If you want go from gut feel to insight inspired, this is the Data Diaries with your hosts from Dexibit, Pierre Perez and Angie Judge. The best podcast for visitor attraction leaders passionate about data and AI. This episode is brought to you by Dexibit. We provide data analytics and AI software specifically for visitor attractions so you can reduce total time to insight and total cost of ownership while democratizing data and improving your team’s agility. Here comes the show!

Angie: Hey, Pierre.

Pierre: Hello Angie.

Angie: How’s it going?

Pierre: It is going well. Thank you. How are you? You just came back from holiday, so I guess you’re a lot refresh on a lot of us right now at this time of year,

Angie: the tan at least. I’m just back in from the Cook Islands. It was magical.

Pierre: Oh, nice. We are really jealous.

Everyone is jealous. We are just not telling you.

Angie: You definitely know the Cook Islands better than I. I need to go to outtake next time.

Pierre: It’s, it’s absolutely one of my favorite place on Earth. Absolutely. How was it?

Angie: It’s funny, I was thinking about it. We, we actually planned our entire trip on chat gpt right down to like, what are we, where are we gonna eat today?

What are we gonna do today? It’s raining and we’ve got a toddler running around, you know, what are you doing? Cook Islands time and that kind of weather. And, even selecting our hotel in the first place, my first AI powered holiday.

Pierre: How did it turn out?

Angie: It’s actually pretty good. We ate our way around the islands at the most incredible, places that just had the best experiences and sometimes they weren’t always like the most expensive place, or, you know, the most well known place.

We turned up at a couple where there were sort of, you know, climbing over chickens on the floor and things. and it was just incredible. It’s, it’s a pretty good travel planner.

Pierre: That’s amazing. That’s amazing. I think we’re all using it a little bit more. You know, for, for different reasons. I, I usually.

Use it use charge GPT or other AI tools quite a bit when it comes to purchasing something and making sure I compare the products in, in a very transparent way. ’cause you can, you know, you can use different sources, right? And, and compare the, the criteria and stuff. But yeah, I think like people are increasingly using it for.

Planning either, you know, financial planning, holiday planning as you, as you mentioned, and I think it’s just gonna get even more and more and more common. Right?

Angie: Yeah. You might hear in my voice, I lost my voice. Coming back from the Cook Islands and I’m, I must admit, to cheating at parenting.

And I put it on voice mode and asked it to come up with a, a story about my little boy being Superman or Batman and his best mate being Robin. And, and saved myself a car right home of having to talk ’cause I had no voice left. So, uh, there’s a, there’s a chat, deputy t use case for everything.

Pierre: I feel like the chat GPT skis 10.0 nj.

That’s brilliant.

Angie: I was having to get creative, but it sounds like a few of our visitors out there in the attractions industry are getting creative too.

Pierre: Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, just like what you did with your travel, right? There’s an increasing number of, users just asking, you know, questions to the systems.

You know, I’m in a city for X amount of hours or X amount of days. What are the most two, what should I be seeing, when should I be seeing it? and then they, so they either would be using chat, you know, chat, GPT, cloud, et cetera, to, to do so, or they may be asking Google and. You know, as you’re aware, we now have AI generated answers in Google where people don’t need to click on links anymore, and they just got the answer straight in front of them without having to dig.

 for, for answers. So taking away that extra step of clicking on, on websites, on sources. so yeah, I think, I think definitely an increasing pattern for sure.

Angie: We’re seeing a couple of data points actually on this. the first is that the Google Analytics results for a lot of places are all over the place.

And I think, We are certainly entering an age where we’re gonna watch these probably decline, because people no longer need to actually physically come and click on your website. And also there’s a lot of stuff going along in, cookie land that are changing the landscape there. And the second is that we’re seeing, where we’ve got attractions who do visitor evaluation, they exit, um, intercept surveys and they ask their visitors, you know, how did your visit go today? And maybe, , who did you come with? Or any of the other sort of questions that they can’t pick up through, quantitative data. One of the questions they commonly are asking now is, um, did you use.

