How NZ tourism can beat the algorithm blues

2026-03-23 - 16:03

Comment: Tourism remains fundamentally about in-person experiences and connections, but it is also entering a new phase – one profoundly shaped by virtual worlds, digital platforms, big data, and artificial intelligence. The way visitors plan, book, travel, engage, review and recommend is constantly evolving, and it is now crucial for Aotearoa New Zealand to consider how we will manage and coordinate our data infrastructure. Although many international destinations are struggling to effectively manage the latest industry developments, countries that are proactively addressing these rapid changes are reaping significant rewards. Destination Canada has arguably gone the furthest. Its Tourism Data Collective integrates hundreds of datasets, from Statistics Canada, card transaction companies, and international travel intelligence, to compile a live national platform. They have shifted tourism decision-making from retrospective reports to real-time insight. It is the clearest example in the world of what treating tourism data as critical national infrastructure looks like. Scotland has embarked on a similar path. The Scottish Tourism Data Partnership is working to bring operators, agencies, and researchers together into a shared data asset. They are not there yet. Acquiring essential data is challenging, especially from competing businesses. Building the capacity to then translate these data into meaningful information that can drive decisions, is arguably harder. But the need is clear and vital: this work is critical to build the new foundations on which all destinations’ futures will depend. The information architecture of tourism – how data flows, who holds it, what questions it can answer, how questions are answered – is the invisible hand that shapes what visitors see and do. It determines which destinations, operators, and narratives are seen, and which become invisible. As such, it determines how values, from financial to cultural, flow through the tourism system. It determines who benefits, and who loses, which places and experiences are celebrated, whose stories are told, and whose are obscured or muted. This architecture is overwhelmingly controlled by global platforms. These platforms are not all inherently malicious or exploitative, although examples to the contrary abound, but they are all built to serve their own objectives, rather than the collective’s (destinations, their people and places, and the greater good). AI raises these stakes further. AI outputs tend toward statistical averaging. AI will recommend what is already popular. It will flatten the distinctive into the generic. It often further homogenises visitors’ experiences. That is the opposite of what destinations need, and the opposite of what visitors now want more than ever: meaningful travel experiences. Creating ‘collective intelligence’ for destinations means diverging from the status quo and our current global trajectory. It means building analytical systems that incorporate local human expertise alongside big data. Systems that weave in cultural knowledge, seasonal nuance, and iwi and community perspectives on what kind of tourism works for a place. It means ensuring the people who have a stake in the destination show up in the intelligence layer – not just the marketing layer. New Zealand’s tourism system is composed of thousands of small and medium-sized businesses. Many are time-poor and under enormous, multi-faceted pressures. Expecting them to keep pace with exponential technological change without significant support is unrealistic. Without coordinated intervention and support, this state of affairs will widen the gap between those who can access and use digital tools, and those who cannot. When that gap grows, it will profoundly reshape who succeeds and benefits from tourism, and who does not. Aotearoa is globally advanced in having robust foundational destination management plans that express key community aspirations and values. New Zealand also has ambitious industry leaders who want to future-proof these plans with appropriate policy settings. What New Zealand needs now is data infrastructure and collective intelligence to empower these aspirations, and ensure tourism is shaped by the people who know this place best – not by algorithms optimised for someone else’s platform and profit margin. A national tourism data system has become critical industry infrastructure. Creating this will require clear mandates; adequate resourcing; and strong, coordinated leadership across destinations, government, industry, and academia to create a long-term vision, framework, and delivery model. And this needs to happen now. In New Zealand, this reaffirms the need for a national tourism development authority with a mandate to lead data infrastructure development, lift capability in relation to emerging technologies, and integrate the country’s tourism system – in a way that individual operators, agencies and regions cannot do alone. Ultimately, this is not just about data or technology, it is about who controls the future of tourism in Aotearoa and whether that future reflects the people, places and values that define us. Joshua Ryan-Saha, Kiri Goulter, and Associate Professor Susan Houge Mackenzie are guest speakers at the Otago Tourism Policy School at the Holiday Inn, Remarkables Park, Queenstown on March 26-27, 2026