Finlay Millar | Senior Strategist | 28 October 2026
Ask ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude to plan a five day trip to Paris, and in seconds it will return a confident, polished and easily followed itinerary. It will suggest where to stay, what to eat and even highlight hidden gems that most travelers miss. Despite only being a few years old, these tools are already reshaping how travel gets discovered, and how more and more travelers plan their trips. An Expedia and YouGov survey of over 5,700 adults across the US, UK and India found that 53% are comfortable letting AI suggest travel options, and 40% use it to build itineraries. Phocuswright puts AI use among US travelers at 56%, with generative AI now a ‘crucial discovery entry point’.
It’s unsurprising, then, that top travel brands are now facing a race for AI visibility. Sojern found that 51% of DMOs are concerned about or preparing for AI search disruption, while the Digital Tourism Think Tank reports destinations investing in Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), restructuring content for AI crawlers and monitoring how ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity represent them. Multiple DMOs, such as Visit London, are now even appointing specialist agencies to lead their GEO strategy.
Getting on the radar
However, being found is a lot different than being trusted. It’s certainly important for travel brands to show up within AI responses, and GEO is rightly a priority for most. But that only gets you on a traveler’s radar. Despite the growth in usage, travelers still have trust issues with AI. In the same Expedia study, 66% won’t let an AI assistant book for them, and 68% still prefer a trusted brand even when AI booking is offered. Ultimately, while they may be comfortable having LLMs surface recommendations and assist with their planning, there is still a sense check between recommendations and decisions, and that happens on social.
Social content acting as a trust layer isn’t new in itself. Travelers have long used Instagram, TikTok or YouTube to get an idea of the look and feel of a destination or experience before booking. 62% of those who use social for trip planning make specific decisions after viewing content. In the past they would have been met with polished picturesque images and videos, showing the best the destination has to offer, both inspiring their visit and instilling trust in its real-life worth. But with the growth of AI, seeing is no longer believing.
When a photo stopped being evidence
In a recent study commissioned by the Tennessee Department of Tourism Development, only 5% of American travelers were able to correctly identify real destination photos in a side-by-side test with AI-generated images, despite 52% saying they felt extremely or very confident in their ability to spot AI-generated imagery. For travelers, there are few bigger breaches of trust than a trip or experience not matching the videos or imagery they had seen before. Research by Bókun, the Tripadvisor owned booking platform, found that 72% of travelers surveyed would be less likely to book an experience when photographs appeared to be AI-generated.
This blurring of the lines between real and fake means travelers are more skeptical of the content they see on social, whether it is real or AI generated. If the imagery itself can no longer prove that a place is what it claims to be, something else has to.
What proves it now
Personality-led content is the new top trust signal in travel. People are more likely to listen to real people telling real stories and showing their real experiences. Across 4,000 of our own posts published between 2022 and 2025, the formats that feel most human (vlogs, POVs and personal storytelling) drove 22% more saves. A save is the highest-intent metric on social, signalling someone is planning to come back to that content later and actually use it.
Most travel brands understand the need for personality-driven or ‘authentic’ content, but a lot of them fundamentally misunderstand what it actually means.
It’s people telling their own story, in their own words and their own style. Not scripted, not promotional, and not a brand borrowing someone else’s audience for a day.
That story can belong to the traveler, a local, or the people behind the experience. It can be a review of a first-class cabin by somebody who sat in it for fourteen hours rather than a thirty-second pan across an empty one. It can be a vlog that takes you through somebody’s perfect weekend in a city they have lived in for twenty years rather than the same five landmarks everybody shoots. It can be the behind-the-scenes of a kitchen that starts at four rather than the breakfast that is already on the table, because people want the story behind how something is made.
They might talk straight to camera, carry the whole thing in voiceover, or simply be the subject on screen while someone else tells their story. Whichever it is, it should feel real and relatable, shot on a phone rather than a production that looks better as an ad.
Somebody who has actually stayed in a hotel can confirm that the imagery which made someone want to go lives up to the hype, in a way that no brand content can. A view can now be generated by anybody, whereas a verdict belongs to the person who gave it.
Where polish still wins
This doesn’t mean that personality-led content should take over your whole feed. Every piece of content you make sits somewhere on a scale, with fully produced, cinematic work at one end and a person with a phone at the other, filming as they experience it. Both ends have a job to do. Our own data shows that the more polished, traditional dreaming content, designed to capture attention, still leads on likes and comments by 45%, while the content that feels most human leads on saves. Those aren’t competing results. They are two different jobs showing up in two different metrics, and a travel brand needs both.
What has changed is what the polished end can do on its own. That same shot used to do two things at once, making someone want to go and proving that somebody had actually been there, because a picture like that was expensive to fake. It isn’t any more. The desire survived, the proof has moved to the other end of the scale, to the content with a real person inside it.
Most travel brands are investing hard in being found. Far fewer are thinking about what a traveler sees when they go and check.
Sources
Beautiful Destinations, The Culture of Travel Report, 2026
Expedia Group / YouGov, The AI Trust Gap, 2026
Phocuswright, The AI Surge: Travel’s Fastest Behavioral Shift in a Decade, 2026
Phocuswright, Social Media Usage Approach in Travel, 2024
Sojern, State of Destination Marketing, 2026
Digital Tourism Think Tank, How Destinations Are Working Through AI, 2026
Talker Research for the Tennessee Department of Tourism Development, 2026
Bókun, Five Photo Mistakes Costing Experience Operators Bookings, 2026