Generative AI in planning your visit here today. And at surprisingly large, an increasing, dramatically increasing number of visitors are saying yes and. It surprises me how big that, that figure is for many places and how quickly it’s growing. It’s certainly outdone a lot of my expectations. So I think just seeing just how aggressive that is.

This is going to be one of the defining trends of the coming year.

Pierre: I like what you said and I think there was, um, you know, there’s an element of of convenience as well, right. You know, you’ll have your traditional AI users that may only have it on their desktop, et cetera. And then you have like the advanced people that probably have it on their smartphone as well.

And you can actually request on the go right, as well. And that, I think that’s gonna be a lot more common, right, of like impromptu requests of be like, I’m here right now, what should I be doing? Are there any events in the area? Et cetera, et cetera. And maybe you know that, that, that’s kinda.

That’s gonna influence behavior for visitation as well.

Angie: Possibly even on site, like I’m here at the Louv, where am I going? You know, true. What should I do? Yeah, it’s a really interesting thing. And, and like you mentioned with the, the Google results, um, I even wonder whether that figure that we’re seeing on those visitor evaluation surveys is actually undershooting because for a lot of visitors, they might be using the Google search, still getting a generative ai.

Reply within their Google search result, not realizing that that’s what it is. Um, and therefore not self-reporting and that they’re using AI and planning. So, yeah, it’s, it’s possibly even a larger number of visitors than we think.

Pierre: You’re totally right and I feel like, you know, um. When that, how did you hear about this question?

Is, is really tricky and I guess the numbers I usually you know to take with a grain of salt I guess. ’cause people want to be helpful and they want to tell you how they think they heard about you. But as you mentioned, it may be coming from a source and they think it’s coming from somewhere, but it’s actually coming from from somewhere different.

When I used to work for, uh, the largest food, restaurant aggregator in the world, in my. In my past, we, we had this quite often, right? How did you hear about us? And funny enough, they were coming on our website, but their first answer was Google because they googled the name of the restaurant and they actually landed on our website, where they had all the information to make a booking, et cetera, to all the takeaway.

So I think that that will be happening right now. You’re right, like people searching, getting an answer of the ai and potentially. Giving you a friendly mislead on how they heard about you maybe, and maybe undershooting that figure for quite a bit.

Angie: Yeah. Thank you. That’s such a, actually a really actionable first, first point off the, um, first cab off the rank for, for today’s episode is if you have a, how do you, how did you hear about us option, say when a visitor books a ticket and AI isn’t on your dropdown list, if it is one.

Let’s get it on there pretty quick. Smart. Um, likewise, if you’ve got visitor intercept surveys running and you haven’t got a question in there about did you use AI as part of your, trip plan or your visit plan, um, let’s get that question in there pretty quick as well. And these are, are two really quickly progressing.

Uh, things that we can do just to get a, a harness of, what our visitors are up to.

Pierre: Yeah, 100%. And there’s a way you can shake how you’re performing. Tell us a little bit about, about that and how you know, how appealing you can be to AI when people are searching.

Angie: Oh, yes. And so I think that this, this area is going to become the defining thing for growth, um, over the coming weeks, months, years, and particularly.

If I’m to put my money on something, I think it’s gonna be by the end of this year. Um, a visitor might be able to actually book a ticket via chat, GBT. Currently you can’t. So currently I can do all my planning, but I still leap over to the website if I want to make an advance reservation somewhere, whether that’s at a restaurant or a uh, as you mentioned, or a attraction or an airline or a hotel or whatever.

But my prediction would be. By November, December, we’ll see at least some of, of the gen ai platforms actually go as far as making bookings. And so it, we will very quickly get to a point where a visitor may not get to your website, even if they’re doing an advanced pass. They’re just wholly interacting with, with AI as part of their visit plan.

So what we’ve done at Dexibit One of the frustrations we have is that these Gen AI platforms don’t currently release any data on them. So like we can get outta Google Analytics to see, you know, how many people visit your website and even out of Google search to see, um, what the different search terms are and things.

