OTA management
Does ChatGPT Recommend Your Tours? How AI Search Is Changing Tour Discovery
· Tourbo
A growing share of trip planning now starts with a question to an AI assistant — “best food tour in Lisbon,” “what to do in Queenstown with kids” — and the operators named in those answers get discovered before the traveler ever opens Viator or Google. If ChatGPT recommends a competitor and not you, that’s demand you’re losing upstream of every channel you currently watch. Here’s how AI discovery works and what to do about it.
Why this matters now
For years, the discovery funnel was search engines and OTAs. AI answer engines — ChatGPT, and the AI overviews now sitting on top of search — add a new first step: the traveler asks, the assistant answers with a shortlist, and that shortlist shapes everything after it. Being in the shortlist is the new page-one ranking. Being left out is invisible, and unlike a low OTA ranking, there’s no obvious place to even see that it happened.
How do AI assistants decide what to recommend?
They synthesize what the web says about you. There’s no ad auction to win; instead, the models lean on signals like these:
- Consistent information across many sources — your site, OTA listings, directories, and articles agreeing on what you offer, where, and for whom.
- Reviews — volume, recency, and sentiment, which both train and ground the recommendations.
- Clear, structured descriptions — plain language about your tours, locations, and who they suit, the kind an assistant can quote.
- Third-party mentions — being written about in guides and roundups, not just listed.
In other words, the same authentic-footprint signals that help travelers trust you help machines recommend you. A feed and a profile full of real guest content isn’t only social proof for humans anymore.
How to check whether you’re included
Treat it like a search audit, but conversational. For each key product and market, ask the assistants what a traveler would ask:
- “What are the best [your category] in [your city]?”
- “Recommend a [half-day / family / private] [your category] in [your city].”
- “Who runs [the specific experience you offer]?”
Note whether you appear, what the assistant says about you (is it accurate?), and which competitors it names instead. Done once, it’s a snapshot. Done regularly, it’s a trendline — and trendlines are where you catch a slide early.
What tour operators can actually do
- Make your information consistent everywhere. Conflicting details across your site and OTA listings confuse both travelers and models. (Config drift hurts here too — see monitoring pricing and ranking across OTAs.)
- Keep reviews flowing. Recent, plentiful reviews are among the strongest signals you control.
- Describe your tours in plain, specific language. “Three-hour small-group food tour of the old town, kid-friendly, six tastings” is quotable; marketing fluff isn’t.
- Build a real content footprint. An active presence with genuine guest footage gives the web something current to say about you.
- Monitor your AI visibility like you monitor ranking. OTA Manager scans AI answers alongside OTA search results and activity pages, so where you stand in ChatGPT-style recommendations sits on the same dashboard as your pricing and ranking — tracked, not guessed.
The bottom line
AI search doesn’t replace OTAs or Google; it sits in front of them as a new first impression. The operators who treat their presence in AI answers as something to measure and improve — consistent information, fresh reviews, a real footprint — will be the ones recommended when a traveler asks. The rest won’t know they were left out.