Yesterday, during a guided visit in Metepec, I asked the group leader how they had found us. He told me that he had asked ChatGPT for a recommendation for a local guide, and ChatGPT gave him the name of one of the guides on our website, along with the WhatsApp number listed there. What made this especially interesting is that we have three guides with quite different profiles. I would have assumed the AI might recommend the guide with the strongest historical and archaeological credentials. It didn’t. It recommended Juan Carlos. At first, that surprised me. Then I learned what the clients had actually asked for: they specifically wanted to visit an artisan workshop. And suddenly the recommendation made perfect sense. Juan Carlos is the person whose profile most clearly reflects experience with artisans, pottery, workshops, and the living traditions of Metepec. So the AI did not appear to be answering the abstract question: “Who is the best guide?” It was answering something much more specific: “Who seems especially well suited to what this traveler wants to do?” That same day, almost by coincidence, I came across an ad for a USD 27 product called the AI Recommendation Playbook. Its basic argument was that many businesses still build very broad pages — “About us,” “Our services,” “We are experts” — while people are increasingly asking AI tools much more specific questions right before making a buying decision. The product suggests identifying those exact questions and creating content specific enough to become a useful answer. I would not take every marketing claim at face value, and I certainly don’t think there is a magic formula that guarantees ChatGPT will recommend one business over another. But the underlying idea matched almost perfectly what I had just seen happen in real life. What I think this means for travel designers 1. Specific relevance may matter more than stronger credentials. 2. A professional may have more years of experience, more qualifications, or broader expertise, but someone else may still be the better match for one very particular request. 3. We do not need to position ourselves as experts in everything. 4. It may be more valuable to make it very clear what kinds of travelers, journeys, decisions, destinations, or problems we are especially good at handling. 5. Specific pages may become increasingly valuable. 6. “Custom travel to Italy” says very little. 7. “Ten days in Sicily for travelers interested in archaeology, small towns, and food without changing hotels every night” answers a real question. 8. Experience becomes more powerful when it is expressed as evidence. 9. Specific places, actual decisions, years spent working in a region, types of clients served, problems solved, processes used, and real examples are more useful than words such as “unique,” “expert,” or “personalized.” 10. This also applies to social media. 11. A post called “Five things I would check before choosing between two Greek islands for a four-night stay” communicates far more expertise than “Discover the magic of Greece.”

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