We don’t currently have any, any visibility as to what’s happening inside those conversations. So we thought we’d change that. And first of all give visitor attractions an assessment tool to understand what exactly chat-gpt and the likes are saying about them, how well they’re, how visible they are.

And then also. Beyond that to be able to compare themselves to their peers and really use this as a competitive differentiation, positioning, um, performance tool not only for marketers, but for everybody involved in the visitor experience in very various aspects. And so. We have launched a new GEO.

We are calling it Benchmark. so this is sort of the a nod to the SEO world of search engine optimization. This is generative engine optimization, to make sure that for your attraction, um, it’s getting mentioned in generative ai. It’s getting positive sentiment in terms of how that mentioned is

Done, that that description is accurate, um, and how you’d want to be represented and that your things like what questions visitors are asking and things are all optimized to make sure that you are getting the most out of this as possible. So it’s a super, super novel, exciting, very innovative.

Uh, look at the world, and I think this is gonna be a really fascinating data set to get deeper and deeper into.

Pierre: Now you’ve mentioned GEO, right? Like generative engine optimization. Is that, is that like a term that’s widely used right now you think? Or is that a term that’s currently internally used for us to refer, to?

Refer, sorry, to, to that specific aspect of, of generative ai.

Angie: I’m not sure sure who or where this was coined. It is definitely when we’ve picked up breath and invented ourselves. Uh, so we won’t take the credit for that. But, um, yeah, definitely this is becoming like the, the marketing frontier for, for marketing teams to get into.

So, definitely very, very topical for anybody who’s in the growth space.

Pierre: I love that for listeners here. So if they hear that term again right there, let’s give them a little bit of, of context of what it is. So GEO, generative engine optimization. Love it.

Angie: Yeah. So what we have done though is we’ve developed a couple of things.

The first is a GEO rank. So how do you do, how do you do in comparison to peers in terms of your mention ability on generative ai? So for example, how often are you mentioned when people talk about coming to visit your city or your country, or when they talk about your category and, as you, you mentioned it actually at the beginning of this, um, you gave an example of you know, I’m heading to this city in such and such a time and I wanna do such and such a thing.

And I actually found myself when I’m wandering around the Cook Islands doing exactly the same thing, with generative ai, it’s like, you know, we’ve had far too much fish and seafood and we want, um, a dirty old hamburger for dinner and, but I’ve got a toddler so I don’t wanna go anywhere fancy. You know, it’s gotta be somewhere where he can run around and go crazy.

 and it’s our last nights we want it to be kind of iconic, you know, like it’s a really involved sort of personalized recommendation conversation. And so when we think about like. It’s not just as simple as saying like, top things to do in America. You know, it’s like very, very specific in terms of how potential visitors might define what their interests are in and how that mention might come up in that conversation.

So that’s really interesting. So. This GEO rank, um, sort of looks at how you perform in that mention ability and how that performs relative to your peers in those, those areas. And then we sort of get, dig into like, and what’s the sentiment of that mention? Is it positive, is it negative? What’s the family friendliness of that and what’s the accessibility? And so we sort of look at all of these different dimensions of not just how frequently that mention is, but how favorable it is. And we also look at things like the sort of questions that visitors are asking and how

your attraction is described and what the keywords are. And so we form all of this into a GEO profile. And so you can then sort of look at how your overall score of performance and generative AI is fairing. So that’s how we’ve built out this assessment tool and how the benchmark is formed. and then it sort of dives into all of these different areas.

So it’s a really, really fascinating piece of data.

Pierre: I like that and I, I wonder, my mind is going, slightly sideways. And it’s, it’s wondering if that score, that ranking or, you know, how often users will be using these models are influenced by the destination that they’re going. So, you know, in my mind, if it’s a really well known destination, they’ll already know what are the must dos.

And if it’s not really a really well known destinations, maybe they will be using this. Tools a little bit more heavily. So I wonder, you know, my mind is, is going there as well. It’s like, I wonder if there is a, a difference here and then if there is a, this difference in the ranking, um, between attractions in these different places, right?

So top attraction in a destination that’s not well known versus a top attraction. You know, a, a destination that’s a really well known destination. But that’s really useful.

