How to use AI for visitor attraction marketing (updated May 2026)

AI thought starters for visitor attractions

When I first wrote this, AI was the clever assistant you had quietly working in the back office - drafting your captions, crunching your reviews, saving you a Tuesday afternoon.

But my gosh, it’s moving fast - too fast to keep documenting every opportunity as it evolves, so here is a snapshot from my perspective as a marketer for visitor attractions in 2026.

The biggest change isn't what you can do with AI for visitor attractions when it comes to your marketing. It's what your visitors are already doing with it. Two-thirds of travellers now use AI tools to plan a trip, and most of them trust what it tells them. Which means there's a new gatekeeper between your attraction and the family deciding where to spend Saturday - and it isn't Google's first page. It's the answer the AI gives before anyone clicks anything at all.

So this isn't a list of tricks to make your marketing faster. It's a way to think about where AI now sits in your visitor's day, and what to actually do about it. I've sorted it into the jobs AI does well - and the one job it still can't do for you.

Consistency is king (and queen and consort)

Literally everything you do - across every single channel, make it consistent - stop trying out different ways of saying things across every touch point. Keep saying the same thing over and over, in a way that feels dangerously repetitive. You may well hate the way it feels, but the saying ‘it does what it says on the tin’ has never been so true.  Be literal, simple and straightforward. No more fancy marketing jargon and clever poetic wordery.

1. Get found by the AI assistants (the new Google page 1)

When someone asks an AI "what's a good rainy-day thing to do near York with two kids?", something is answering. The question is whether it's you. Right now, almost every "things to do" type search triggers an AI summary, and the people who arrive through those AI answers convert far better than old-school search traffic - because they've already done their deciding. They turn up with intent, not idle curiosity.

The catch: being top of Google no longer means you'll be in the AI's answer. Those used to be the same thing. They're now drifting apart fast.

What can you do with this?

• Test it yourself. Ask Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity the questions your visitors would ask. "Best museum for toddlers in [your region]." "Days out near [your town] for a wet bank holiday." See if you show up - and who's showing up instead of you.

• Write for the question, not the keyword. Clear, direct answers to the things people actually ask. A page that genuinely answers "is it pushchair-friendly?" beats a page stuffed with "family attraction" forty times.

• Make your facts machine-readable. Opening times, prices, accessibility, what's on. AI reads structure - a date it understands is an event, a number it understands is a price. Tidy, structured, current information is what gets you cited.

• Keep it fresh. AI favours current over stale. The event page you last updated in 2023 is doing you no favours.

• Don't skip the basic SEO housekeeping. None of this works if the plumbing's broken. Page titles that say what the page is, headings that match real questions, alt text on images, a sitemap that's actually current, pages that load before someone gives up. AI is brilliant at auditing this for you - point it at a page and ask what's missing. Boring, unglamorous, and the foundation everything else sits on.

This is the thing to fix first. You can have the best day out in the country, but if the machine recommending days out has never heard of you, none of the rest matters.

2. Use AI to think, not just to do

This is where AI earns its keep behind the scenes - and it's genuinely good at it. But the most valuable thing it can do here isn't faster admin. It's helping you work out what you actually sell.

Start with the itch you're scratching. Most attractions describe themselves from the inside out - "a family day out with history and heritage." Fine. But nobody wakes up itching for heritage. They wake up needing somewhere that'll keep a tired six-year-old happy and not bore a teenager and let the adults sit down with a decent coffee for ten minutes. That's the actual job. That's the niche need underneath the generic description. Use AI to interrogate your own offer: feed it your reviews, your booking data, your site, and ask it - what problem do people keep telling us we solve? Then describe yourself as the answer to that, not as a list of what you contain. This is the single most strategic thing on this whole page, so do it before anything else.

Once you've found that, the rest of the analytical work compounds:

• Review your customer data for the patterns you're too close to see. Feed it booking patterns, dwell time, repeat-visit data and ask what it notices. Not to build personas you'll never use - to spot the trigger moments. When do people actually book? What tips them over? That's worth more than a demographic.

• Analyse your reviews twice. First pass: the themes - what people love, what quietly annoys them, the moments they remember. Second pass, and this is the one most people miss: the language and tone your audience uses. The exact words. Then mirror them back in your own content. If your visitors say "knackered the kids out, bliss," that's better copy than anything you'll write in a meeting. Their words, fed back to them, is the whole trick.

• Understand your GA and search data without a data degree. Drop your Google Analytics and Search Console exports in and ask plain questions. Where are people dropping off? Which pages do nothing? What were they searching for when they found you - and what were they searching for when they didn't? AI turns the spreadsheet you've been avoiding into a conversation.

