Ensuring AI Content Quality in Tourism Marketing

Is the hospitality industry ready for AI search optimization? Most people in hospitality are still stuck optimizing for Google’s blue links. But travelers aren’t searching the same way anymore. AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google SGE are rewriting the rules of search—and they’re doing the thinking for the traveler. Instead of “best hotel in Barcelona,” people are now asking, “What’s a modern boutique hotel in Barcelona with rooftop views, great tapas, and a relaxed digital nomad vibe?” And AI isn’t giving 10 links anymore. It’s giving one paragraph with one or two recommendations. If you're not mentioned, you're invisible. Here’s what you need to do—right now—to stay in the game: 🔹 Revamp your website content. Speak like a human, not a brochure. AI scrapes and summarizes natural-sounding answers to questions, not robotic keyword stuffing. 🔹 Publish original content weekly. AI tools are favoring firsthand, high-quality content—videos, blogs, behind-the-scenes insights, storytelling. Reposting trends won't cut it. You need to be the source. 🔹 Leverage your social media like it’s your SEO. AI pulls heavily from Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn, and even Instagram and TikTok captions. If your content is being talked about, reviewed, shared, and saved, it becomes searchable and referenceable in AI-generated answers. 🔹 Focus on reputation signals. AI cares about how others talk about you. That means guest reviews, user-generated content, influencer mentions, media coverage—all of it matters. 🔹 Double down on video. AI search tools are scanning YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram Reels for real content, not stock footage. If you’re not showing your property, your people, and your story, you’re leaving opportunity on the table. 🔹 Own your niche. Don’t try to be everything to everyone. Be remarkable at something, and make sure your content shows that clearly. AI is more likely to recommend “the best eco-luxury property in Costa Rica” than just “a nice hotel.” Social is no longer just a marketing tool. It’s a search engine. It’s your digital storefront. And it’s shaping the way AI sees and ranks your brand. These days it's all about brand building. If you’re not creating consistently, showing up authentically, and thinking like a resource, don’t be surprised when AI stops recommending you. And remember, if you stay ready, you don’t need to get ready. ---- I’m Scott Eddy, keynote speaker, social media strategist, and the #15 hospitality influencer in the world. I help hotels, cruise lines, and destinations tell stories that drive revenue and lasting results — through strategy, content, and unforgettable photo shoots. If the way I look at the world of hospitality works for you, and you want to have a conversation about working together, let’s chat: scott@mrscotteddy.com.

Your stunning destination video means nothing if AI can't understand it. Here's what most travel brands are missing: AI search isn't just reading text anymore. It's natively multimodal - pulling from video, audio, images, and their transcripts simultaneously. The Multimodal Reality When someone asks AI "What's it like to experience the Northern Lights in Iceland," the system isn't just scanning blog posts. It's analyzing your destination videos, processing audio from your guides, and understanding the emotions in your imagery. Think in Content Clusters Stop creating isolated pieces. Your content strategy needs clusters: that epic drone footage, the audio narration explaining the phenomenon, the guide's transcript, and the written description - all working together to paint the complete picture. The Citation Problem Here's the kicker: Google might reconstruct your beautiful content without citing you if it's not in the format they prefer. Your 4K Northern Lights video could become someone else's AI answer if you don't have the supporting multimodal elements. The Fix Every piece of visual content needs machine-readable companions. Transcripts for videos. Alt text that tells stories. Audio descriptions that capture the experience. Structured data that connects it all. Travel is inherently experiential. Your content strategy should be too. #travelmarketing #multimodal #AIcontent #videomarketing #digitalmarketing

