In short
The third wave of tourism digitalisation is about destinations. After flights and the GDS, and after hotels and experiences, where OTAs took the lion's share of the market, it is now the turn of what a place offers: what to do, what to see, how to book it. Destinations that structure this offer as readable data become visible to distribution and to artificial intelligence. The others disappear from the answers.
Ask an AI assistant where to spend a week in Italy. Then ask again, as a family, as a retired couple, as a solo traveller who loves hiking.
The destinations barely change. Only the way they are described does.
This is what Skift Research observed in its report The Mystery of the Disappearing Destination, published in October 2026: very different profiles largely receive the same shortlist of places. It is not a matter of taste. It is a matter of data: AI recommends what it can read.
For anyone who manages a destination, this is not technology news. It is a matter of survival.
What are the three waves of tourism digitalisation?
Tourism did not go digital in a single step. It happened in waves, and each one shifted control of the market.
| Wave |
What goes digital |
Who takes control |
The destination |
First
1990s |
Flights |
GDS and airlines |
Stays offline |
Second
2000s and 2010s |
Hotels and experiences |
OTAs, with the lion's share of the market |
Loses its identity, broken into single products |
Third
2020s |
The destination as an integrated offer |
Whoever structures and distributes the destination's data |
Its visibility is at stake |
In the second wave, OTAs won because they had two things: structured data and the ability to distribute it. The destination became the backdrop for products sold by others.
The third wave is about the destination itself. And the question is the same as before: who will own the data?
Why are lesser-known destinations at risk of disappearing?
Demand is already shifting. According to a global survey reported by FTN News, 43% of travellers say they plan to avoid overcrowded destinations in 2026, up 11% on the previous year.
This is a huge opportunity for rural areas, small towns and places off the beaten track. But travellers looking for alternatives search with tools that can only read what is structured.
And the offer of smaller destinations, almost always, is not. It lives in brochures, on institutional websites, in the heads of local operators. It does not exist as a product.
Meanwhile, AI is already reading destination websites at scale: an analysis by Simpleview and Granicus, reported by PhocusWire, counted nearly two million ChatGPT requests to DMO websites in eight days. And the industry is calling for a common schema that machines can interpret.
A destination that does not provide readable data lets others tell its story. Or lets no one tell it at all.
It is the leap from marketing to management we have already written about: promoting is no longer enough, you have to manage.
Can an AI agent sell a destination?
The next phase is not AI that recommends. It is AI that books. According to Phocuswright, 61% of travel companies are experimenting with or scaling agentic AI, but only 6% have extended it across multiple functions.
The gap is not technological. It is a product gap.
An agent can only build a trip from elements with consistent availability, prices, rules and descriptions. An excursion described in a PDF, a museum whose opening hours are updated by hand, a winery you can only book by phone: to an agent, they do not exist.
An agent cannot sell a product that does not exist. Travel is not a product, it is a process. And a process has to be structured before it can be distributed.
How do you digitalise a destination's offer?
Digitalising a destination does not mean rebuilding the website. It means turning what to do and what to see into an offer that is structured, up to date and ready to distribute.
This is the work we built TravelHUB for. It allows a destination to:
- gather the area's experiences, activities, places and services in a single digital warehouse;
- turn them into products with consistent availability, rates and rules;
- connect them to distribution channels, B2B and B2C, without losing control;
- make them readable by search engines and AI assistants, because they are data and not just text.
This is where lesser-known destinations find their space. In the second wave, the biggest marketing budget won. In the third, data quality is what counts, and the data of a small inland village can be just as precise as that of a major art city.
We have already written that aggregation is not enough, the destination has to be distributed, and that identity does not distribute itself. The third wave adds one more step: before it can be distributed, a destination has to be found.
What about tailor made?
It becomes more valuable, not less. When the core offer is structured, those who design bespoke trips stop chasing information and go back to doing their real job: listening to the client, putting the trip together, looking after the traveller.
That is why we created TripBuilder: tour operators and travel designers build tailor made itineraries starting from an offer that is already digital.
Automate the predictable. Humanise the exceptional.
Three objections to the third wave
Won't a small destination be crushed by the big ones anyway?
In traditional search, whoever produced the most content and the most links won. AI answers reward relevance and data quality. It is not a guaranteed advantage, but it is the first time the playing field is less uneven.
Isn't a good institutional website enough?
A website tells a story. A structured offer can be booked, combined and distributed. AI and sales channels work with the second.
Won't OTAs remain the intermediaries anyway?
For many products, probably yes. The difference is whether the destination comes to the table with its own data or lets others build it. In the second wave, it went the second way.
Existing on your own terms
The second wave taught one lesson: if you do not control the data of your own product, you end up renting out your own identity.
The third offers destinations something they have never had: the chance to exist on their own terms. But only for those who decide to get structured now.
How readable is your destination's offer today?
Let's look at it together and work out where to start to make it findable and ready to distribute.
Book a TravelHUB demo
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