AI is everywhere right now, and travel is no exception. But if you run tours, activities, attractions, or anything scheduled and capacity-based, it’s worth looking at the less shiny side too. Not to panic, but to stay in control.
Because the direction of travel from big tech (and big travel) is pretty clear: AI won’t just be “a tool you can choose”. It’ll be baked into the products the industry already relies on, and it’ll slowly shape pricing, distribution, customer comms, and even what travellers think is “true”.
1) The money problem: huge costs create huge pressure
Running modern AI is expensive. It needs vast data centres, specialised chips, and constant spending on power and infrastructure. That cost base creates pressure for AI companies to drive more usage, more often, in more places.
That has a knock-on effect for customers. Providers need AI to become an everyday item, not something relegated to occasional usage. Features that are gimmicks or “nice-to-have” become always-on defaults, directly baked into workflows.
And this is part of the business model, because once you are dependent on it as part of your day-to-day, the prices rise. Especially if its expensive to switch.
For tour operators, this matters because many of these decisions sit upstream. Even if AI use is light today, the tools and platforms around the business may not stay optional about it.
2) The “make it non-optional” playbook is already happening
The quickest way to justify AI spend is to place it where people use it daily: email, search, dashboards, customer service, and booking journeys.
In travel, big consumer platforms are already building AI into trip planning and discovery, making “ask a question” feel like the start of the booking journey. Expedia’s ChatGPT app is a good example of this direction.
The point is not that every operator needs to rush into this. It’s that travellers and platforms are being nudged towards AI-led journeys, which changes expectations fast.
3) Errors and “hallucinations” are not a quirky edge case
AI can sound confident and still be wrong, and in travel, that can turn into a real cost. A widely reported example is Air Canada being ordered to compensate a customer after its chatbot provided inaccurate information about a fare policy.
For tours and activities, the failure modes are very specific:
- Wrong meeting points, wrong opening hours, wrong accessibility info
- Confident but incorrect inclusions (what’s “included” drives refunds and disputes)
- Made-up local rules (refund policies, age limits, documentation)
- Misquoted “what the operator said”, especially when AI summarises calls or emails
When it comes to interacting with your customers, confidently providing incorrect data via a chatbot can cause a customer to leave and never come back.
4) Bias shows up in travel recommendations in subtle ways
Bias isn’t always obvious. In travel, it can be as as simple as recommending the same “safe” options as destinations. Steering people toward specific experiences, or possibly even reinforcing stereotypes about what someone “would like” based on inappropriately highlighted user signals.
Researchers at the Cyprus University of Technology have audited travel and geographic recommendations and found measurable patterns, such as popularity bias and demographic or regional skews, depending on the prompt and persona.
If discovery shifts from “search results” to “ai answers”, these patterns can quietly change who sees what, and which operators get recommended. Especially as the landscape changes with paid media and advertisements on the horizon for ChatGPT.
5) The energy and infrastructure impact is becoming a real-world constraint
Data centres are already a pressure point for energy grids, and AI workloads are a big part of the reason. The IEA projects data centre electricity demand will more than double by 2030, with AI the biggest driver.
In Great Britain, Ofgem has warned that proposed data centre projects could require more power than the current peak demand, which shows how quickly this is becoming an infrastructure issue, not just a tech one.
Why should a tour operator care? Because constraints and regulations can change pricing and availability of the tools the industry relies on, and they can trigger new rules about disclosure and audit trails.
6) “Hard to stop” does not need to be sci-fi to be a problem
There’s plenty of noise online about AI systems “refusing to shut down”. There’s also academic work testing “shutdown resistance” behaviours in controlled setups.
The practical version of this risk in business software is simpler:
- Tools that keep acting when someone thinks they’ve stopped (auto-sends, auto-posts, auto-replies)
- Automated actions that are hard to audit or roll back
- “Helpful” optimisations that change settings without a clear permission trail
In tourism operations, where a small change can cascade into overbookings, refunds, and staffing headaches, that matters.
7) Regulation is catching up, and travel businesses will be pulled into it
If you operate in or sell into the EU, the EU AI Act timeline matters. The European Commission’s own timeline sets out phased application dates, including prohibited practices and AI literacy obligations applying from 2 February 2025, with broader application from 2 August 2026 (with some later deadlines for certain high-risk areas).
Even if a company is not building AI models, there may still be responsibilities depending on how AI is used, especially when it influences customer decisions or runs automated comms at scale.
What this means for tours and activities, in plain terms
Today, most operators are light users
There is limited usage of AI systems for typical operators. Bots are used as chatbots, and for support desks above all, however it can also extend to copyrighting for products, FAQs, and articles, through to various internal help like designing templates, summaries, and translations.
Mostly simple stuff.
Read our article on how to strike a balance between AI, chatbots & human support… And meet our chatbot tool, Harry. We’ve also solved the writing product copy task with our AI translation feature.
This is often where change arrives quietly.
Platforms are already starting to add AI into the core mechanics of how products are surfaced and evaluated. Search and ranking become AI-driven, as activity descriptions and comparisons start to be auto-generated. Pricing tools begin suggesting where you should move to stay “competitive”. Reviews get analysed automatically, producing sentiment-based quality scores that influence how products appear.
So yeah, its a big step up.
None of this necessarily shows up as a dramatic feature launch, it just gradually becomes part of how the marketplace works, instead. A new normal that slowly creeps in.
The next step is when those same systems start telling operators what they should do.
AI-powered dashboards can be genuinely useful, they can highlight patterns, surface opportunities, and save time analysing data. But they also introduce a subtle shift: the dashboard stops being a reporting tool and starts becoming a decision engine.
At that point, operators begin seeing prompts such as raising prices based on market signals, discounting specific time slots to fill capacity, adjusting cancellation policies to improve conversion, or bundling products in ways that better match how a platform wants to sell.
Sometimes those recommendations will be correct. But they may also be wrong, biased toward the platform’s incentives, or based on incomplete data.
A simple “are you ready?” checklist for operators
In closing
AI can absolutely help tours and activities. But the industry should stop treating it like a harmless writing tool. The real shift is happening higher up the chain: platforms and tech providers are using AI to shape discovery, pricing, and behaviour. That brings real benefits and real downsides.
The operators who do best won’t be the ones who “use AI the most”. They’ll be the ones who stay in charge of where it’s allowed to act, what it’s allowed to touch, and how quickly a human can step in when it gets it wrong.
If you want the best human support for your tour operations, reach out to Palisis for real and reliable perfection in booking and reservation management.