AI tools are revolutionizing how people travel. According to Statista, more than 40% of travelers are now turning to AI tools to personalize their trips, streamline booking processes, and even break down linguistic barriers in searching for recommendations. But it’s also changing how we, as tour operators, can respond to what travelers want—and refine what we offer.
At Carpe Diem Tours, our core offer will always centre on interpersonal experiences and human interaction. Yet we can draw on AI and automation tools to refine our service, scale our businesses, and reach more people. From content creation and trend tracking to automating key processes so you can prioritize more important tasks, here are five use cases for AI and automation that are working for us, that you can use to help your tour operator business thrive.
Analyze Customer Reviews (Recommended LLM, ChatGPT or Claude)
Every effective tour operator collects and thrives on feedback, whether as glowing five-star reviews on Tripadvisor, candid comments in post-tour surveys, or even occasional complaints on OTA platforms. But reading through and consolidating hundreds of reviews simply isn’t scalable if we have to do it ourselves. By using AI sentiment analysis tools, we can scan and categorize large volumes of reviews to uncover trends in what our guests truly think.
Sentiment analysis tools use natural language processing (NLP) to highlight:
- Customer highlights, such as standout guides, smooth logistics, or a specific tour element.
- Recurring pain points, like meeting point confusion, delays, or inconsistent pacing.
- Hidden opportunities for improving tours, guides, or communication strategies.
Even better, AI dashboards can visualize trends over time, making it easy to spot emerging issues early or track whether recent changes, like switching guides or adjusting routes, are having the desired effect or are better off being abandoned.
Sentiment analysis can help us move from reactive problem-solving to proactive experience design. That’s a powerful advantage in today’s competitive travel landscape, and achievable only when combining scale with insight. So how can you go about doing this?
1. Collect Reviews
I recommend exporting reviews from review management tools like Trustindex or using a scraping tool (like Octoparse or a Chrome extension) to gather reviews from Viator, GetYourGuide, and Google into a spreadsheet. Reviews can also be collected manually, but this is far more time-consuming.
2. Run Sentiment Analysis with AI
Paste your reviews into ChatGPT or use a text analysis platform like MonkeyLearn. Then prompt these AI tools to classify each review as positive, negative, or neutral and to extract key themes (e.g. guide quality, timing, and value).
3. Spot Trends & Improve
Sort by sentiment and theme to identify common praise and pain points. Use these insights to improve tours, update descriptions, and train staff.
How we do this at Carpe Diem Tours: We use Trustindex, a review management software that collates reviews from all platforms, including major OTAs. This allows us to easily export reviews through their platform. Once exported, we upload these reviews into ChatGPT, begin to sift through them to identify trends in customer sentiment, then package the findings in a presentable way that can be shared with the relevant team (marketing, customer relations etc.).
Bonus Tip: We also occasionally use Manus, an agentic AI model, to read reviews from our review pages on a weekly basis and provide an update on current review sentiment.
Build Local Guides for your Marketing Campaigns
Creating compelling travel content and local guides is a proven strategy for driving top-of-funnel interest and positioning your tour brand as trustworthy and authoritative. AI tools like ChatGPT can expedite this process and make it more scalable, helping corroborate your insider knowledge of hidden gems and must-see landmarks with trending local spots based on real-time travel blogs, review data, and curated content.
You can prompt AI to generate themed lists (e.g. “best street food in Trastevere” or “5 secret rooftops in Lisbon”), then use tools like Google My Maps or Proxi to plot these out with custom icons and short descriptions, creating interactive maps that you can embed in digital content or share with guests.
AI also streamlines the content creation process, and can be a particularly useful tool among local destination experts for whom English is not their first language. It can write first drafts of guide introductions, generate blurbs for each location, suggest SEO-friendly titles and meta descriptions, and even draft social media captions to promote your guide. This makes it easy to scale across cities and tour types. You can also tailor each guide to different audiences, for example, “Rome with Teens,” “Budget Barcelona,” or “Vegan Eats in Athens.” Once created, these guides can be offered as lead magnets on your website, sent post-booking, or used to upsell other experiences such as walking tours or food tastings.
That said, while AI is a powerful assistant, it is by no means infallible. Local context changes quickly. Restaurants close, opening hours shift, and neighbourhoods evolve. It is therefore critical to have someone on the ground cross-check all suggestions, validating AI-generated info with local knowledge, Google Maps or Tripadvisor before publishing. Accuracy builds trust, and your guide should reflect the same high standards as your tours. When done right, AI-powered guides can become a valuable part of your marketing funnel, building brand awareness, nurturing leads, and enhancing the guest experience long after the tour ends.
How we do this at Carpe Diem Tours: We have embraced the potential of AI—specifically large language models like ChatGPT—to enhance the way we create content and guides for our tours. From Rome to Barcelona, and even our bone-chilling Jack the Ripper tour in London, we’ve used AI tools to help us draft interactive city guides and immersive storytelling experiences.
Because providing accurate information and local expertise are the bedrock of our reputation, we always involve our destination managers on the ground to cross-check every detail. That way we avoid sharing poor recommendations, historical inaccuracies, or outdated recommendations (like businesses that may have moved or closed).
We also use AI to quickly gather supporting information such as reviews, opening hours, locations, and ticket prices, which helps us build comprehensive, up-to-date resources for our guests, making every trip smoother, more informed, and more memorable.
Trend Tracker & Brand Sentiment Analysis (Recommend using Perplexity Labs)
Tour operators can harness AI tools to track emerging trends across social media and the web. At Carpe Diem Tours, our social media team regularly uses Perplexity Labs to spot rising conversations in the travel niche: from viral TikTok destinations to shifting traveller preferences.
