As Seville’s Tourism Innovation Summit puts AI, digital infrastructure and tourism intelligence at the centre of its 2026 agenda, while India builds a National Digital Tourism Stack to make its tourism ecosystem more discoverable, accessible and trustworthy, the real contest may no longer be who uses AI — but who shapes the digital layer through which travel demand increasingly flows.
Global (Tourism Reporter) — For years, artificial intelligence was presented to tourism as a tool: a chatbot here, a recommendation engine there, a faster way to answer a traveller’s question. That era is ending.
At the Tourism Innovation Summit (TIS) 2026 in Seville this week, the industry’s conversation has moved towards something much bigger: AI as infrastructure. The summit’s organisers say that by 2026, AI is “no longer a differentiator, it is infrastructure”, with the real question now being who can scale it profitably. The event, running from 6 to 8 October at FIBES, is expected to draw more than 8,000 travel professionals and over 200 travel technology companies, with more than 400 international speakers across five auditoriums, four vertical forums and six C-level agendas. Confirmed speakers include Sergio Torrijos, Head of Travel at Google; Juliana Araujo, Product Director at Skyscanner; and Wilfred Fan, Chief Commercial Officer at Klook, alongside executives from Louvre Hotels, Prague City Tourism and the European Travel Commission.
For tourism, that matters because infrastructure does not merely support demand. It can determine where demand goes.
Roads, runways and railways have always shaped travel flows. A destination without an airport can struggle to grow, while a new high-speed rail link can suddenly place it within reach of millions of potential travellers. What is changing now is that a new layer of infrastructure is forming — one that is not made of concrete, steel or asphalt. It is made of data, interfaces and algorithms, and it sits between the traveller and the destination.
From travel search to demand architecture
Think about how travellers have found destinations over the past two decades. Google Search became one of the major gateways. Online travel agencies became another. Social media became another, turning inspiration into a continuous feed. Each gateway came with its own rules, costs and winners, and destinations learned — sometimes painfully — to adapt to them.
Now AI assistants and agentic travel systems could become the next layer. They do not simply list options. They interpret a traveller’s intent, weigh trade-offs and, increasingly, act on the traveller’s behalf.
That changes the strategic question.
It was once:
“How do we market our destination?”
It is becoming:
“How does our destination appear inside the systems making travel recommendations?”
Those are different problems.
Marketing is about persuading a human audience. Appearing inside an AI system is about being legible to a machine — having clean, structured, current and trustworthy information that AI systems can find, understand and confidently use in recommendations.
A destination can have stunning imagery, compelling campaigns and a world-class tourism product. But if its information is fragmented, outdated or inconsistent across the digital ecosystem, it may simply not exist in the answer.
A destination can be famous to humans and invisible to machines.
The Seville agenda reflects this shift directly. Organisers say the programme will examine how AI, automation and hyper-personalisation are changing how tourism products are designed, sold and marketed, alongside a dedicated focus on digital sovereignty in Spain and Europe, including data management, digital infrastructure and technological independence. That is a description of distribution being rebuilt, not merely improved.
The destination is becoming data
This is where India’s latest move becomes relevant. On World Tourism Day, 27 September, Union Tourism Minister Gajendra Shekhawat launched the National Digital Tourism Stack (NDTS) at Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi. Developed by the Ministry of Tourism with the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC), with support from the International Centre for DPI Innovation and Advancement, the Stack is designed to create open digital infrastructure connecting tourism businesses and experiences with travellers across multiple platforms.
What makes the initiative notable is its design philosophy. Officials describe the Stack as open digital infrastructure rather than another standalone portal or marketplace. Its planned capabilities include verified identities and supplier credentials, search and discovery, digital payments, ratings and grievance redressal. The model is built around a simple proposition: list once, reach multiple platforms. AI is also intended to sit at the front end of the system, with Tourism Secretary Bhuvnesh Kumar describing a vision of “One ticket, One pass” for the traveller’s journey across India. Shekhawat has described the initiative as AI-native digital infrastructure for the tourism industry.
The Ministry has also signed five MoUs with Airbnb, FlixBus, Glance Digital Experience, the Eicher Group Foundation and MakeMyTrip, bringing major private-sector platforms into the emerging ecosystem.
India is not alone in thinking this way. Seville’s TIS 2026 agenda, with its parallel focus on digital sovereignty, data management and technological independence, points in the same direction.
A global pattern is beginning to emerge: destinations are no longer building only physical tourism infrastructure. They are building digital infrastructure around the destination itself.
Hotels. Attractions. Airports. Restaurants. Events. Transport. Tour guides. Experiences. Reviews. Visitor data.
The more structured, verified and interoperable that information becomes, the easier it becomes for machines — and eventually AI agents — to discover, understand and recommend a destination.
And the reverse is also true.
The smaller tourism business whose offering is not structured, verified and connected risks becoming invisible to the systems increasingly mediating demand.
That makes India’s “list once, reach multiple platforms” principle more than a technical convenience. It is potentially a mechanism for widening the digital surface area of tourism: allowing a homestay, guide or experience in a lesser-known destination to become discoverable across platforms it could never have reached alone.
The new gatekeeper may be the AI travel agent
Here is where the shift becomes genuinely provocative.
Imagine a traveller telling an AI assistant:
“I have five days. I don’t like crowds. I want nature, good food and a direct flight from London. Find me somewhere.”
