Digital Tourism Think Tank

16/09/2026

Can a model that operates your computer for you also decide what "AI-generated" means for your business?

OpenAI has released GPT-6 Astra, a model built to browse, code, fill in forms, manage records and carry out full pieces of professional work with very little human input along the way. It can sit inside your operations and act on your behalf, which means the question of what it is allowed to do matters more than it did last month.

Many DMOs carry a quiet worry about this. A full-scale AI rollout feels risky when it touches people's roles and livelihoods, and that hesitation is a reasonable starting point. It is also exactly why a framework matters most. A framework lets you adopt AI on your own terms, from broad use down to none at all, and gives your team clear limits so everyone knows what is allowed and where the line should be drawn. Choosing to stay away from AI altogether is a valid position too, as long as it is written down and shared clearly, so every member of staff is working from the same understanding and shadow AI has nowhere to take hold.

Setting those limits well means being specific and that is where a lot of early frameworks fall short. Version 1 of our AI Transparency Framework asked a single question: how much of a piece of work was AI-generated, on a percentage from 1 to 99. Testing that question with our DMO peer group surfaced two problems. A percentage implies a precision nobody could honestly give and that sat uneasily in a framework built on honest disclosure. It also treated a strategy document and a generated image as the same kind of work, when AI supports each of those in different ways.

Version 2.0 answers both of those points. You start by choosing the medium from 9 options, including an article, a report, an image, a social post, a video, a website, an email, a presentation or a bid. Each medium carries its own set of activities and those answers are weighted and combined into a score. This gives DMOs specific, workable limits to build a policy around.

👉 Explore Version 2.0 of our AI Transparency Framework: https://ai.thinkdigital.travel/

11/09/2026

How do you know whether tourism is leaving a place better off?

Arrivals, overnight stays and visitor spend fill the annual reports that go to ministers and funding boards. They show how big tourism has grown while saying almost nothing about what it leaves behind. A growing number of destinations are starting to measure the harder thing, which is whether the economy, the community and the environment all hold their gains once the visitors leave.

In this article, we explore what that shift looks like:

📉 Why chasing arrivals can leave a place worse off even as headline numbers climb and how much of tourism runs on a hidden public subsidy.

🏘️ Where the costs actually land, from local services expanding for a few busy weeks to short-term rentals pushing rents past what residents can afford.

📊 How impact models and destination standards are giving DMOs a way to trace what they are trying to change and whether it is working.

🗳️ Why the harder question is who sets the benchmark and what happens when residents carry the benefits while the choices are settled elsewhere.

⚖️ How some destinations are treating limits as discipline, giving up one kind of tourism to protect the community the industry depends on.

Value and Impact is one of seven themes at CAMPUS 2026, where destinations and industry will work through questions like these.

See the other themes at https://www.thinkdigital.travel/campus

CAMPUS runs from 29 September to 3 October in the Turku Archipelago, Finland, and is built around reshaping the destination management model, one where generating demand stops being the starting objective and becomes the result of designing a destination around its own context and the people who live in it.

👉 Read the full article: www.thinkdigital.travel/opinion/building-tourism-that-gives-more-than-it-takes

09/09/2026

How do destinations prove their climate progress in numbers that stand up to scrutiny?

The question has become harder to avoid as regulatory disclosure and procurement requirements have tightened. For years the industry had no shared way to compare figures, since they came from different methods and covered different stretches of a journey. What has changed is the measure and transparency layer beneath the claims and the green tech now building it.

This article covers:

📏 How CountEmissionsEU sets one door-to-door method across road, rail, air and sea and why comparability is what turns a number into a target.

⚖️ Why generic green claims and offset-based neutrality labels are being closed off and what that leaves as the credible path.

🔋 How green tech is making the lower-carbon route the easiest one to book, from joint air and rail ticketing to charging maps that work across borders.

📊 Why most of a tourism business's footprint sits in the value chain and where a DMO's influence actually reaches.

Climate Change Mitigation is one of seven themes at CAMPUS 2026, where destinations and industry will come together to work through questions like these.

Check out the other themes at https://www.thinkdigital.travel/campus.

Taking place from 29 September to 3 October in the Turku Archipelago, Finland, CAMPUS brings destinations and industry together to rethink what the destination management model needs to become.

👉 Read the full article: https://www.thinkdigital.travel/opinion/counting-what-counts-green-tech-and-credible-carbon-reduction

08/09/2026

Ask what a successful destination looks like and the answer usually arrives as a number that went up.

The Butler model has shaped that instinct for decades, tracing a destination's development curve. Growth sits at the centre of the curve, which makes visitor numbers and spend the obvious things to measure. However, a destination can post a strong year on both while the environment loses its capacity to recover, residents find themselves priced and crowded out of their own streets and the experience visitors get quietly deteriorates.

