Billboards, SEO, social ads, and email campaigns have all done their part. But the game has changed. Travelers now begin their journey in an AI portal, not traditional Google, not Instagram on average, but ChatGPT, Perplexity, or whatever conversational interface lives inside their phone, car, or headset.
That’s why the next step for every tourism bureau, convention and visitors bureau (CVB), and regional coalition is clear: hire an AI guide for your region.
The top of the visitor (and professional traveler or conference goer) funnel has moved. Travelers no longer browse, they converse. To compete, destinations must show up inside those conversations with verified information, real-time offers, and the warmth of local voice. An AI guide makes that possible AND allows the region to maintain control on their brand opposed to letting the AI gods decide on what information should appear.
Tourism economics haven’t changed in a century…just the tools. Every strategy still measures success by basically three outcomes:
AI guides directly advance each of these goals because they don’t just market the region, they converse on its behalf.
Before AI, attraction was built on broadcast tactics. Billboards, Google Ads, and paid social all shouted into the void, hoping to trigger curiosity and clicks. You’d measure impressions, not meaningful engagement.
After AI, a billboard can become a conversation starter. Add a QR code that says “Talk to Wheeling right now.” Scan it, and an AI guide trained on the city’s history, local business inventory, events, and insider knowledge starts building your weekend itinerary. It asks questions, offers themes, even suggests drive times and local stays.
Now, every impression becomes a measurable dialogue and if the guide is maintained locally there is information, pics, video, discounts, and so much more that would never have been accessed by large AI portals trying to win at a national level.
Before AI, travelers landed, pulled up Google Maps or Yelp, etc, and scrolled through review sites that often promoted the biggest advertisers, not the most authentic experiences. Most spent money at a few well-known anchors and missed the local gems that make the trip memorable. The brave few dodged the trolls in Reddit or tried to avoid triggering an endless scroll in Instagram or TikTok just to hope for unique events or experiences to burst through the algorithm fog and find them - it works unless it didn’t.
After AI, the region’s guide becomes a personal concierge. It helps make connections between a theatre show and a pre-show dinner, recommends a local chocolatier for dessert, and maps a short walk to a riverfront brewery. It knows what’s open, what’s nearby, and what’s special today, not last month. And, it also thinks through the age of kids you have, if you travel with a dog, have different physical abilities and so much more. A single conversation helping to bounce from one helpful AI guide to another maintained by local organizations answers the basics but allows you to simply have a chat in natural language about YOUR journey and hopes for the trip.
When you connect that intelligence across multiple local guides from the CVB to partner restaurants, venues, and parks you get a living local economy that collaborates in real time. Each referral keeps dollars circulating inside the community instead of leaking out to chains and intermediaries and the data you can now see allows real planning for the future. No more frustrated searches for normal people, just a series of conversations and chats with guides who represent what to do.
Before AI, your relationship with the traveler ended when they checked out. Maybe they got an email newsletter if they remembered to sign up and more often they tried to avoid yet another buzz or beep from a place they visited what may feel like a lifetime ago.
After AI, the guide remembers them and what they asked about even if it’s across ten or more companies, attractions, or organizations. It recalls that they came for a spring festival, loved local history, and had two kids under ten. Six months later, it can reach back out with a personal message:
“You loved the Heritage Trail last April. You should see it in fall colors. Here's a two-day itinerary built just for you.”
That’s how you build repeat visitors, with relevance and timing, not generic blasts or hopes they remember you compared to all the other travel shiny objects being thrust at them via legacy ads.
Wheeling’s CVB has already done what so many smaller cities do right: build a capable digital presence, host events, and champion its local business network. But like hundreds of destinations across America, its challenge isn’t lack of content, it's lack of connection.
An AI guide for Wheeling could become the connective tissue across every attraction and local business. It could:
This isn’t replacing human hospitality, it’s just scaling it (24/7 in virtually any language).
Every decade, tourism marketing reinvents itself around a new medium: print, television, the web, social, video. Each time, the winners were the first to show up where the customer was already looking.
AI guides are the next iteration. In this answer economy, people don’t scroll through ten links, they ask one question and act on more or less one answer as a starting point. If that answer doesn’t come from your region’s guide, it will come from somewhere else… maybe a national booking engine or a chain that pays for placement.
The solution isn’t more advertising. It’s ownership of your local narrative inside the AI ecosystem.
Imagine a traveler in Columbus thinking about a fall road trip. They ask ChatGPT:
“What’s a small town nearby with good food, local history, and things for kids to do outdoors?”
If Wheeling’s CVB has trained its guide, the response might include:
“Wheeling, West Virginia which is home to the historic Suspension Bridge, Oglebay Park’s trails, and a vibrant downtown arts scene. You can chat directly with Wheeling’s AI guide for trip ideas, real-time offers, and local recommendations.”
Click that link, and suddenly the traveler isn’t browsing they’re talking and planning.
They see short videos from the festival last weekend. They get a suggested “Weekend of Local Flavor” itinerary. They ask for vegetarian restaurants and get three real, open options with menus and maps. They’re sold because they didn’t just read about Wheeling. They talked to it. AND EVERY CONVERSATION AND JOURNEY IS DIFFERENT.
AI guides are not gimmicks. They’re infrastructure. They turn tourism organizations into active participants in a new kind of digital conversation that happens 24/7, in every traveler’s pocket.
Owning that channel means owning your data, your brand voice, and your future audience. Ignore it, and you risk being represented by whatever a global AI model can scrape from the web: outdated, impersonal, and incomplete.
Every executive understands the danger of being invisible in the feed. Now the feed is changing form. Tomorrow, being invisible in the conversation will cost far more.
AI guides don’t replace marketing. They make it smarter. They don’t replace travel agents or front-line staff. They amplify them. And they don’t erase the value of the visitor bureau, they make it omnipresent!
Wheeling, like thousands of cities rich in story and spirit, can now extend hospitality beyond geography. The conversation no longer starts at your website, it starts the moment someone asks a global AI, “Where should I go next?”
If you want that answer to be yours, it’s time to hire an AI guide.