Angie: Yeah, certainly actually the, the well-known attractions feature really well, probably because they’re talked about a lot. And so for example, if I’m going to New York, of course the Met and MoMA are gonna be up on the list of, um, and score really well and some of the more boutique places off the beaten path, maybe outside of Manhattan aren’t going to fear so well.

But, There’s also ones that are notably absent. there’s high performing niche niche places that make a great appearance elsewhere. And likewise some that aren’t. There’s, there’s definitely a skew towards quite a positive feel. So, the likes of char-gpt tend to be quite, quite kind in the way that they describe a lot of these attractions and very delicate about how they mention some of their shortcomings.

Um, but we have found overall. That the GEO score is better, where the overall sentiment is better. So, what that means is that attractions that are perceived to be more beloved, are more visible. With with generative ai, it tends to favor things that people love and, and places that have a genuinely great visitor experience.

And we can see that in the correlations too between high quality experiences with generative visibility. And that’s probably because things like word of mouth and reviews and user feedback and things are, influencing the AI’s training data. Then we can see as well that the same is true to a slightly lesser degree for family friendliness and accessibility actually on, on equal power with each other.

They, you know, scoring well for families reflecting inclusive design. We are, both of those audiences are served that tends to, to serve their geo visibility as well. So those are, those are sort of, the interesting points and I think, what this says to me is that the voice of the visitor is now no longer an afterthought.

You know, it’s no longer a lagging indicator of like how well you’re doing that. If somebody walks out the door, you could say, oh, did you have a good time? This is now a growth input, like this is now how your visitors are enjoying their visit, how they talk about that, that voice of their feedback is now starting to dictate how well you do in the market, and it’s just become far more important than ever.

Pierre: That is so interesting. I mean, yeah, you’re right. It’s, it’s coming from you know, call it reactive place to actually a very proactive place, as in we need to have. Good feedback because it’s gonna impact this, this, and this. On, on that, you know, on these models. So you spoke about visitor feedback, right?

Mainly online. So via Google, you know, the other review agreement, Reddit, what?

Angie: Yeah, Reddit. Reddi Design a really popular place. Yeah,

Pierre: yeah, yeah, for sure. What about the reply. Of the management of that institution. Does this have an impact on that score alone?

Angie: Bingo. Um, I’ve heard you say this to so many customers, you, you’ll have to repeat it for all the other listeners who haven’t heard you say this before.

Pierre: What, what do I usually say? I say so many things

Angie: about how important it is to reply to your Google reviews.

Pierre: Absolutely. I think, You know, it’s coming from, again, my experience in, in reviews and, and all that, but also there’s a there’s a concept in philosophy that’s defined the self, and I think I’ve mentioned that before, but for the people that did not listen to the previous episodes, I repeat myself.

But self is, is a combination of two things, right? Self is a combination of how you think about yourself. And how you think you are. And then it’s also a a factor of how people perceive you and the true self. So your true self is actually in the middle, right? Because it’s a mix of how people see you, and it’s a mix of how you see yourself.

And that review is exactly the same thing. There is an aspect of how people give you feedback and perceive the experience, and then there is an aspect of how, um, you can reply to that and give your point of view of, oh, you know, we appreciate your feedback on this and we are trying to do this, or this is what we’re trying to narrate, et cetera, et cetera.

So I like that and that’s why it’s important to reply to reviews, but you’re telling us now it’s even more important to reply to reviews. Because it will have, um, you know, will be a, an input for performance on the marketing side, essentially.

Angie: Yeah. That training data covers both what they said and what you said.

I feel like we just went really deep on the self. Um,

 I need some, some the, to peel back that layer of the onion and. But yeah, absolutely it is both. It’s hard to tell, you know, how much waiting goes which way? When it comes to gen AI’s training, but both. Are important. And funnily enough, one of the aspects that is important is like the emotion of it and the enthusiasm of it.

And one of the things that we’ve seen in the data, interestingly enough, is that maybe there’s a little bit of bias towards sort of American lens, cultural lens on the world. And what I mean by this is that a visitor to like a British. Attraction can go along and say, oh, it wasn’t bad. And what they mean by that is they had a great time, but equally, you know, an American can go along to an American attraction and say it was just the best.