Destination health evaluates performance through a series of connected layers. It reads success across the whole system a destination depends on, so the picture holds together rather than resting on one measure.

That starts with widening what gets counted. The VICE model gives a useful frame, holding the visitor, the industry, the community and the environment in view at the same time, and a destination performing well on one while failing on another is showing the early signs of the decline Butler describes as the end of the destination lifecycle. Tracking all four over time bridges the gap between a long-term ambition and the current situation, keeping DMO strategy accountable every step of the way.

The Destination Health Index sits behind this at CAMPUS, a 360-degree assessment that shows whether a destination is genuinely moving in the right direction. Its practical value lies in exposing the widest gaps, so a team with limited resources knows which part of the system needs attention first and can direct the sector towards repairing it.

DMO teams can take part in building this together at CAMPUS this September, in the Turku Archipelago.

👉 Find out more and save your spot at CAMPUS, taking place from 30 September to 3 October 2026 in the Turku Archipelago, Finland: https://www.thinkdigital.travel/campus

07/09/2026

How do you manage visitor pressure at the level where it's actually felt?

Aggregate tourism numbers can look healthy while individual places absorb pressure their infrastructure and communities were never designed to handle. Managing that means working at a far more granular scale than most frameworks are built for and it calls for a management role that sits in tension with the traditional DMO remit of growing visitor numbers.

In this article, we explore what that takes in practice:

🗺️ Why dispersal only works when product depth and local readiness are in place first and what happens when the signal goes out before they are.

💶 How coordination across neighbouring authorities matters more than the rate when visitor fees are on the table.

📱How trip planners and AI recommendation tools can steer visitors towards quieter places without diminishing the trip.

📊 Why moving beyond arrivals as the headline measure is as much a political question as a technical one.

Visitor Flows is one of seven themes at CAMPUS 2026, where destinations and industry will come together to work through questions like these.

Check out the other themes at https://www.thinkdigital.travel/campus

Taking place from 29 September to 3 October in the Turku Archipelago, Finland, CAMPUS offers a space to step outside the usual routine and engage with the ideas shaping the future of this sector.

👉 Read the full article: https://www.thinkdigital.travel/opinion/bringing-visitor-flow-management-to-the-local-and-regional-level

04/09/2026

Tourism sits on most lists of the industries doing the greatest climate damage. Very few DMOs can say what their own share of it is.

Climate neutrality strategies are being written and monitored, corporate reporting obligations are arriving across the sector and a DMO asked for its emissions figure often has to reach for national tourism averages rather than anything drawn from its own operations. That gap matters more as the producer responsibility principle gains ground, because it brings the emissions generated by the visitors into the conversation as well.

A baseline shifts the focus to direct attribution. It measures what a DMO's own activity produces and gives the organisation something concrete to report, defend and improve on.

That starts with connecting the emissions to the work that contributed to them. A long-haul roadshow or trade show participation, media trips and AI interfaces all carry a footprint, and each of them also carries a strategic purpose worth weighing against it. Reading the two together shows a team which activities are doing enough to justify their impact and which could be substituted with very little lost, which is a far more useful place to start than a single total for the year.

The DMO Emissions Baseline sits behind this at CAMPUS, a shared method for measuring direct impact that produces figures comparable between destinations. Once several DMOs are working from the same basis, the substitutions that worked in one place become evidence another can act on and the conversation moves from reporting numbers to changing them.

DMO teams can take part in building this together at CAMPUS this September, in the Turku Archipelago.

👉 Find out more and save your spot at CAMPUS, taking place from 30 September to 3 October 2026 in the Turku Archipelago, Finland: https://www.thinkdigital.travel/campus

03/09/2026

After a few years of adopting AI tools individually, attention is now shifting to the harder question of how organisations monitor that adoption and turn scattered progress into a strategy they can steer.

Here's what the AI Transparency Framework's organisational intelligence instruments explore:

🧭 Mapping AI Maturity: Most leadership teams still can't say whether their organisation is further along than a year ago. The Maturity Model tracks progress across five stages, revealing where some teams have raced ahead while others are only just starting out.

🎯 Advancing Team Capability: Knowledge about what works with AI often stays trapped with the person who found it. The Capability Model maps what each person can do across sixteen capabilities, helping managers build project teams that combine complementary strengths.

💛 Protecting Team Wellbeing: AI changes how work feels as much as what gets done. That shift rarely shows up in performance figures until it becomes a problem. The Organisational Wellbeing Instrument tracks workload, role fit and job meaning, giving teams a defined mechanism to talk about how AI is really affecting them.

