AI trip planning is changing how travelers find tours - here's the data
More than half of U.S. leisure travelers used AI to plan at least one trip in the past twelve months. That number comes from Phocuswright’s March 2026 report, which called this “the fastest behavioral shift in travel in a decade.” In 2024, that figure was 24%. By late 2025, it was 43%. Now it’s 56%.
If you run a rafting company, guide service, or campground, those numbers describe your future customers. Not all of them. Not yet. But enough of them that ignoring AI trip planning means missing a growing share of the people who would otherwise find and book with you.
We pulled the data together. Here is what it says.
The adoption curve is steeper than you think
Going from 24% to 56% in roughly eighteen months is unusual for any technology category in travel. Nothing else moved this fast recently.
Phocuswright’s demographic breakdown tells a more detailed story. Among travelers aged 18 to 35, adoption hit 71% in March 2026, up from 52% in 2024. Millennials lead at 74%, with Gen Z close behind at 72%. Gen X sits at 50%.
The surprise is the older demographics. Travelers 55 and older reached 38% adoption, up from 18% in 2024. Boomers doubled from 13% to 27% in six months. If you assume your older customers are not using AI to plan trips, the data disagrees with you.
Simon-Kucher’s Global Travel Trends survey, covering more than 10,000 respondents across ten markets, found 42% of travelers used AI tools like ChatGPT or Copilot for itinerary planning in 2025. Another 33% used them for translation and 31% for general travel search.
The IMG Travel Outlook Survey, with more than 1,000 respondents, found 75% of AI-using travelers seek recommendations through these tools, 70% use them to plan itineraries, and 69% use them to discover new ideas and destinations. Only 13% use AI for actual booking. That last number matters. People are using AI to decide where to go and what to do, then booking through traditional channels. The discovery phase is where the shift is happening.
How travelers actually use AI to find tours and activities
The old search pattern was simple. Someone would type “Asheville family activities” into Google and scan the results. The new pattern is conversational. That same person now asks ChatGPT or Google’s AI something like “What should I do on a weekend trip to Asheville with kids?”
That is a very different kind of query. The person is not scanning ten links. They expect the AI to filter, compare, and recommend. They expect the AI already knows your business exists.
Booking.com launched natural-language trip planning where users describe what they want in plain sentences, like “beachfront hotels for families with pool and free breakfast.” Expedia deployed an AI assistant called Romie for trip planning and review summarization. Tripadvisor demoed a tool at Nvidia GTC 2026 where users insert an influencer video and the AI identifies every location and builds a bookable itinerary cross-referenced with Tripadvisor data.
These are not experimental features from small startups. Booking, Expedia, and Tripadvisor are rebuilding their core product around this. When Tripadvisor says it makes 2 to 3 times more revenue from travelers who use AI features versus the traditional interface, every other platform is going to follow.
Across major travel platforms, 48% of bookings in recent data involved at least one AI-assisted query or recommendation. Search volume for “AI travel planner” grew 1,100% over five years. AI planning assistants cut booking time by an estimated 40% for routine trips in March 2026 data, up from 18% in 2024.
What does this mean for you? A growing number of your potential customers are asking AI “where should I go rafting near Asheville” or “best guided fishing trips in Montana for beginners” before they ever open Google. If you are not part of the information those AI systems draw from, you are invisible during discovery.
What AI overviews are doing to search traffic
Google’s own AI Overviews are a separate but related problem. Travel queries saw a 381% increase in AI Overviews during Google’s March 2025 core update. AI Overviews now appear on roughly 60% of travel-related searches.
The click-through rate impact is real. Seer Interactive studied 3,119 queries with 25.1 million impressions and found that organic CTR dropped 61% when AI Overviews were present, falling from 1.76% to 0.61%. Searches triggering AI Overviews show an 83% zero-click rate, meaning the searcher got their answer without clicking any website.
Those numbers sound grim. Keep reading.
The same Seer Interactive data found that sources cited within AI Overviews earn 35% more organic clicks and 91% more paid clicks compared to non-cited results. Getting cited in the AI Overview flips the equation. Instead of losing traffic, you gain it.
Zero-click searches overall rose from 22.8% in July 2024 to 26.7% by September 2025. The trend is clear: fewer clicks for everyone, but disproportionately more clicks for the businesses that AI chooses to cite.
For you, this is the difference between being a source the AI quotes and being a page the AI summarizes away. One grows your traffic. The other shrinks it. Your Google AI Overviews strategy needs to account for this.
The AI dark funnel problem
Here is the part of this data that should make you uncomfortable. When someone asks ChatGPT for rafting trip recommendations and ChatGPT mentions your competitor but not you, that interaction never shows up in your analytics. You cannot see it in Google Analytics. You cannot see it in Search Console. You cannot measure what you lost. You do not even know it happened.
Researchers are calling this the “AI dark funnel.” Awareness and comparison now happen inside closed AI systems. Your analytics tools never see the interaction. Sixty-four percent of AI-using travelers used standalone platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity for trip planning, according to Phocuswright. Eighty-one percent rated these standalone tools as the most useful for trip planning.