You know, I had the time of my life and they’re actually probably saying the same thing. In terms of once you take sort of cultural context out of it. But AI seems to bias that emotion and that enthusiasm. And so one of the things you can do is ramp up that emotional response in your reply, and bring some of that rah rah spirit into your, review content for one of a better word through how you respond to it.

And also you can sort of, you know, you can. Kind of interpret how visitors are saying something. So for example, a common thing might be for a visitor to say it was really noisy. There were lots of children running around. Like, don’t necessarily reply to that to be assuming that that’s a bad thing.

You know, you could, you could reply to that and say, we love the atmosphere that the kids create in our attraction. You know, and immediately you’re sort of, you know, not only. Putting a positive spin on that for that visitor and any other visitor who’s reading this review. But, you know, giving that ai, that positive spin, that’s gonna help with this training data as well.

So, I think it’s a really curious thing that that emotion of the visitor voice is playing a really big role.

Pierre: I feel like there will be a, a nuance to that, right? Like if you had a review. That was saying the food at the cafe was really bad because my bone bread was stale. And you reply, yes, we all about recycling.

Okay. There’s so, you know, may, maybe there’s a, there’s a limit, right? That you can push. But I, I, I do like the fact that you say you know, essentially if you have a, you. Talk about, you know, a European, let’s take the French. ’cause we’re usually very heavy on the, on the negative feedback.

Sometimes if a French person was like, it wasn’t bad, what you will reply would be, we are glad that you had the time of your life at the museum. Please come back essentially, right. Is that what you’re saying?

Angie: Yeah. And maybe like, double click on some of the things that your visitors are saying. Go deep in them as well.

So not just putting the roast tinted glasses on about the, the bad bread, but you know, offer a bit more information each time you reply rather than just, you know, glad you had a great time. I love that. Um, because again, that’s creating more and more content, which is really interesting as well. So, one of the things that we have put into this benchmark data and the assessment data, um, that you get on your own attraction as well as what you can see on the wider industry is a couple of.

Things. And they are the primary persona of the users or, or visitors that are commonly conversing with AI about your attraction. And, not to say that this is an exhaustive, um, persona or avatar, but just that this is like a common, example primary persona. We can also see what their motivations are.

Um, so, in the way that we’ve created this data set, you can see that this is like a theater goer and their name is Lanar and they’re interested in cultural performances about X, y, Z, for example. And, so it gives you a team, sort of an an example person of who might be, um, engaging with. AI about their visit.

And the other thing that we’ve added into there is a missed market persona and a justification of why that market is missing, and also some suggestions around how you can go about creating content for that missed market. And this comes back to your point that you made originally. Which is that we start to get super specific when we have these conversations with ai.

And it’s not just what can I do in New York, but it’s like I’m a, I’m a student and it’s always been my life dream to come to New York and I’m doing it for the first time and I wanna have a really iconic experience. And I’ve been watching this movie and. You know, what can I do? And so it’s by using these kind of personas in mind that we can start to create content, um, whether it’s in the replies to our reviews, or whether it’s, um, blogs that we put on our website or, whether it’s.

Influencers that we get to cover our, our visitor attraction and put their content out in the world and their platforms, to start to appeal to some of these more niche audiences. And, and rather than sort of treat every visitor as the same vanilla, we start to get all the different flavors coming through.

And we’ve often talked in the attraction sector about like hyper-personalization and never really got there, you know, all the apps in the world have tried, but this is kind of it like. The visitors are doing it for themselves, so to speak. And how we deliver on this through content and, and how we take this time to sort of inject this stuff everywhere in the training data that, that AI picks up, um, as part of, of supporting that hyper-personalization.

Pierre: I love that. So there’s probably like a few. Do you say like practical, tactical, actionable stuff that you need to do if you wanna, if you wanna win at the game, essentially the new game, right?

