Real visitor AI questions for DMOs and tourism boards: webinar transcript insights

This page adapts a webinar for Destination Marketing Organizations (DMOs), delivered by Marina Petrova, the CEO & Co-Founder of Intentful, on August 26, 2025. The transcript has been edited for smoother reading while keeping the speaker’s meaning intact.

Marina Petrova, CEO and Co-Founder of Intentful, shared patterns from thousands of real visitor questions submitted through AI experiences on destination websites, along with practical ways DMOs can become easier to discover and more useful in this emerging environment.

The session focused on three areas:

• The kinds of questions visitors ask AI on destination websites, drawn from a sample of 15,000 real queries.
• A plain-language explanation of how AI locates information and determines what to include in an answer.
• Recommendations for helping destinations become more discoverable and helpful across AI systems.

Context: AI Is Reshaping How People Look for Information

AI has moved beyond the margins. It is changing how people engage with content, destinations, and brands. That shift can feel intense, but it also creates a new opening for DMOs: the ability to help every visitor individually while still operating at scale.

Rooted in Hands-On AI Experience

Intentful’s perspective comes from building real systems, not from abstract theory. The team’s expertise is grounded in direct work with APIs, crawlers, retrieval logic, embedding pipelines, and the ways AI systems search for, interpret, and retrieve information. That systems-level experience supports Intentful products such as AI-search-driven Assistants and Generative Response Ads, where AI needs to locate and deliver brand-aware responses in real time.

AI systems change every day. For Intentful, adapting to that pace is part of the company’s DNA. Since 2021, Intentful has worked hands-on with AI discoverability, going deep across multiple LLMs while evolving alongside the technology itself.

In addition to destinations, Intentful currently supports organizations in travel, performing arts, consumer packaged goods, telecommunications, and agencies, with a growing global presence.

Methodology

These insights are based on 15,000 anonymized questions submitted by real people through Intentful’s technology and one of its products, Intentful AI assistant, embedded on DMO websites.

We never collect any personally identifiable information. Intentful only sees the question that was submitted, not the identity of the person who submitted it.

Some visitor questions on the source page were shown exactly as people typed them, including typos and grammar mistakes, to reflect the natural and unpolished way people use AI. Other examples were lightly adjusted to remove especially sensitive details while keeping the original intent.

The Big Picture: What Visitors Want to Know

The shortest answer: nearly everything. Visitors ask about practical needs such as parking, hours, and events; surprising curiosities such as haunted restaurants; and very specific accessibility circumstances.

The key question for any destination is whether its website actually contains the answer a visitor would need. If the information is missing, AI cannot retrieve it, and visitors cannot get help from it.

The source page includes anonymous visitor questions covering reservations for parks, overnight beach parking, local history, dogs on trolleys, thrift shopping, event submission costs, date night ideas, horseback riding on beaches, unusual food searches, grammar feedback about an ad, traffic on 101 south, hikes after a hip replacement, haunted places, fireworks timing, and lighthouse weddings.

The Question Style: Visitors Speak as if They Are Asking a Trusted Local

Visitors ask about everything from parking fees to haunted sites, thrift stores to bike races, July 4th drone shows to ADA beach access, event listings to local history.

Their language sounds less like keyword search and more like conversation with a knowledgeable local. Over time, the pattern has shifted from fragmented keywords toward fuller, conversational requests that expect answers with context.

The source page also shows that visitors interact with AI socially. They greet it, thank it, joke with it, test it, express frustration, and say goodbye, while still understanding that it is not a person.

Every Query Points to an Information Need

Visitor questions generally fall into three broad needs:

• What do I need to understand?
• How can I get what I want?
• Where can I find it in this destination?

Categories of Questions, With Patterns and Examples

Basic and Practical Information

Visitors frequently ask for essential logistics: shuttle hours, whether reservations are required, farmers market end times, public beach parking, average room cost, beach restrooms, store hours, handicap friendly accessible activities, parade street closures, beach chair and umbrella rentals, elevation, fall color timing, and customer service phone numbers.

Takeaway: Make sure foundational details such as hours, reservations, fees, parking, accessibility, and seasonal timing are easy to find and up to date.

Direct and Transactional Requests

Many people arrive ready to act. The source examples include questions about 3 tickets for tomorrow, food-related events, sign-up steps, a vendor form for May 4, dinner cruise pricing for 2 people, directions, cost, start time, address, statute numbers, food and wine festival ticket prices, 10 rooms for 03/20 - 03/22 with discount and breakfast questions, an oceanfront room for December 15 to17, lake picnic table reservations, booth rental, selling a product, ice rink ticket refunds, reserving a table for 6, gift cards for general admission, and buying a 2025 jazz and blues festival poster.

Trend: Transactional intent is increasing as people realize AI assistants can handle more than old-style scripted chatbot interactions.

Human Curiosity

Visitors also ask for stories, meaning, and context. The source includes examples about why chinese camp is a ghost town, why a firework celebration happens before 4th of July, gold panning areas, lighthouse facts, a 2-day coastal itinerary, the start of fall weather, ufos, swimming beyond a sandy beach area, and bears.

Takeaway: People are not only looking for listings. They also want the reason, the background, and the story.

