The AI Destination Planner for DMOs, Tourism Boards and Small Operators

A Destination Planning AI That Actually Knows the Numbers

I built this because I got tired of answering the same tourism questions with guesses.

I run Destination Economics — a destination intelligence service that tracks arrivals, airline routes, traveler sentiment and search visibility for real destinations, week after week. Cambodia, Ethiopia, Uzbekistan. Real airline schedules pulled weekly. Real sentiment collected from review platforms and travel forums. Real arrival numbers from the UN Tourism database.

This is the planning side of that work, opened up.

Ask it what you'd ask a consultant

It works with tourism boards, regional DMOs, and independent operators. The questions people bring it look like this:

- "Help me write a tourism development plan for a province with 40,000 annual visitors and one highway"
- "Our arrivals from China are down 30%. What should we actually do about it?"
- "Draft a marketing plan for a small tour operator competing against three bigger brands"
- "What does a realistic visitor forecast look like for a destination rebuilding after a crisis?"

It answers with structure: strategy frameworks, draft policies, campaign plans, product ideas, costed options. Then you push back, and it revises — the way a good junior strategist would, if one were available at 11pm on a Sunday.

What it covers

- Strategy and policy — destination management plans, regulatory frameworks, governance, alignment with the SDGs
- Marketing — campaigns by audience and channel, niche positioning (wellness, slow travel, community-based tourism), realistic plans for small budgets
- Data and forecasting — demand seasonality, source-market logic, pricing strategy for peak management
- Crisis and recovery — demand-side vs supply-side diagnosis, reputation repair, restoring visitor confidence
- Small-operator growth — the small-DMO problem is my specialty: what one person with limited budget can do that beats a bigger competitor

Why it's different from asking a general chatbot

Two reasons.

First, tools. This isn't a chatbot with a tourism prompt — it runs on custom tools I built for destination work. When a question needs facts, the assistant pulls them: route-level airline data, weekly sentiment collections, arrivals history, search-visibility numbers. It answers from evidence, not from whatever's in its training data. You can connect your team to it directly — it plugs into the AI assistant you already use.

Second, judgment. It's tuned for tourism's actual arguments — carrying capacity vs growth targets, tour operators vs OTAs, long-haul vs regional source markets, VFR-heavy arrival bases. General chatbots give generic answers to tourism questions. This one argues with you.

Who it's for

- National and regional DMO staff writing plans they have to defend
- Small operators doing their own marketing because there's no one else
- Consultants and students who want a sharp second opinion
- Anyone in a tourism office who has inherited a question they're not sure how to answer

Start with your hardest question

Don't test it with "give me tourism trends for 2026." Bring it the problem you've been avoiding: the stale management plan, the market that stopped coming, the product nobody books. That's where it's most useful.