Every destination we talk to is being pitched an AI trip planner or booking widget right now, and most of the pitches sound the same. The demo is polished. The interface is slick. What's much harder to see on a first call is what sits underneath it, and that's what actually determines whether the tool holds up six months from now.
The question regional tourism organisations should be asking isn't whether to connect to AI-driven travel tools. It's what to look for when evaluating them. Here are the three questions we think matter most.
1. Whose data is behind the recommendation?
A lot of AI tools draw from large, generic pools of aggregated listings rather than a destination's own connected operators. A recommendation that looks local doesn't necessarily mean it's linked to real regional supply. It's worth asking the vendor directly where the underlying data comes from and how it connects back to your operators.
2. What keeps the listing accurate six months from now?
Data quality tends to hold up best when there's a real consequence attached to it going stale. A live transaction creates that consequence in a way a static listing doesn't. This is our view based on how we've seen it play out in the programs we run, and it's a reasonable question to put to any vendor: what actually keeps their data current once the initial setup is done?
3. Where does the money go, and who owns the customer?
When a visitor books, does the payment go directly to the operator, or through an intermediary first? Whether the operator remains merchant of record affects who holds the customer relationship, who carries compliance and dispute risk, and whether your region's operators are capturing direct revenue.
Our model
This third question is one we've built our own platform around. Operators using Nabooki are the merchant of record on direct bookings through Nabooki, and there's no commission on direct bookings. That's a structural difference from platforms where an intermediary sits inside every transaction.
We built and operate the booking technology behind the South Australian Tourism Commission's Coast is Calling program, and it's shaped how we think about this. A government marketplace can list every operator in a region and still struggle to stay current for AI tools to trust, because nothing forces it to stay fresh. A live transaction is what does that. That's the layer we build, on the destination's own domain, with the destination's own operators.
RTOs and destination bodies keep full control of brand, consumer data and reporting, while operators retain direct ownership of the customer relationship and the transaction itself.
If you're evaluating AI-connected booking infrastructure for your region, we're happy to talk through what to ask vendors, including us.