Perplexity Labs allows us to search real-time queries and explore citations, making it faster to validate what’s really trending as opposed to what’s just background noise. For a brand like ours, where social media is a key marketing component, this is a massive time-saver and strategic advantage. Instead of guessing what content might resonate, we can proactively build campaigns, reels, and itineraries around what people are actually excited about right now.
By incorporating this into your social content planning, you can stay one step ahead of the competition, and your audience will acknowledge that you’re always in the know.
Another great use of AI for tour operators is automating brand monitoring. Instead of manually checking every tag, mention, or comment across platforms, you can use AI tools to instantly alert your team whenever someone talks about your brand.
Our social media team uses social listening tools powered by AI (like Brand2, Meltwater, or Sprout Social) to track when guests post about us, tag us, or even mention us without an official @handle. These tools use natural language processing (NLP) to detect relevant posts even if users misspell our name or write casually, meaning we never miss the chance to reshare a positive guest post, we can quickly respond to feedback or resolve issues, and we’re able to gather UGC (user-generated content) and testimonials in real time.
All of this can be configured with custom AI workflows using tools like Make.com, Zapier, N8N, or even ChatGPT + Google Sheets, where you monitor specific keywords and phrases across platforms like Twitter, Instagram, or TikTok via APIs or scraped data.
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Automate Key Processes
The barrier to entry for automation has significantly lowered in recent years. Even for non-technical teams, it is more accessible than ever. No-code platforms like Make.com allow businesses to build powerful automated workflows without having to write a single line of code. For those with more technical ability or a desire to reduce long-term costs, self-hosted solutions like n8n offer scalable, cost-effective alternatives that can be fully customised to your needs.
In our industry, the opportunities for automation are as endless and transformative as they are exciting. Gone are the days of copying and pasting email templates thanks to the automation of booking confirmations and follow-up emails. Syncing availability across platforms means we no longer have to monitor spaces for each tour wherever we sell it. Customer data can be automatically gathered; competitor pricing can be automatically scraped. Automation can save time, reduce human error, and improve the overall guest experience.
As the sector becomes more competitive, operators who embrace these tools will gain a significant edge in efficiency, cohesion, and customer satisfaction.
At Carpe Diem Tours, we use automation to streamline operations, improve team communication, and enhance customer experience. One key use case is campaign performance tracking. Using Make.com, we automatically scrape promo code data linked to our marketing campaigns. This data is then sent directly to a dedicated Slack channel via a custom Slack bot, giving the marketing team real-time visibility into campaign success. Not only does this automation save time, it also enables the team to make quick, informed decisions based on how promotions are performing, and boosts morale as team members see their marketing efforts are paying off.
Another powerful automation we use is customer sentiment and review tracking. We monitor incoming reviews in real time and automatically flag any negative feedback, which is instantly shared with our customer service team. This allows us to take immediate action, whether that means investigating what went wrong on a tour or identifying operational issues such as guest no-shows. Automating this process ensures that nothing slips through the cracks, and puts us in the best position to respond swiftly to improve guest satisfaction.
General AI Tips
Try using Claude for email writing and corrections. ChatGPT has been around for a while, and many people are starting to recognise the typical writing style it produces. Claude, by contrast, often uses more natural language that can be harder to identify as AI-generated. Furthermore Claude allows you to create a custom writing style so you can use this as a way for the LLM to learn your style (Seem the screenshot below)
Perplexity allows you to select multiple AI models, and so it serves best as a hub to switch between models based on what you’re looking to achieve. Perplexity’s purpose-built deep research feature is also ahead of the curve, and has brought us considerable success when researching our tours.
Learn the PROMPT engineering Framework. I personally use the TCREI framework, which is a useful structure designed to help people systematically create and refine prompts when working with large language models like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini.
Being able to prompt clearly and effectively gives you a headstart over most LLM users.
How do you get started with AI?
How did we get started with AI at Carpe Diem?
It all began with a simple but powerful step — we asked every team, from management down, to list the tasks they do on a daily basis. From creating reports to inputting data, we gathered it all.
Then we asked the question: What can be automated or improved with AI?
We started small, with email filters, auto responses, and simple workflows. But things quickly evolved. Now we are working on more advanced solutions like AI powered Tour Guide Scheduling, one of our most exciting projects to date.
This process has helped us not only save time but also empower our team to focus on what really matters: creating unforgettable experiences.
AI Potential Tech Stack for operators
Below is my recommended AI tech stack for your tour, activity or attraction company.
Make.com – Straightforward, user-friendly automation software. Make.com has an easy-to-use AI assistant to build custom AI Automations and a library loaded with thousands of templates.
n8n.com – Much cheaper alternative to Make.com. Higher learning curve with fewer native app connections. Also more powerful when building agentic automations.
manus.im – Excellent for building presentations.
claude.ai – A powerful large language model used across our company for writing, data analysis, and generating graphs. Claude also serves as a personal assistant for many of our team members.
With its MCP connections including updated connectors like Google Drive, Gmail, and Monday.com, our managers can quickly find data, send emails, and create tasks with ease.
manychat.com – Very simple social media automations. Great for connecting to Instagram etc., with many ready-to-use templates.
lovable.dev – No code/vibe coding platform, great for throwing up quick landing pages as part of your marketing sales funnel.
About the Author
Oliver Green is the co-founder and chief marketing officer of Carpe Diem Tours and Create Circus marketing agency. Founded in 2019, the company runs tours across seven cities in Europe and has more than 700,000 followers across Instagram and Tiktok for its Tipsy Tour and Carpe Diem Tours brands.
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