Owning a travel business (whether you’re an independent travel advisor or a travel company of any size) often means you have to wear many hats when it comes to the day-to-day operations and marketing side of things. Once you’ve set up your travel business with Waybird, you can use Artificial Intelligence (AI) and tech tools to market your travel business and get new clients – whether you’re just starting out or have been in the game for a while.
With countless tech and AI tools available these days, you can pick-and-choose the ones that work best for you when it comes to refining your brand identity; creating and scheduling relevant content; boosting your productivity; and improving your time management. All of which will free up your time to focus on what you love most – creating once-in-a-lifetime travel experiences for your clients, no matter whether they want to safari in Kenya, hike across Patagonia, cruise through the Amazon, or explore Thailand’s beaches!
This blog post is the first in a series where we’ll explore the best AI tools for travel advisors and how you can leverage technology across different areas of your travel business from streamlining admin and work flows to optimising daily business operations. First up, we’ll dive into how to supercharge your travel business with the help of tech and AI tools for content creation and marketing.
AI tools for travel advisors: Content creation and marketing
Content is king (and AI its queen)
We’ve heard it all before – ‘content is king’ when it comes to marketing, and these days ‘AI is its queen’. If you want to attract new clients and establish your expertise as an independent travel advisor within a certain niche or destination, it’s important to create engaging and relevant content that relates to the travel services you offer. But writing regular blogs, penning newsletters and creating social media posts can be very time-consuming; even more so when you have to stay on top of managing client requests and be up-to-date with travel trends and new hotel openings (though we can help with the last one, as Waybird’s library of over 3,000 curated properties are updated regularly by our in-house content experts).
Content ideation to spark your creativity
Before you start writing anything, it’s important to consider your target audience and niche/specialisation, so that you create content that’s relevant to them and also your business goals.
- Google Trends is a free tool that outlines trending topics in real-time in any location around the world. It’s helpful in discovering a surge in specific search topics, tapping into seasonal search trends, identifying emerging travel styles and to refine your content strategy. The “Related Queries” feature can help you discover long-tail SEO keywords that travellers are looking for online. You can also sign up to get regular updates on what’s trending on Google delivered straight to your inbox.
- AnswerThePublic helps you discover the most popular questions that people are searching for online, across various internet browsers and social media platforms, such as Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. Answer relevant questions that relate to your travel niche in your blogs, social media content and newsletters.
These days Generative AI (Gen AI) models or LLMs (AI-powered Large Language Models), such as: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Jasper.ai, Copy.ai and many others can help you with ideation, outlining the structure of your content, answering common traveller questions, and content creation.
AI tools for travel advisors: Content creation
Once you have insights into the kinds of topics your potential clients are looking for, combined with your personal experience, it’s time to start creating. And while this can be a laborious process, AI tools can help you generate content much faster, whether it be quirky captions for your Instagram posts, engaging questions for your Facebook page, short scripts for video content (for Reels, TikToks and YouTube shorts), newsletters or blogs.
If you specialise in selling Latin America, adventurous travel or ecotourism holidays, for example, and want to write a newsletter about the best hiking trails in Patagonia, simply give your chosen AI a prompt that includes as much useful information as possible, such as “Write a detailed blog post about the top 5 hiking trails in Patagonia, including the hike length, duration and difficulty levels, scenic highlights along the way, and best times of the year to do each hiking trail.”
For the best results, fine-tune your prompts or provide as much detailed context as you can. To save time, you can also share your already-written content to train the AI model you’re using – ask it to use your content’s tone of voice, writing style and editing format as a starting point or to summarise, edit or repurpose it accordingly.
You’ll get a decent first draft that you can edit with your personal insights and recommendations, while including links to the properties and the experiences you sell, combined with some of your most popular travel itineraries in the region. Include helpful notes from your personal experiences and insider tips, so that the content is unique to your travel brand and builds trust with your audience.
Which Generative AI model is best for travel advisors?
There are countless free and paid-for AIs out there with many more being developed for specific industries and sectors. Here are just a few of the most popular ones that are best suited to content creation for independent travel advisors like yourself. Though it’s important to note that they’re being developed and updated at such a fast pace that quite a few things might have changed since the time of writing this blog post.
- ChatGPT (by OpenAI) has decent creative writing capabilities and real-time access to the internet. The paid-for version allows you to: upload files for advanced data analysis; make custom GPTs that are tailored to your business; offers image and video generation; reasoning models, and voice mode through GPT 4-o. It’s known to provide generic answers at first, which is why it’s important to always refine prompts.