A single assessment only offers a snapshot. Setting a baseline now gives destinations the consistent metrics to prove whether their AI strategy is working, turning early habits into a resilient foundation for the years ahead.

👉 Read the full breakdown to see how the three instruments work together: https://www.thinkdigital.travel/opinion/monitoring-how-ai-reshapes-organisational-processes

AI adoption is a change management question. Our AI Transparency Framework's organisational intelligence instruments offer benchmarkable insights into monitoring AI readiness, what employees can achieve and how the change is affecting team morale.

03/09/2026

Every DMO says it wants year-round visitors. Very few content calendars agree.

The marketing cycle keeps producing what it delivered last year. Yet, marketing is one of the few levers a DMO holds over when and where travellers turn up. Most destinations spend it reinforcing patterns they say they want to change.

Content prioritisation forces a rethink of the traditional campaign approach. It treats the editorial calendar as a visitor flow management tool and asks what each piece of content is designed to achieve, linking marketing back to broader destination management objectives.

That starts with an honest look at who is already doing the work. Influencers and journalists give the headline attractions all the visibility they need, so a DMO adding another beautiful photograph of the same view is duplicating effort. Hidden gems content tends to sit alongside the main attractions as an extra rather than an alternative, which is why the sharper questions are about timing, brand narrative and the specific audiences most likely to travel outside peak, all matched against the resources a team realistically has.

The Content Prioritisation Model sits behind this at CAMPUS, an actionable tool for identifying where content can move demand and directing effort there first. It also asks a DMO to loosen the focus on impressions as the measure of success, because reach describes how far the marketing travelled and says very little about the effect it had on the destination itself.

DMO teams can take part in building this together at CAMPUS this September, in the Turku Archipelago.

👉 Find out more and save your spot at CAMPUS, taking place from 30 September to 3 October 2026 in the Turku Archipelago, Finland: https://www.thinkdigital.travel/campus

02/09/2026

AI undoubtedly creates value, but true progress requires defining what that value looks like, without sacrificing our sustainability commitments along the way.

For one team, it's the hours saved on work that used to take a fortnight. For another, it's additional revenue that can be traced to the output or a capability the organisation simply did not hold before. Three very different claims, and each carries different meaning when someone asks whether the energy consumed by AI was worth spending.

An impact test confronts this growing challenge directly through futures thinking. It puts the value created and the footprint it costs on the same page, so the judgement gets made about each use of AI rather than about AI as a whole.

That starts with an honest comparison. The systems already running inside an organisation carry an environmental footprint of their own, so the real question about a new AI workflow is what it adds against what it replaces. Working out those equivalencies turns a general unease about AI energy use into a decision a team can defend, showing where AI earns its place at scale and where the impact is too hard to justify.

The AI Impact Test sits behind this at CAMPUS, building on the AI Environmental Impact Model we've published as part of our AI Transparency Framework. The Environmental Model grades the energy intensity of a piece of work and the Impact Test asks what that work gave back, so a DMO can look across its own AI use and see where the benefit is most apparent.

DMO teams can take part in building this together at CAMPUS this September, in the Turku Archipelago.

👉 Find out more and save your spot at CAMPUS, taking place from 30 September to 3 October 2026 in the Turku Archipelago, Finland: https://www.thinkdigital.travel/campus

01/09/2026

Tourism has to justify itself now in a way it never used to.

The number a DMO reaches for is visitor spend, because it's the one that's always available. It captures the transaction at the till and stops there, which leaves out the part that usually matters most to the people deciding whether tourism deserves their support. A restaurant buying its fish from the harbour it sits beside and one importing everything frozen produce the same figure in that dataset.

Local value considers tourism's broader impact. It follows what happens past the point of sale and asks how much of the benefit stays circulating in the community that hosts the visitor.

That starts with tracing what happens to visitor spend after the transaction. Local ownership anchors visitor spend, local suppliers recirculate it and year-round jobs keep that value in the community through the quiet months. Factoring in the local effort needed to earn that income provides a far clearer reflection of tourism's net contribution.

The Local Value Label sits behind this at CAMPUS, a composite index built to score a destination across those pillars and turn a broad claim about tourism's worth into strong evidence of how it fuels the local economy. A single index gives a DMO a more holistic figure to monitor, so conversations about ongoing funding shift from defending the sector to showing where economic retention and circularity can be further strengthened.

DMO teams can take part in building this together at CAMPUS this September, in the Turku Archipelago.

👉 Find out more and save your spot at CAMPUS, taking place from 30 September to 3 October 2026 in the Turku Archipelago, Finland: https://www.thinkdigital.travel/campus