That means the majority of AI-assisted travel planning is happening in places you cannot track. If your traffic numbers look flat, they might actually be declining relative to total demand, because a chunk of demand is being routed through AI tools that you have no visibility into.
This is different from traditional SEO, where you could at least see which keywords drove traffic and where you ranked. With AI search affecting outdoor businesses in ways that are hard to measure, you need to think about visibility in AI systems as a separate problem from your Google rankings.
The trust gap is your window
Despite those adoption numbers, most travelers still do not fully trust what AI tells them. Ninety percent know AI can help plan travel, but only 38% have actually used it. Even fewer say they trust the results.
That gap will close. Adoption doubled in a year. But right now, the travelers using AI for discovery are disproportionately the ones who plan carefully, research thoroughly, and spend more. Tripadvisor’s data showing 2 to 3 times more revenue from AI-using travelers supports this. These are not bargain hunters clicking the first result. They are deliberate planners asking follow-up questions, comparing options, and booking trips that cost more.
There is also a trust problem working in your favor. CNN tested ChatGPT city guides and found that 3 out of 9 recommended restaurants did not exist or had permanently closed. AI gets things wrong often enough that travelers still cross-reference recommendations with real sources. If your business has accurate, up-to-date information online, you become the cross-reference. The businesses with incomplete or outdated web presences are the ones that AI either hallucinates about or skips in favor of a competitor who made the effort.
What the data says you should do about it
Nothing here is complicated. But it does require attention you might not be giving it today.
First, your content needs to answer conversational questions. When someone asks “What should I do on a weekend trip to Asheville with kids,” your content needs to answer that question directly. Not in marketing language. In plain, specific, factual language. “Half-day family rafting on the French Broad, Class I-II rapids, suitable for ages 6 and up, $65 per person including gear.” That is the kind of sentence AI systems extract and cite. Your customer search behavior is shifting from keywords to questions, and your content needs to match.
Second, structured data matters more than it used to. AI systems pull from pages that are well-organized with clear pricing, availability, location details, and FAQ sections. Schema markup, complete Google Business Profile information, and consistent data across platforms all increase the odds that AI tools will surface your business accurately. If your information is scattered across an outdated website, a half-filled Yelp page, and a Google profile you set up three years ago, the AI is going to get you wrong or skip you entirely.
Third, you need to be on the platforms that AI tools pull from. ChatGPT draws from Bing’s index, Google Business Profile data, and review sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor. Perplexity pulls from the top 30 search results and weights local sources. If you are only optimizing your own website and ignoring these platforms, you are invisible to a growing share of the discovery process.
Fourth, the content volume math has changed. AI systems favor businesses that have more content answering more questions. A five-page website with a home page, about page, and three trip descriptions is not enough. The operators who are showing up in AI recommendations tend to have blogs answering specific questions, detailed trip pages, “best time to visit” content, and FAQ sections covering real customer concerns. Publishing more means being visible where AI looks for answers.
The numbers compared: 2024 versus 2026
Putting the data side by side makes the speed of change hard to ignore.
- AI trip planning adoption overall: 24% in 2024, 56% in March 2026
- Adoption among 18-35 year olds: 52% in 2024, 71% in March 2026
- Adoption among 55+ travelers: 18% in 2024, 38% in March 2026
- Booking time reduction from AI tools: 18% in 2024, 40% in March 2026
- Travel queries with AI Overviews: under 15% in early 2024, roughly 60% in early 2026
- Zero-click rate on AI Overview searches: 83% in 2025 data
- Organic CTR drop when AI Overviews present: 61%
- CTR boost for sources cited in AI Overviews: 35% more organic clicks
Those numbers are all moving in the same direction. AI involvement in travel planning is growing, click-through rates from search are declining for uncited sources, and the businesses that show up inside AI answers are pulling ahead.
You do not have to become an AI expert. You do not have to understand how large language models work or care about prompt engineering. You need to understand that the way people find outdoor activities is changing, and the data says it is changing fast.
Think about how your own customers behave. A family planning a summer vacation used to start on Google, click through ten blue links, compare a few websites, and call or book online. Now that same family might open ChatGPT, describe what they want, and get three or four specific recommendations in seconds. If your business is one of those recommendations, you just skipped the entire SEO funnel. If you are not, you never had a chance.
The operators who will lose ground are the ones who assume their existing website and word-of-mouth referrals are enough. The operators who will gain ground are the ones who make their business easy for AI systems to find, understand, and recommend. That means accurate structured data, consistent platform presence, content that answers real questions, and enough of it to matter.
None of this requires a massive budget or a full-time marketing hire. It requires updating your Google Business Profile, writing answers to the questions your customers actually ask, keeping your information consistent across platforms, and publishing content regularly. If you have been putting off that work, the data in this article is the reason to stop waiting.
If your traffic has been flat or declining despite steady demand in your area, AI’s growing role in how customers find outdoor businesses might already be the reason. The shift is not coming. It is here, and the data makes that hard to argue with.