Most teams rushed into AI hoping it would solve content problems. Instead, it just made the noise louder without amplifying the signal. Marketing teams generate more blogs, more emails, more assets...but none of it’s consistent, trackable, or tied back to real goals. No strategy. No system. Just output. So now you’ve got folders of half-finished drafts, disconnected landing pages, and a brand voice that changes depending on which tool was used that day. The issue isn’t the AI. It’s the fact that most teams dropped it into broken processes and expected better results. Here’s what works instead: Think about content like you think about data. It should have a clear structure, an organized place to live, and most importantly, a purpose. Start by getting your structure in place: – Map your lifecycle stages – Know your conversion paths – Centralize where content lives and how it gets tracked Think about a tool like Breeze Copilot, which allows you to chat with your CRM data. If your data is messy and untrustworthy, Copilot will give you bad output. But if it is good, you get some really useful insights (check the screenshot!) Similarly, you should think about AI used for content, like Content Agent, as if it is chatting with your brand and content strategy. If you don't have a clear brand voice or objectives stored in a way that the AI can read it, you're going to get poor quality content output. – Auto-draft landing pages that actually drive conversions – Turn video transcripts into usable blog posts, not just copy-paste fluff – Build from templates that reflect your real strategy—not generic filler Aptitude 8 is one of the HubSpot partners leading the way in helping teams implement AI inside HubSpot in a way that aligns with how they work, not just what’s possible. If your content engine feels scattered right now, it’s probably not a creativity problem. It’s a system one.

🤖 1 in 3 travellers have turned to AI for recommendations when booking travel. This came out of a survey we ran amongst 2000 Americans (split evenly between travellers and hotel employees). Personally I use ChatGPT when I need inspiration for a leisure trip and don't have a specific destination in mind. It has gotten so good recently in recommending destinations with great beaches, close to coffee shops that serve flat whites (usually a sign of cooler neighbourhoods) and within 30 minute drive from the airport with direct flight connections to Amsterdam. How can hotels benefit from this new trend? A lot of the Large Language Models in AI feeds from customer reviews and social media, so you want to own that conversation. 1️⃣ Map our the buying personas for your brand. Who are the travellers you aim to attract to your hotel and what do they care about most when searching and booking accommodation? 2️⃣ Once you know which buyers, understand their motives. Do a qualitative and quantitative survey amongst those travellers, to understand what they are looking for when they book your hotel. What are the specific words/attributes they search for when booking a destination/hotel. 3️⃣ Set up smart online advertising campaigns that attract these customers that fit the buying personas. The more travellers you bring in with the right profile, the larger the pool of potential customers using the right language when talking about your hotel afterwards. 4️⃣ Have an online content strategy that accentuates the usage of those attributes in online media by travellers in both reviews and social media. Have a solution in place that drives more reviews from the right customer segments (volume matters in large language models) like Shiji ReviewPro, Revinate or TrustYou. 5️⃣ Make sure you have team members engage with the reviews, again using the right language that supports the strategy. Also hotels that engage positively with reviews, generally see that customers are more likely to leave a review, knowing that the hotel is paying attention. 6️⃣ Ensure you have a website with lots of content and blogposts leaning into all the same buying personas. For example if you are targeting someone like me, write a blog about the best flat whites within a 15 minute walking distance. Most hotel websites are basic and I often turn to the OTA's if I want to find out if the hotel has a gym or allows for dogs. There is no acceptable reason your own website should have less content than a 3rd party. These are all very deliberate strategies, and it takes a lot of hard work. But it is clear that travellers are moving in this direction fast, and traditional marketing needs to shift. This is a really exciting opportunity for our industry!

