If you run a tourism, events or activity business in Wales, someone has probably invited you to an AI workshop this year. They're free, they're practical, and they're filling up fast: the first national series was near capacity shortly after launch, and a second round is now touring the country. Our advice, genuinely, is to go.
But look at what's in the notebook when you get home. Website content. Listings. Search visibility. Quicker, better replies when an enquiry arrives. Much of it is about being found, and about responding well once someone gets in touch. Useful work, but it stops short of the operational machinery behind a confirmed, paid and well-managed booking. And for many of the operators, venues and course providers we work with, that machinery is where the larger leak sits.
The Welsh Government has put £2.1m into helping Welsh SMEs adopt AI: £600,000 for a Business Wales awareness programme, £1m for AI upskilling through the Flexible Skills Programme (with employers paying just 25% of eligible AI training costs), and £500,000 aimed squarely at tourism and events, including a partnership with the Hartree Centre in Cardiff and Cardiff University to work with event organisers. The free workshops, delivered by MWT Cymru for Visit Wales, focus on hands-on tools for content, online visibility and customer communications, including Harri, a custom-built AI assistant for Welsh tourism businesses that helps with content, listings and customer enquiries.
Read the signal correctly: Wales expects its visitor economy to digitise, and there's generously subsidised help on the table for the skills. That's worth taking with both hands. Just don't mistake the syllabus for the whole opportunity. Better content and quicker replies get a visitor to your door and keep the conversation warm. They don't hold the availability, take the deposit, send the reminder, or bring anyone back next season.
Think about your last busy fortnight. The enquiry that came in on Saturday and got answered on Tuesday, by which time they'd booked elsewhere. The availability that lives in a paper diary or one person's head, so nobody else dares confirm anything. The deposit that gets chased when someone remembers. The joining instructions sent by hand, or not sent, and the no-show that follows. The same guest details typed from the email into the spreadsheet, then into the invoice, then onto the group list.
Then the season ends and the quietest leak of all opens up: the guests who loved it, were never asked for a review, and were never invited back.
None of that is a marketing problem, and no amount of better content fixes it. It's an operations problem, and it's where the real money is hiding.
Here's the useful division of labour. Anywhere the rule is clear enough to write on a postcard, ordinary automation should run it, no AI required: live availability that can't double-book, deposits taken at booking with the balance requested on a set date, confirmations sent the moment payment lands, reminders and joining instructions that go out on schedule, and the day's manifest or delegate list assembling itself. We've written about choosing between AI and automation, and the short version is that most of a booking journey wants the boring, dependable kind.
This is exactly the machinery we build and run for Jones International, whose coach holiday operation moves thousands of passengers a season, and the principles scale down to a kayak school or a wedding venue without losing anything. If you're curious what sits under the surface, here's what a booking system is actually doing.
Where AI genuinely earns a place in a tourism business is interpretation. Reading the enquiry email and pulling out the dates, party size and which package they mean. Drafting a reply from your real prices and availability for a person to check and send. Summarising a group's requirements from a long thread. Making sense of a supplier document or event sheet. In every case the machine does the reading, and a person you trust does the deciding, a division we've argued for in where automation helps and where people matter most.
Weather cancellations. Access requirements. The group of twelve that becomes nine on Thursday night. The couple who booked the wrong weekend and are mortified about it. In tourism, the exceptions aren't an inconvenience at the edge of the operation; handled warmly, they're where reputations get made. So they should never be automated away. The system's job is to catch them and put them in front of a person quickly, with the whole booking history on one screen, so your team can be human at the exact moment it counts.
You don't need a digital strategy to act on any of this. Pick the journey that hurts most, often deposits or reminders, and map how it really runs today: who does what, where the details live, where things wait. Fix that one handover properly, measure the difference for a month, and let the evidence decide what's next. That's how the businesses that get real value from this stuff actually do it: one dependable workflow at a time, while everyone else is still generating content.
If you'd like a second pair of eyes on yours, we offer a Tourism & Events Automation Review: a fixed-fee, fixed-scope look at your enquiry-to-booking journey, where it leaks, which steps should run on rules, and where AI genuinely fits your operation. You'll receive written findings, prioritised recommendations and a sensible first step. If the honest conclusion is "your setup is fine, go and enjoy the free workshops", that's what the report will say.
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