Detail Checks After an Action

Questions often continue after someone has taken action elsewhere. Visitors ask whether a hotel has free parking, how to get confirmation for tickets bought online, shuttle service for MAy 2nd for a Group of 60, email reminders when tickets go on sale, whether snorkeling gear must be brought, how to enter a car show, where an America the beautiful pass can be used, how to retrieve comedy show tickets, why a submitted event has not appeared, and check-in time.

Takeaway: Plan for follow-up questions, even when the related booking, purchase, or submission happened somewhere else.

Accessibility and Personal Context

Visitors often provide personal details so they can receive better-fit guidance. The source examples include people asking where to go with a toddler, free or fun ideas for a girls. 21st birthday, the best hike after a husband’s hip replacement, a 3/29 day trip for about 8 or 10 people including someone who walks with a cane and needs shade or a place to rest, restaurants suitable for dairy soy or wheat restrictions, ideas for a 74 female who is mobility challenged with Low back pain and a cane, whether there is enough to do for 5 days as a solo female over 60, romantic honeymoon options, pet friendly adventures, and things to do for visitors with physical or sensory challenges.

Takeaway: Include accessible routes, equipment information, terrain difficulty, pet policies, and dietary details wherever they matter.

Locals Asking Local Questions

Not every user is a tourist. Residents and partners also use destination sites.

Local-style questions include:

• Whether an event is walkable from a neighborhood.
• Where to find forms or confirmations.
• How to add a food truck or event.

Takeaway: Your website serves residents and partners too, so content should be organized with those audiences in mind.

Events and Near-Term Activity

Event questions are usually time-sensitive. Visitors ask about what is happening this weekend, whether there is a 2025 2026 new years eve fireworks display, who is playing at music in the park on Wednesday in July, events in the last week of March, and whether kids can attend a car show.

Takeaway: Event information should stay fresh, structured, and filterable by date range.

Food and Drink

Visitors ask for restaurant recommendations and food-specific fit. The source examples include Best mexican restaurant, date night dining, vegan friendly options, breakfast spots, and cuban food.

Takeaway: Go beyond simple listings. Add decision-making criteria that help both AI and people choose, such as kid-friendly, outdoor seating, and gluten-free options.

Lodging, Transportation, and Parking

Visitors ask about hotels with meeting space, hotels near the airport, honeymoon stays, inexpensive but decent motels in pretty settings, Rv parking, city parking with an rv, public bus service from the airport to downtown and how often it runs, whether hiking requires a parking reservation, parade street closures, and the parking zone number near the fort.

Takeaway: Many users expect real-time answers. Make clear what is general guidance versus real-time information, and point to authoritative sources when needed.

Why This Matters: Trip Planning Is Not Linear

The travel funnel still exists: dream, plan, book, visit. But people do not move through it like a checklist.

Travelers rarely complete planning in one neat session. They jump between topics, come back later, and ask follow-up questions. Content should be designed so any page can serve as an entry point and each answer can stand on its own.

How AI Chooses What to Answer, in Plain Language

If information has not been published, AI will not know it. Some systems may guess, while stronger systems may refuse to answer. In both cases, missing content creates missed opportunities.

AI reads the facts available to it, not the destination’s reputation. It does not automatically know that a site represents the official DMO unless the content and markup make that clear. At present, AI tends to surface information it considers clear, regardless of brand reputation.

Retrieval is based on context, not only keywords. Content is split into chunks, converted into vector embeddings, and matched according to meaning.

Machine-readable pages perform better when they are structured and accessible. Headings, lists, tables, schema, sitemaps, and robots settings all help make information visible and parseable.

If AI cannot locate the answer, it goes elsewhere. Re-querying uses compute, so destinations should not assume the system will keep trying.

When AI Cannot Locate the Answer: Two Common Failure Modes

• Pages that AI cannot read well: weak structure, missing sitemaps, robots issues, or inaccessible content.
• Facts that are missing or incomplete: visually polished pages that omit details such as hours, fees, parking, and accessibility.

Actionable Recommendations by Intentful

Intentful’s recommendations combine a systems-level understanding of how AI ingests and organizes content with a human-level view shaped by 15,000 authentic visitor queries.

Balance inspiration with answers. Keep compelling imagery, but pair it with practical facts.

Add the details AI needs: hours, seasonality, fees, parking, reservations, accessibility, pet-friendly info, dietary notes, equipment, terrain difficulty, public transit, links to real-time sources. Update Member pages!

Structure everything. Use semantic headings, bullet lists, tables where helpful, and relevant schema for events, places, and articles. Keep the sitemap clean and robots.txt correct.

Treat accessibility as a core feature, not a secondary concern. Accessible pages serve more people and are also easier for AI to understand.

Keep near-term information current. Many visitors ask about today or this weekend, so destinations need an internal process for updating time-sensitive content.

Avoid hiding pages. Do not create machine-only content. Keep information visible to people, even if it is visually de-emphasized, and organize it clearly for machines.

For changeable details such as prices, consider API feeds when manual updates are difficult, or provide ranges with clear references to authoritative sources for the latest information.

Closing

AI gives destinations a way to serve each visitor with precise, contextual guidance. Make the website readable by machines, support the destination story with detailed facts, and establish a regular process for updating time-sensitive content.