Sixty percent of travelers now use AI to research restaurants, attractions, and transportation options before they arrive at a destination — yet only 22% of destination marketing organizations have deployed AI trip-planning capabilities on their websites, according to new research released by Mindtrip, Sabre, Sojern, and MMGY Travel Intelligence. The disconnect is sharpening the stakes for hospitality operators whose visibility increasingly depends on how well their destination partners have adapted to AI-driven discovery.
The Gap in Numbers
The study, conducted in April 2026 with 1,006 U.S. leisure travelers and 103 DMO leaders, found that 54% of travelers have already used AI to plan a trip and 75% intend to do so in the future. For restaurants and hospitality businesses, the granular data is particularly instructive: 40% of travelers have discovered a destination through AI, while 29% have changed travel plans based on an AI recommendation. That means AI is influencing not just where people go, but which restaurants, hotels, and experiences they choose once they get there. Among the most common AI-assisted tasks travelers reported were researching itineraries (42%), comparing flights, hotels, and tours (32%), and finding destination ideas (32%).
Generational adoption is accelerating the timeline. Nearly 7 in 10 Millennials (69%) and 63% of Gen Z travelers say they use AI assistants as often as social media for trip planning — a shift with direct implications for restaurant marketing strategies that have leaned heavily on platforms like Instagram and TikTok for discovery.
What It Means for Operators
For restaurant and hotel operators, the risk is indirect but real. If DMOs fail to integrate AI, their destination sites become less useful to travelers, which in turn reduces the organic discovery pipeline for local businesses. Seventy-two percent of DMO leaders themselves acknowledged that organizations not adopting AI within two years risk becoming irrelevant to destination discovery. Only 26% of those same leaders currently have a documented AI strategy.
"Travelers aren't waiting for the industry to catch up," said Michelle Denogean, CMO of Mindtrip. "AI is already reshaping how people discover destinations, build itineraries, and make travel decisions. The organizations that move now have an opportunity to become more useful, more visible, and more valuable to travelers."
The research points to a specific capability gap around dining and activity planning. Only 20% of DMO leaders rank itinerary building as a high-value capability — even though researching restaurants, attractions, and transportation is the single most common way travelers already use AI, cited by 60% of respondents. Operators who embed structured, AI-readable content about their venues — menus, hours, accessibility details, signature experiences — stand to benefit most as AI platforms increasingly pull from destination content layers.
Booking behavior is also shifting. More than one-third of travelers are already comfortable with AI participating in the booking process, and that comfort rises when human support remains available. "Travelers are already using AI to discover destinations, compare options, and make travel decisions," said Brad Johnson, Vice President of Product Management at Sabre. "For destination organizations, this creates an opportunity to extend their role beyond inspiration and become a more connected part of the traveler journey."
Implications for Hospitality
For hospitality operators tracking broader technology trends in the industry, this study underscores that AI is no longer a future-state concern. Nearly two-thirds of travelers (63%) say they would use an AI trip planner directly on a destination website, and 25% are less likely to use a destination site that lacks AI features. As AI-powered planning tools become standard expectations rather than novelties, restaurants and lodging properties have an incentive to pressure their regional DMO partners to invest in these capabilities — and to audit whether their own digital content is structured to surface through AI-driven queries.
The full findings, including a destination readiness framework and practical recommendations, are available at go.mindtrip.ai/ai-readiness-report.
Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.
