AI upends travel: china’s boom, marketers scramble to catch up

China’s experience shift was already visible well before the late-2026 AI inflection: Baiguan said the “2026 Year of the Horse Spring Festival (Feb 15–23) will likely be remembered as the year China’s ‘revenge spending’ matured into something more structural,” pointing to deeper trends in culture- and experience-led travel rather than a one-off holiday burst. The scale mattered too: domestic tourism during the 2026 Chinese New Year holiday grew 19% year over year to 596 million tourists, while tourism revenue also rose 19% to RMB 803 billion, giving hard evidence that experiential demand was accelerating on a mass-market base.

That growth was not centered only on China’s biggest hubs, which is why it matters for the broader reshaping of tourism patterns between August and October 2026: Baiguan noted this trend has been visible “since 2024,” with “smaller and lower-tier cities” outpacing big cities, provincial capitals, and traditional tourist hubs in tourist growth. The wider Asian backdrop reinforced the durability of that shift, as Briefglance cited Agoda data showing nearly a third of Indonesian travelers planned 11 or more trips in 2026, Asia’s Gen Z mostly expected short trips of one to seven days, and for 65% of global markets the single busiest month had lost dominance, supporting a steadier year-round market for experience-rich travel.

By late 2026, travelers were not waiting for brands to teach them how to use AI; they were already folding it into trip planning at scale. The Aug. 19, 2026 study by Mindtrip, Sabre, Sojern and MMGY Travel Intelligence found that more than half of travelers already use AI to plan trips and that travelers are two years ahead of the travel industry on AI, with nearly 7 in 10 Millennials (69%) and 63% of Gen Z using AI assistants as often as social media for planning.

That adoption is shaping real travel behavior, not just inspiration: 40% of travelers have discovered a destination through AI, 29% have changed plans based on an AI recommendation, and 60% use it to research attractions, restaurants and transportation, while 43% use it to build itineraries and organize details. Yet destination marketers are behind, with only 22% of DMOs offering AI trip-planning on their websites and just 26% having a documented AI strategy, even as trust remains fragile: only 24% trust AI recommendations, more than half distrust them, and 43% feel overwhelmed by AI’s growing presence.

AI is already moving travel discovery upstream, before a traveler ever reaches a supplier site. Anna Slater said Verve LLM data shows “consumers are using it for general discovery,” with “Around 28% of the prompts… relate to these types of inquiries,” while “AI use for travel inspiration has doubled in the past year”; she added that users can go from “give me trip ideas” to a shortlist without touching a brand website, and that prompts are dominated by discovery, timing and itinerary building, showing plans are being reshaped in the search phase itself.

That shift is translating into action, not just curiosity. AI traffic to travel sites was up 119% year over year in July, and monthly conversion rates are now similar to non-AI traffic, suggesting users are increasingly willing to act on AI recommendations; separately, 28.7% of US internet users have used AI for travel guidance, with 43% naming research and inspiration as primary uses, followed by transportation planning at 41% and itinerary creation at 34%, while PwC found 44% often or always use AI to compare prices and discounts. Google’s tools now mirror that behavior directly: “AI Mode helps users discover, compare, and book participating hotels,” and for flights it “show[s] available flight options with the latest prices from more than 300 partner airlines and travel sites.”

Travel companies and destination marketers are reorganizing budgets, products, and campaigns around AI because they cannot rely on legacy channels alone. The 2026 Destination Marketing Strategy intelligence surveys found that 67 of marketers are still exploring AI or using it only for specific tasks, so the shift is real but uneven. Skift reported that AI-enabled companies took 45% of travel startup funding by mid-2025, up from 10% in 2023, even though referral traffic from AI agents still drives fewer than 1% of room nights at Booking.com. Only 6% of hotels appear in AI-generated search results, and AI systems shortlist the brands they can read.

That gap is pushing a practical reorganization of products and campaigns around a split funnel rather than a full handoff to AI booking. Skift found that AI is becoming part of travel discovery faster than it is becoming a transaction channel, with AI accounting for 21% of touchpoints during inspiration but just 6% at booking; only 2% of leisure travelers will let AI book for them, while 49% cite greater trust in a supplier’s website as their top reason for booking direct. Marketers are shifting spend toward AI visibility, direct trust signals, and internal efficiency, where Airbnb cut support cost per booking by about 16% using AI.

AI’s diversification value is becoming clearer because overtourism is fundamentally a concentration problem: too many travelers default to the same famous places, while nearby alternatives remain invisible. Fortune captured that logic in Klook cofounder Ethan Lin’s argument that AI can solve overtourism by helping people find “hidden gems,” turning recommendation engines into demand-redistribution tools that surface less-visited destinations instead of simply reinforcing the gravitational pull of established hubs.

Indonesia offers a concrete model of how that redirection works in practice: according to Briefglance, its AI assistant MaiA is designed as a “digital traffic controller” that reduces the friction of planning trips beyond Bali, nudging a wellness traveler toward Lombok or East Nusa Tenggara instead of saturated hotspots. The same strategic need is visible in Europe, where Skift reported that France wants international visitors to spend €100 billion a year by 2030, up 29% from last year’s level, without adding to the crowds in Paris and its other best-known cities, while “Ireland's tourism policy, published in December, targets a 15% rise in revenue from overseas visitors by 2031.”