The Impact of the AI Revolution on Sustainable Tourism

An aura of peace and serenity adds to Victoria’s image as one of the best sustainable tourism destinations in Canada. Visitors can navigate the charming British Columbia capital—rich in nature, local cuisine, and British colonial and First Nations landmarks—with minimal awareness of the AI storm that is brewing, if not already at gale force.

You can still book a Salish Sea whale-watching tour with Prince of Whales or Eagle Wing Tours without touching a smartphone. No digital prompting is required to fill your water bottle at one of the complimentary refill stations at the luxurious, carbon-neutral Inn at Laurel Point. Ditto for quaffing a kiwi sour beer at Market Square’s Whistle Buoy Brewing, which sources grain from Saanich’s Field Five Farm and donates spent grain to feed local livestock. Or feasting on Jervis Inlet oysters and dry-aged halibut at Chinatown’s ever-inventive End Dive.

However, the landscape is changing. Conversations at the Impact Sustainability Travel & Tourism Summit—held annually at the Victoria Conference Centre—indicate that the global travel industry is urgently grappling with how to adapt to AI’s effect on travel planning. Artificial intelligence poses threats to both the natural and the information environment.

In the 2020s “answer economy,” travellers are increasingly rewiring their brains for instant gratification via generative AI tools like ChatGPT. Yet simultaneously, there is widespread pushback against fake or degrading AI-generated imagery disseminated on social media. That’s not to mention the hallucinations—egregious errors or outright lies—that AI chatbots frequently spit out, baked-in discrimination against minority groups, and theft of the intellectual property of writers and artists. Instagram and Facebook fatigue amplifies the growing desire for authentic experiences unmediated by technology.

Sustainable tour operators are conscious of what’s at stake with their marketing choices. “We’re not going to use AI to generate photos,” says Eagle Wing Tours co-owner Brett Soberg. “We trust our team to capture the spirit of what happens on the boats, and we use real content generated during real experiences with real whales.”

Prince of Whales marketing manager Claudia Milia outlines a moderate investment in AI: “We use Happywhale, an industry-wide platform that is great for ID-ing whales. The AI can actually recognize patterns in the flukes of humpback whales, trace them through photography, and discover certain whales’ lineage. We have also developed our own chatbot. It’s based on machine learning from our on-board biologists, giving basic details about the animals we see on tours. It saves time for our reservations team in terms of answering questions and makes sure it’s correct information.”

Opting for lightweight AI solutions is a recurring theme at Impact. And the conference’s philosophical ripple effect can be significant. Impact showcases tour companies such as Intrepid Travel, speakers like CBC broadcaster Laura Lynch and Cascade Institute founder Thomas Homer-Dixon, and delegates from as far away as Portugal, New Zealand, and Uganda. Only a handful of these sustainable tourism advocates are unreservedly enthusiastic about AI’s rapid momentum.

“ChatGPT is bad for the environment,” says Kyle Bouwknecht, the technical lead at Victoria-based Synergy Enterprises and a critic of large-language AI models. “If they are putting up data centres left, right, and centre, they are disproportionately impacting communities that don’t have very much say about it. An average ChatGPT query is about three watt-hours of energy. Meanwhile, there are other much smaller, more refined models out there that use about 500 times less energy.”

Cody Chomiak, Travel Manitoba’s vice-president of marketing, offers a counterpoint that is as bone-chilling as cold-plunging into the Gorge at Victoria’s Banfield Park: “If you’re not implementing an AI-first approach, you are going to be left behind. Your next web site visitor is an algorithm. AI platforms and AI agents are the new gatekeepers.”

On the brighter side, Chomiak touts the regenerative potential of AI tools like “bear-dar,” an early-warning polar bear detection system that helps residents of Churchill, Manitoba, to better manage the bear population. “There are a lot of tools in the ecosystem that are going to help people travel more safely and be more responsible within destinations,” he says.

Still, the main drumbeat around AI implementation in the tourism industry is based on increasing speed, efficiency, and customer-base growth. From a consumer perspective, it is well worth questioning whether AI empowers you to travel more richly and authentically.

We have already lived through a social media explosion that spawned depression, narcissism, and unrealistic expectations, fomenting a travel culture where taking filtered selfies outweighed truly soaking in the moment. Many travellers lost their ability to memorize street addresses or phone numbers and became too distracted to read an entire guidebook. The cognitive and quality-of-life costs of allowing your phone to dictate your life are real.

Victoria attracts more than four million visitors a year. It has a chance to model what sustainable tourism can be. As pressure to adopt AI in every sphere increases, maintaining that pristine West Coast environment with orcas, Garry oaks, and orange-pink sunsets will be a challenge.

Photographs courtesy of Destination Victoria.

SHARE