This insight summarises 3 themes shaping the next phase of AI in travel marketing, an opinion article by C.A. Clark, VP of AI at Miles Partnership, published on PhocusWire in November 2026.
Provenance becomes table stakes. Clark cites a 2025 study in Communications of the ACM in which people correctly separated AI-generated from human-authored writing only 51% of the time. Since August, Article 50 of the EU AI Act has required providers of generative AI to mark their outputs in a machine-readable format. Clark notes that the obligations also reach deployers in the EU market, including agencies and the travel brands they serve, so publishing AI-generated or AI-edited imagery or text now calls for careful thought about human involvement and disclosure.
Intelligence moves in-house. Stanford and Together AI found that models small enough to run on a good laptop correctly answered 88.7% of single-turn chat and reasoning queries. The share a local model could serve rose from 23.2% in 2023 to 71.3% in 2025. Clark points to AT&T, which described processing 45 billion tokens a day and cutting costs by up to 90% by routing each request to the cheapest model able to handle it. AT&T did not build a model from scratch. It took open weights and taught them its business, the pattern Clark expects to spread.
AI becomes your operating system. Clark expects work to become a conversation with an AI that monitors communications and calendars, then acts or builds the interface needed. For travel brands, "the asset worth maintaining is not your website, or your app, or your chatbot; it is the knowledge behind them." Clark cites Google's Open Knowledge Format, a specification for holding knowledge as linked markdown files with structured metadata, as an early component.
What progress takes. From three years of conversations with destinations and brands, Clark concludes that the ones moving ahead are more often the most curious than the biggest spenders. These are forecasts and the author's own view.
AIHA practical takeaway. If you market to EU guests, ask your agency how AI-generated or AI-edited images and copy are identified, keep a record of human involvement and take advice on what Article 50 means for you. Move property facts into one maintained source that your website, listings and AI tools can all draw on. Treat local and open models as a cost question to revisit as routine AI workloads grow.
Related AIHA insights: What is GEO? What it means for independent hotels and Keeping AI Guest Replies Accurate When Property Details Change.