- Claude (by Anthropic) offers more natural, human-sounding text generation making it ideal for getting your creative juices flowing, especially if you want to evoke a serious case of #TravelInspiration within your clients. This AI is designed to focus on generating ‘ethical’ and transparent outputs that protect users’ privacy.
- Gemini (by Google AI) can process real-time information from the internet and performs well on complex reasoning tasks. It supports multiple languages, voice integrations, document uploads, and seamlessly integrates with other Google services like Google Maps, Google Flights, and Google Hotels. You can upload your own content to create custom so-called ‘gems’, with the addition of other Google services. As with all other AI tools, its responses are influenced by the data it was trained on, which may contain biases, but that’s where your personal travel experience has the chance to shine,
- Other Gen AIs that are specifically built for the creation of marketing content include Jasper.ai (paid) and Copy.ai (2,000 words per month on the free version).
At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter which one you use, the most important thing to remember is that LLMs are in their infancy and can get facts wrong, so always use your discretion and fact-check, edit and personalise the output into your own language and a tone of voice that reflects your travel brand.
Personalised travel itineraries, fact-checked content and quality images
At Waybird, our tech has done much of the hard work for you, when it comes to helping you build your own travel brand. Our easy-to-use platform streamlines the creation of customisable trip itineraries in minutes, based on your clients’ dreams (and budget). Our itinerary builder makes use of fact-checked, up-to-date travel content written by our in-house experts with first-hand experience of the properties and experiences in each of our 42 destinations around Africa, Asia and Latin America.
Each trip itinerary is coupled with relevant quality images and can be downloaded as beautifully-designed PDFs or sent to your client via an online link. Waybird also gives you the option to edit and personalise the content we’ve already created, so that it reflects your travel business and is relevant to your clients’ special interests. If you add any extra information to a trip template, such as a new experience or additional hotel details, you can easily save this information in your trip library to re-use again in future itineraries – talk about a great way to save time down the line.
Go on, design your first trip with Waybird, we know you want to! Rest assured that we also have a support team on call if you ever need help.
Up-to-date country guides with Waybird
Our country guides allow you to be the travel expert. With Waybird, you no longer have to spend countless hours researching every detail about the destinations you sell because we’ve done all that hard work for you. Waybird’s country guides include up-to-date pre-departure travel information about each of our countries and regions, such as packing lists, visa requirements, health information, local customs and so much more.
SEO to get your travel business found online
Once your travel business scales and your team grows, you may want to consider creating an SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) strategy for your travel website to rank highly in search engine results, improve your online visibility, and (hopefully) increase travel bookings too (that’s why you’re here in the first place, right?).
It’s a very competitive and time-consuming exercise, especially as you’ll be competing against much larger travel businesses with big teams, who have more resources. But if you decide that an SEO strategy is the way to go in terms of your marketing approach, there are a number of tech tools and SEO toolkits to consider, such as: Google Search Console, SEMrush, SurferSEO, Yoast, Ahrefs.
But that’s a blog post of its own, which we’ll tackle another time.
AI tools for travel advisors: Editing your content
No one likes a pesky typo or a confusing run-on sentence, especially not when you only see it after you’ve posted something (sigh, it’s happened to the best of us). You can create professional-sounding content with the help of online editing tools that act as a virtual proofreader to catch any mistakes you might have missed. They can also help you humanise AI-created content and personalise it so that it sounds more like you. Our personal favourite is Grammarly. We’re also rather fond of QuillBot – a handy rephrasing tool that improves sentence clarity. You can also use it to refine your brand voice.
The way with Waybird
Creating compelling content to market your travel business (no matter how big or small, and whether you’ve been going for a while or if you’re just getting started) has never been easier with the help of various AI tools for travel advisors that are our there. They can free up your time by driving efficiencies and increasing your productivity. Most importantly, they can help you create a steady stream of targeted and Instagram-worthy content that’s aimed at your niche and target travellers.
And if you’re looking to save time, energy and effort in crafting unforgettable holidays and travel experiences that are personalised to your clients’ budget and interests, Waybird can help to supercharge your travel business. If you’re curious about what we do and how we can help you build your own travel brand, we’ve created a series of ‘how-to’ tutorials.
Stay tuned for the next post in this series.
