most cost-effective way, and step confidently but wisely. AI for the sake of AI is a futile investment. You should have a persuasive answer why you need it and how it can benefit your particular business.

Invest in a flexible data architecture, adopt foundational AI technologies, and promote organizational competencies, and it may happen that it is your company’s success story that we will be writing about next time.