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Brand USA and Spain’s tourism authority Turespaña are reorienting their marketing strategy around a straightforward premise: travelers now ask ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude where to go before they ever open a travel site. Fred Dixon and Miguel Sanz, speaking at Skift Global Forum, argue that destination marketing organizations must now shape what AI models recommend, not just run paid campaigns. Sanz goes further, contending that overtourism in crowded markets like Barcelona is partly a perception problem that better AI-era content distribution can help manage by steering demand toward secondary cities.
What this means for your business
Any brand that competes on discovery, not just conversion, is in the same structural position as a national tourism board right now. If your category is one where a consumer or buyer might open an AI chat interface and ask “what should I choose,” then your content strategy is either feeding those models or it isn’t. The companies moving first on this aren’t in travel. They’re in financial services, consumer packaged goods, and B2B software, categories where brand consideration used to be built through search and is now being built, or lost, inside AI responses before a prospect ever visits your site.
The mechanism here matters. Large language models are trained on publicly available content, and they surface recommendations based on what’s well-documented, frequently cited, and consistently described across sources. That’s a fundamentally different optimization target than Google SEO, which rewarded backlinks and keyword density. A destination, or a brand, that produces rich, structured, consistently framed content across many third-party surfaces is more likely to appear in AI-generated recommendations than one with a polished homepage and thin external presence. Sanz’s argument that Spain needs more marketing, not less, even though everyone knows Spain, is actually a claim about content surface area, not awareness.
The overtourism angle is worth taking seriously as a signal rather than a travel-industry footnote. When demand concentrates because AI models default to the most-documented options, the winners get crushed and the alternatives stay invisible. Brands facing category concentration, where one or two dominant names absorb most of the AI-generated mentions, should treat this as a competitive opening, not a branding problem. The CMO who figures out how to make a second-tier product or regional offering well-documented enough to enter AI consideration sets will have built a moat that’s harder to buy out of than a paid media line.
Based on reporting from Destination Marketing Is Now AI Marketing: Brand USA and Spain’s Playbook for 2026, originally published 2026-04-21 03:00:00.
