Will AI Send Tourists to Your Ontario Town in 2026?

The short answer: only if AI can find your town. 54% of travellers have already used AI to plan a trip and 40% have discovered a destination through an AI recommendation (Mindtrip, with Sabre, Sojern and MMGY Travel Intelligence, 2026) — so when ChatGPT assembles someone's fall day-trip shortlist and your town isn't in the answer, those visitors drive to the town that is.

We run marketing for municipalities, festivals and tourism businesses across Toronto, Hamilton, St. Catharines and Niagara, and this is the quietest shift we have ever watched happen to a visitor economy. Nobody announced it. There was no new platform to join. Travellers simply started asking a chatbot "best small town day trip from Toronto in October" — and the towns in the answer started getting the visitors. This article covers how big that shift actually is, how far behind most destination marketers are, and what an Ontario town can do about it before next season.

How many travellers are actually planning trips with AI?

More than half, and the number is still climbing. The 2026 Mindtrip study, run with Sabre, Sojern and MMGY Travel Intelligence, found that 54% of travellers have already used AI to plan travel and 75% intend to use it for future trips. Among the generations your patios and main streets most want to attract, AI is no longer a novelty: 69% of Millennials and 63% of Gen Z travellers now use AI assistants as often as social media for trip planning.

The behaviour goes well beyond asking for flight deals. In the same study, 60% of travellers used AI to research attractions, restaurants and transportation, 43% used it to build itineraries, and — the two numbers that should make every tourism committee sit up — 40% discovered a destination through AI, and 29% changed their travel plans based on an AI recommendation. That is AI doing the exact job your tourism budget exists to do: putting your town in front of someone deciding where to go.

It holds for the American visitors Niagara depends on, too. Allianz Partners' 2026 Global Travel Confidence Index, polled by Ipsos among 2,001 U.S. adults, found 37% of Americans planning summer travel were using AI to help plan their vacations. The border-city families weighing Niagara Falls against a weekend in New York State are increasingly asking a chatbot to make the case.

Is your town ahead of its visitors — or two years behind?

Here is the gap, and it is the whole opportunity. While 54% of travellers already plan with AI, only 22% of destination marketing organizations offer any AI trip-planning capability on their websites, and only 26% have a documented AI strategy at all (Mindtrip study, 2026). The travellers moved first; the marketers haven't caught up. Even destination leaders admit it — in the same study, 72% of DMO leaders said organizations that fail to adopt AI within two years risk becoming irrelevant in destination discovery.

Visitors are starting to punish the laggards directly. 63% of travellers said they would use an AI trip planner on a destination's own website, and 25% are already less likely to use a destination site that lacks AI features. Now be honest about what most small Ontario towns are fielding against that expectation: a tourism page that is a scanned PDF guide, an events calendar last updated in June, and operator listings with dead links. A traveller can't use it, and — this is the part that costs real visits — neither can the AI tools they're asking instead.

For a town outside the GTA's gravity, this gap is good news. Big-city destination budgets don't help them here; AI answers are assembled from content quality, not media spend. A well-structured site for a town of 8,000 in Niagara or Haldimand can outrank a sleepy mid-size city in the answer to "charming Ontario towns for a weekend trip" — because the AI could actually read it.

What decides whether ChatGPT names your town?

AI tools build travel answers from the structured, current, well-written pages they can find and verify. In practice, a town gets named when three things are true. First, the content exists: real itinerary pages ("A fall Saturday in Port Colborne," "48 hours in Prince Edward County"), current operator listings with hours and prices, and honest descriptions of what the town is actually like in each season. Second, it is machine-readable: proper headings, FAQ and schema markup, fast pages — the technical work of building a destination site that AI search can read. Third, the town is corroborated elsewhere: reviews, local press, blog mentions and social profiles that all tell the same story, so the AI can trust what your site claims.

None of this is exotic. It is the same discipline we apply to municipal and tourism campaigns generally: decide which three to five experiences define the town, build the definitive page for each, keep them current, and make every other channel point at them. The towns that do this now are compounding an advantage — AI systems keep citing the sources that have proven reliable, so early visibility gets stickier over time.

Does AI replace social media and ads — or feed on them?

It feeds on them. An AI answer about your town is a synthesis of everything publicly said about it — and short-form video, press coverage and active social profiles are a large share of what gets said. A steady stream of real footage — the falls in fog, the market on Saturday, the patio at golden hour — does double duty: it fills your channels today, and it generates the captions, place names and engagement signals that teach both Google and AI tools what your town is known for. That is why we build municipal clients one content engine that supplies the town's channels, its operators and its ads at once.

Paid reach still matters for the dates you need filled. AI visibility compounds slowly; geo-targeted ads aimed at your real drive markets — the GTA, Hamilton and the border cities for most Niagara-region towns — remain the fastest way to move a specific shoulder-season weekend. The budget conversation isn't ads versus AI. It's making sure the attention you pay for lands on pages that AI can read, so every campaign also builds the asset that keeps recommending you for free.

Frequently asked questions

Do travellers actually trust AI trip recommendations?

Enough to act on them. In the 2026 Mindtrip study with Sabre, Sojern and MMGY Travel Intelligence, 29% of travellers had changed travel plans based on an AI recommendation and 75% intend to use AI for future trips. Travellers still verify details like hours and prices themselves, which is exactly why a town's own pages need to be current — the AI answer sends them there to check.

What is GEO, and does it apply to a small town?

GEO — generative engine optimization — is the practice of structuring your content so AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews can read it, trust it and cite it. It absolutely applies to towns: AI assembles day-trip and itinerary answers from structured, current, well-written pages, so a town with real itinerary pages and schema markup gets named while a town whose tourism presence is a PDF gets skipped.

Does my town's website need its own AI trip planner?

Eventually, probably — 63% of travellers say they would use an AI trip planner on a destination website, and 25% are already less likely to use a destination site that lacks AI features. But the first dollar should go to making your existing content machine-readable: current listings, itinerary pages and schema markup. A chatbot sitting on top of stale content recommends stale things.

Will AI replace Google for finding day trips?

It is replacing the first step, not the whole journey. Travellers increasingly start itinerary-style questions in ChatGPT or see an AI Overview before any traditional listing, then click through to verify. Google itself now answers many tourism queries with AI-generated summaries. Either way, the winning move is the same: publish structured, current content that both AI systems and Google can read.

Sources: Lodging Magazine, on the 2026 Mindtrip study with Sabre, Sojern and MMGY Travel Intelligence (August 2026); Hotel Dive, on Allianz Partners' Global Travel Confidence Index, polled by Ipsos, 2,001 U.S. adults, March–April 2026.