7th September 2026 By Contributor
Artificial intelligence search risks favouring operators with the biggest digital footprints, but the same technology could also help smaller businesses compete, writes Tomahawk’s Gina Paladini.
For years, we’ve told tourism businesses: you don’t need to be everywhere.
Choose the channels that matter to your audiences. Focus your budget. Create good content. Do it well.
But AI search has changed the game.
When a traveller asks AI where to stay, what to do or who to book, it doesn’t just look at your website. It draws on information from across the web: reviews, videos, tourism websites, travel publications, social media and more.
Being visible is no longer just about being on the right platform. It’s about having enough credible information across the digital ecosystem for AI to find you, understand you and recommend you.
And that creates a problem.
AI could make the digital divide bigger.
Large tourism businesses can respond. They have a Marketing Team that includes content writers, SEO specialists, videographers perhaps an external agency and even PR budgets.
But what about the small operator who is already doing the marketing between guiding the kayak trip and running the business?
Now they’re being told they need more content to be found on ChatGPT. That they need more videos, more reviews, add FAQs to all your products, more SEO optimisation. More. More. More.
That’s not realistic.
And there is a genuine risk that the businesses with the biggest marketing budgets create the biggest digital footprints and thus become the easiest for AI to find and recommend.
Meanwhile, some of the most authentic and distinctive Kiwi tourism experiences could become harder to discover or simply not at all.
That’s the digital divide we should be talking about.
We need to be talking loudly to SMEs to say, you don’t need to do more, you need to make more from what you already do.
The answer isn’t for every tourism operator to become a content creator. It’s to make every piece of content work harder.
Take one three-minute video answering a question a traveller frequently asks.
That could become:
One idea. Eight opportunities to be discovered. Renee Goodsell, Tomahawk’s general manager, just did a presentation at the TECNZ Conference to share how this can be achieved.
Turn one piece of content into eight – that’s the mindset shift SMEs need.
Stop asking: “What should we post today?”
Start asking: “How much can we get out of the valuable content we already have?”
And here’s the crazy part…the thing that looks destined to doom the traditional SME marketing strategy could actually be the thing that saves it.
The same technology that is changing how travellers discover businesses can also dramatically reduce the time and cost of creating and distributing content that AI feeds off of.
AI can take one piece of knowledge and help turn it into multiple formats.
It can repurpose and help a small marketing budget appear much bigger one.
The biggest irony of the AI revolution is this:
The technology that threatens to widen the digital divide could also be the technology that closes it.
Gina Paladini
Director
Tomahawk Tourism Marketing
