An aerial drone photo taken on May 3, 2025 shows tourists visiting the Fuzimiao scenic area in Nanjing, east China's Jiangsu Province. People across China enjoy the ongoing May Day holiday in various ways. [Photo/Xinhua]

BEIJING -- During this year's May Day holiday, Ms. Liu from Shanghai finally made her long-awaited trip to southwest China's Yunnan Province, a tourism hotspot with largely pleasant weather and diverse culture and ecology. According to the Shanghai resident, AI made her trip more enjoyable and put her at ease.

For many, researching travel information on transport, accommodation and must-see sites is quite a hassle, and Ms. Liu was no exception. "In the past, before every trip, I had to go to various platforms to look up many travel guides, carefully select the scenic spots I liked, and constantly check various flight and hotel information. It was so exhausting!"

For her Yunnan trip this time, Liu gave AI apps a try. She said that by inputting travel time, budget, hobbies and some specific requirements, a detailed travel plan generated by AI was right in front of her within a few minutes. "AI has helped me solve the big problem of making travel plans, and I also managed to book air tickets and hotels at reasonable prices. Making a travel plan has never been so efficient."

Like Liu, making travel plans and detailed guides with available AI models such as DeepSeek, Kimi, and ByteDance's Doubao, is all the rage now among the millions of tourists in the world's second-largest economy. With growing AI applications, customized travel itineraries are allowing more people to travel smart and boosting the growth of the smart tourism economy.

Meanwhile, on social media platforms such as "rednote," posts tagged "DeepSeek travel guides" or "AI-customized trips" are trending, further exposing the strength and speed of AI in making travel suggestions to more users.

Many industry players are doubling down on this trend, with a growing number of tourism companies and scenic spots accelerating their AI-oriented transformation and focusing on the new landscape of smart tourism.

In April, tourism platform Tuniu launched its AI travel assistant Xiaoniu, which leverages open-source AI models like DeepSeek to provide users with one-stop services including smart searches of air tickets, hotels and train ticket information, automatic price comparison, personalized recommendations, and bundled bookings.

Tuniu CEO Yu Dunde said that people making travel plans used to spend quite a lot of time making repeated comparisons to get the best deals for air tickets and hotels. With Xiaoniu, users can get very clear and succinct recommendations within 10 seconds with the assistant's smart searches and comparisons. "Users may also fine-tune their requirements and get their most suitable travel plans."

This year, tourism companies in the nation's scenic areas such as Huangshan Mountain and Lushan Mountain in east China, have announced their connection to DeepSeek, providing upgraded customer services in intelligent interactions and tour companion experiences, as virtual guide and augmented reality navigation give rise to increasing AI application scenarios in the tourism industry.

In Xi'an, northwest China's Shaanxi Province, the Grand Tang Mall has introduced an interactive AI virtual assistant named "Tang Xiaobao" to engage with tourists and provide travel services. At the digital exhibition hall of the Mogao Grottoes in Dunhuang, northwest China's Gansu province, visitors can wear VR glasses to visit the grottoes and view the murals up close, immersively.

Visitors use virtual reality (VR) equipment to visit the Mogao Grottoes in Dunhuang, northwest China's Gansu Province, July 22, 2024. [Photo/Xinhua]

According to a China Academy of Information and Communications Technology report, the cultural and tourism sector ranks top among the country's services sector regarding AI adoption. It said that the expanding scope of AI applications stimulates and generates new growth points for tourism consumption.

"At present, the integration of tourism and AI is accelerating the restructuring of the service ecosystem. In terms of tourism services, AI-empowered personalized services are reshaping tourists' decision-making. At the same time, on the supply side, changes are more profound because the structure of the tourism sector's value chain is being reconstructed as a result of AI," said Zhu Keli, a researcher with the China Institute of New Economy.

Zhu believed that the next three to five years will be a critical period for AI to reshape the structure of the tourism industry. He added that enterprises that first transform and upgrade their businesses' organization by embracing AI technologies to innovate their services will hopefully gain a first-mover advantage in defining new industry standards.

A joint action plan issued in 2024 by multiple government departments, including the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, aims to significantly expand China's smart tourism economy by 2027 with upgraded infrastructure and enhanced management.

"AI-powered tourism holds vast potential, as it personalizes travel experiences while boosting operational efficiency and innovation for businesses," said Hong Yong, an expert of the digital-real economies integration Forum 50.

However, challenges remain in the deep integration of AI and cultural tourism. One of them is the shortage of cross-disciplinary talents who can advance the deep integration of AI with the tourism business for sustainable commercialization. Another challenge is adaptation costs, especially for small- and medium-sized tourism companies, which lack the capabilities to develop tailored services because generic AI solutions do not perfectly match their specific needs.