 A Major Shift in Online Search is Coming – Are You Ready? We just dropped a new episode with Christian Watts, and it couldn’t be more timely. If you’re in the travel, tour, or rental space, you need to hear this one. For the last 20 years, online discovery has revolved around search engines like Google. Type in “boat rental in Miami,” scroll through a list of links, and pick what looks best. The top results won. Game over. But AI is rewriting the rules...fast. Consumers will soon rely on conversational AI assistants that act like personal travel agents. Instead of browsing dozens of websites, users will describe exactly what they want, “I’m looking for a dog-friendly pontoon boat in Destin for 6 people this weekend”—and the AI will deliver curated, decision-ready options pulled from OTAs, reseller platforms, and direct operator sites. So, the question is: How do you become one of those options AI recommends? We’re entering a world where it's not just about keywords or backlinks, it's about clarity, completeness, and trust. Based on current trends and what I’ve seen firsthand, here’s what I believe matters most: 1. Trust Signals Will Trump Technical SEO AI agents will prioritize businesses with strong social proof - real reviews, active brand presence, and signals that customers trust you. Think of reviews not just as feedback but as ranking fuel for the new search paradigm. 2. Content Must Be Over-the-Top Helpful It’s no longer enough to say “Dogs allowed on board.” Your website should answer every possible question: What breeds and sizes are permitted? Are there extra fees? Do you provide water bowls or dog life jackets? Include photos of real dogs on your boats. This kind of obsessive detail is exactly what AI thrives on. It helps it confidently match your offering to ultra-specific user requests. 3. Your Site Must Be AI-Friendly Forget flashy animations or bloated load times. Your content needs to be: Fast-loading Mobile-optimized Crawlable and structured (yes, schema markup still matters) If AI agents can’t easily parse your information, you simply won’t be recommended. The next wave of winners in travel and local experiences will be those who prepare now. Think beyond SEO. Think beyond ads. Think about how your digital presence can serve as a crystal-clear answer to someone's hyper-specific question.

Google’s Booking Trips Now. And It Might Not Be Recommending Your Hotel. Google took the funnel. Canvas. Flight Deals. Agentic Booking. They are the new infrastructure of travel. ➡️ Canvas is Google’s AI-powered trip planning workspace. You describe the trip you want. The AI builds it instantly. Live hotel pricing. Flight options. Restaurant picks. Activities. Walk times. Reviews. A full itinerary, all in one side panel. You never need to visit a hotel site. ➡️ Flight Deals listens for intent. You can say something vague like "somewhere warm in January." The AI scans destinations, compares prices, and shows you the cheapest options in seconds. ➡️ Agentic Booking takes it further. The AI checks real-time availability for restaurants, events, and soon hotels. Then it sends you straight to the booking page. No discovery. No consideration window. No second chance. Your hotel doesn’t show up unless it is already structured for AI. If you are not embedded in the logic of the plan, you are not part of the journey. AI doesn’t care how charming your homepage is. It doesn’t wait for your pop-up to capture an email. It doesn’t read your story. It scans for structured data, rich content, pricing signals, and authoritative responses. If your brand isn’t in the AI layer, it’s out of the funnel. And someone else owns your guest. The Commercial Org Has a Choice: Build or Vanish You’re fighting for relevance inside an AI-first booking path. Here’s what needs to happen immediately: 1️⃣ Retrain Your Team to Think in AI Train your team on how AI interprets content, how travelers ask questions, and how to think in systems. 2️⃣ Turn Your Direct Channel into a Machine-Readable Asset Structure your data. Tag your content. Speed up your load times. Every pixel should be built for discovery and retrieval by AI. If it can’t parse it, it won’t show it. 3️⃣ Redesign Campaigns for the Prompt Economy Guests don’t search “hotels in Tulum” anymore. They ask “Where should I stay for a quiet wellness weekend near the beach?” If your campaigns don’t match the language of AI prompts, you’re invisible. 4️⃣ Deploy Agentic AI Before OTAs Do It for You AI voice agents. Automated booking flows. 24/7 language coverage. Revenue infrastructure. Own the interaction. 5️⃣ Generate Your Own AI-Optimized Visuals AI is parsing visual content to match user intent. Build a visual library that reflects your vibe, your location, your people. Or Google will use someone else’s. This Is the Split Moment Hotels that adopt AI early will compound visibility, relevance, and direct revenue. They’ll move faster, test more, and create paths that AI can follow. The rest will build content no one sees. Campaigns no one clicks. Offers no one converts. If your team wants to protect margin, speed up execution, or needs help designing an AI-first direct strategy, reach out. Don’t wait to get cut out.