The traveller doesn’t search for “best destinations in Europe”. They don’t scroll through ten blue links, compare ten tabs or read a dozen blog posts. The AI does the filtering first. It may narrow the field to two or three destinations before the traveller ever sees a name.
That is fundamentally different from traditional search, where the traveller is still presented with a broad set of options and does much of the filtering themselves.
In an agentic model, the filtering is the product.
That changes the strategic question.
The battle becomes:
Who gets recommended?
And then, just as importantly:
Why?
That second question opens a set of issues the tourism industry has only begun to confront.
Data quality: Which sources does the system trust? A destination with rich, accurate and machine-readable data could potentially be favoured over a destination with an equally compelling tourism product but poor digital data.
Commercial relationships: If recommendations can be influenced by partnerships, commissions or paid placement, travellers will need to know. Transparency could become both a competitive and regulatory issue.
Algorithmic bias: Models trained on historical data may favour destinations that are already well documented, well reviewed and well known, reinforcing existing visibility rather than discovering new places.
Visibility: If a destination is absent from the recommendation layer, its traditional marketing budget may count for less than it once did.
Platforms are already attempting to connect AI tools, partnerships and tourism demand. Spanish coverage of TIS reports that Klook renewed its alliance with the Korea Tourism Organization in July, covering digital transformation, regional destinations and AI tools for visitors, while bookings to Busan and Jeju reportedly rose by more than 50% year-on-year in the first half of 2026.
Those figures should not be read as evidence that the partnership or AI tools caused the increase; the Korean outbound and domestic tourism markets were already moving. But the development illustrates something important: platform partnerships, regional destination promotion and AI-enabled travel tools are increasingly being assembled as parts of the same demand ecosystem.
And that brings us back to the question at the heart of this story:
If AI becomes the layer through which travellers discover and choose destinations, who controls that layer — and who gets to decide what the traveller sees?
AI could manufacture demand, but it could also concentrate it
This is the question that separates a serious conversation about AI in tourism from another enthusiastic discussion about technology.
On one side, AI could help lesser-known destinations become discoverable. A traveller looking for quiet, nature and good food may never have considered a second-tier region. An assistant that understands the traveller’s preferences, rather than simply their search history, could open doors that mass marketing never did. India’s digital tourism stack is explicitly designed to help smaller tourism providers and lesser-known destinations reach a wider digital market.
On the other side, AI could reinforce the winners that already dominate tourism.
If millions of AI-generated itineraries keep surfacing Paris, Rome, Tokyo and Barcelona because those destinations have the most data, reviews and digital content, AI could accelerate overtourism rather than relieve it. A recommendation engine optimised primarily for traveller satisfaction and conversion may, left unchecked, simply funnel more people towards places already struggling with visitor pressure.
The better outcome depends on what the system knows.
If AI understands capacity, seasonality, local infrastructure and visitor pressure, it could do something far more useful than recommend. It could say:
“Don’t go there in July. Try this destination instead.”
At that point, AI stops being merely a marketing tool and becomes a destination-management tool.
It could spread visitors across the calendar and across regions, redirecting demand before congestion becomes a crisis. This is not a fringe concern at TIS. The summit’s programme addresses practical pressures including tourism capacity management, air connectivity, inflation, rising energy costs and talent shortages, alongside measurable sustainability and regenerative tourism models.
But there is a catch.
For AI to manage tourism pressure, destinations must first give it something to manage.
That means reliable data on capacity, seasonality, event calendars, transport loads, visitor flows and local policies — preferably with enough freshness to reflect conditions as they change. That requires the digital infrastructure described above, but also raises a more fundamental question: who owns, contributes to and controls the data?
A system that hears only from commercial suppliers will tend to optimise for commerce.
A system that also hears from destination managers, residents and local communities has a chance of optimising for balance.
The difference matters because the most powerful tourism recommendation system may eventually be the one that knows not only where travellers want to go, but where destinations can afford to receive them.
The real question isn’t whether tourism will use AI
Tourism will use AI. That debate is over, and Seville is a sign of it. The question that matters is who will shape the AI layer through which tourism demand increasingly moves.
Destinations own the product, the local knowledge and the long-term interest in managing visitors well, but they have uneven digital capability and limited leverage over global platforms.
Online travel agencies own distribution relationships, customer data and years of booking behaviour. Airlines control access and, in many cases, the first step of the journey. Hotels hold inventory and direct customer relationships, and increasingly their own AI tools.
Technology companies and AI platforms may own the interface where travellers start asking the questions in the first place. And travellers themselves shape the outcome too, through the preferences they set, the assistants they choose and the agents they trust.
The honest answer is that nobody has settled this yet. And the outcome is unlikely to be a single winner.
But the destinations and businesses that wait to find out are taking a risk.
Those that structure their data, build trusted digital identities, join open networks and engage in how recommendation systems are designed will have a say. Those that don’t may find the new gatekeepers have already decided where demand goes.
That is the tourism story behind the AI story: the infrastructure determining not simply how people travel, but increasingly where they go, what they buy and which destinations capture the value.
The next generation of destination competition may therefore be fought not only on beaches, runways and skylines, but inside algorithms.
This report is part of Tourism Reporter’s tourism intelligence coverage, examining the technologies, data infrastructure and strategic decisions shaping how travellers discover destinations, how tourism demand is directed, and where value is ultimately captured.
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