• Scan socials and forums for what's coming, not what's been. Reddit and TikTok are where trends surface before they reach the mainstream and long before they reach a trends report. Ask AI to scan the conversations in your space - what are people asking, complaining about, getting excited by? That's your early-warning system. By the time something's in a press release, you're late.

• Analyse your social data properly. Not just "this post did well." Why did it do well - the format, the timing, the hook, the emotion? Feed it your analytics and your posts together and ask it to find the pattern you keep accidentally getting right, so you can do it on purpose.

• Stress-test before you commit. Got a new campaign idea? Argue with the AI about it before you argue with your board. Ask it to pick holes. It's a brilliant, tireless devil's advocate.

The trick here is thinking partner, not answer machine. The good stuff comes from the conversation, not the first reply.

3. Content and social (still useful, just be honest about it)

The everyday wins are still real - just don't kid yourself they're a strategy.

• Find the language your visitors actually use to search for days out, and match your content to it.

• Repurpose, don't reinvent. One decent idea becomes a LinkedIn post, three TikToks and a newsletter line. AI is excellent at the reformatting graft.

• Build a content calendar off your own posting rhythm, so you're not starting from a blank page every Monday.

• Translate content - including video subtitles - for international visitors, properly and quickly.

• Draft the structure of long-form pieces and case studies, then add the detail and the voice yourself. The bones can be AI. The personality can't.

A word of caution that matters more every month: as everyone leans on the same tools, everyone's content starts to sound the same. The flat, polished, faintly-soulless AI voice is now instantly recognisable - and it's a turn-off. Use AI to get to the first draft faster. Don't let it be the last draft.

4. The visitor experience (tread carefully here)

This is where the gimmicks live, so I'll keep it short.

There is still nothing better than real photos. User-generated, candid, in-the-moment shots beat anything synthetic. People can smell a fake, and faking the experience is the fastest way to break the trust you're trying to build.

By all means play - a futuristic render of your site in a hundred years, a glimpse of how your heritage site looked centuries ago, a bit of fun for social. But that's a sprinkle, not a strategy. The talking-giraffe novelty has worn off. The attractions winning aren't the ones with the cleverest AI video. They're the ones whose actual day out is worth talking about.

If you're going to invest in immersive or AR, let it deepen a real moment rather than distract from a thin one. Tech can't rescue an experience that isn't there.

5. Operations and care

The quiet, unglamorous wins that actually move the numbers.

• Customer care. Use AI to analyse feedback and complaints at scale, spot the patterns, and draft thoughtful responses to tricky ones - then make them sound like you, every time. On chatbots: only if they genuinely help. A bad bot does more damage than no bot. Plenty of your visitors still want a human, and knowing when to hand over is the whole skill.

• Sentiment analysis. Fast read on the mood from reviews and forms, so you're reacting to evidence, not the loudest one-star.

• Pricing. AI tools can support dynamic, real-time pricing - handle with care and a human eye on what's fair, because your visitors can smell a rip-off too.

• Resourcing. Model staffing against demand for key seasons and events, so you're not over- or under-staffed when it counts.

• Your own admin. Don't forget the desktop. AI can sort the chaos - collating data for reports, scanning competitor activity weekly, untangling the disaster that is your downloads folder. Some of the best returns are the ones nobody sees.

• Build a dashboard that actually talks to itself. Your numbers live in too many places - Notion, Slack, your booking system, your social platforms, that spreadsheet only one person understands. AI can help you pull them into one bespoke marketing dashboard so you see the whole picture in one glance instead of opening nine tabs every Monday. The point isn't a prettier report. It's that when everything's in one view, you actually spot what's working.

The bit that's still yours

Here's what hasn't changed, and won't.

AI can find your visitors, answer their questions, draft your words and crunch your numbers. What it can't do is understand why a day out matters to the person having it. It doesn't know what it feels like to watch your kid's face at the aquarium, or why a particular bench at a particular view makes a grown adult well up.

That's the bit that's still yours. The strategy. The judgement. The micro-moments that turn a visit into a memory and a memory into a recommendation. The machine can do the doing. The thinking still has to be human - and if AI can free up time so your teams can spend more time out and about meeting and speaking to customers and visitors all the better.

Use AI for everything it's good at - and there's now a lot. Just don't outsource the soul of the place.

What can you do with this? Pick one thing from section one and do it this week. Go and ask an AI where to spend a day out near you. See if you're in the answer.