Angie: Yeah. Yeah. So in, in the example of like the theater, go Elena, you know, like I would put a, something up on my website about, how such and such a type of theater interest is, you know, and this is what they should visit during their visit, um, to the attraction.

Or these are the particular event schedules or public program or things that they might enjoy. Or maybe it’s like an architect’s architect lovers visit and sort of features of the building that they should look out for or. Maybe they’re a botanist enthusiast and, you know, talk about the different plants that are on the property.

Who knows? Um, but I would get some of this content out there in whichever form you can. Put it into your blog post, put it into your YouTube, and do a little walking tour, you know, however it gets out there into the world. And the other thing that I pick up on is FAQs. If you don’t have an FAQ section on your website, get one up there.

Quick, smart. And the, a great place to start is in this section with the GEO assessment tool. There is frequently asked questions by users with generative AI who are thinking about visiting or attraction. What do they ask? And weirdly, some of these might not be things that you have thought about.

Like a lot of them are around sort of, Can I bring children of this age? Is it suitable for children of this age? You know, these are sorts of things that you can, first of all have a FAQ section to answer a whole pile of them, and then like, dig deeper on each one and maybe do, again, a blog post or something similar about that particular.

Question and go deep on it. Like, yes, you can bring children under five. Here’s what we would do, you know, things to do with them. Here’s things to pack, here’s what to consider, here’s where the change rooms are. You know, all of these sorts of things. And that will help when gen AI is having those conversations with your visitor.

Get that mention in there and get that content, in there as well.

Pierre: No, I love that. I love that. And I think like there is a few scenarios where that would work, right? Like low sensory tools you know, like we talked about like accessibility earlier, so like wheelchair, prem, et cetera, et cetera. There’d be a lot of, um, situations where they’ll apply Now.

It may be a lot to take in. Right now it’s a new topic. There’s a lot of stuff that you can do. If you were to start from scratch, like what will be like the three or four things that you’ll, you’ll do like in order of importance you think,

Angie: oh, to, to optimize for gen and gene AI overall.

Pierre: Yes.

Angie: Ooh. Well, I mean, SEO is not dead.

So your original search engine optimization to make sure, say for example, that you rank well in Google is still relevant in a gen AI world because it’s gotta find you to begin with. so I would still keep investing in that. Like, don’t stop. The second one is I would get some of that content up, start with the FAQs, and then the third one is, as we, mentioned at the beginning, is like, get some data around to what degree these visitors are are using this already and maybe some feedback with them or maybe go deeper on some of that evaluation if you’ve got the opportunity too, to ask them about those conversations and just sort of learn through observation about how your visitors are using gene ai.

And one of my favorite things actually that’s in the assessment tool is it gives you your comparative twin. So this is an attraction around the world that it finds most like you in many different ways and aspects of the conversations that it has with your visitors. And so I would look at them and say.

Well, what do you know if their, if their scores are better than your scores? It’s a benchmark so you can see them. If their scores are better than your scores, what do they do that I don’t like? Or what do their visitors ask them about them? versus how does that compare to my visitor FAQs, you know, how they describe versus me.

And what about their visitor experience notes and that my accessibility notes, like how do all of these sorts of things compare and use them as an example, and then maybe do the same with like your. Neighbors and your peers and other sort of like venues that you would compare to yourself as well.

And sort of just, you know, help yourself to that benchmark data to be able to do some competitive positioning and differentiation and start to sort of borrow from others and make some initial first leaps with your your profiling.

Pierre: Nice. These benchmarks are available right now, right? We’ve been looking at it for a few weeks already.

We’ve been digging into it for a few weeks. So if folks wanna, wanna find out a little bit more about that, it is in Dexibit right now. Don’t be shy. Ask. Ask, right? Ask. And we’ll, we will show you essentially, and there’s, there’s a lot of interesting stuff happening, I think on that benchmark.

Angie: Yeah.

And fascinating. And I’m just, yeah, I’m just so thrilled to have some data to, to look at when it comes to Gen ai. So Sick of the Black Box. Hopefully they come out with some metrics fairly soon.

Pierre: Fair one. Hopefully

Angie: I might go and start planning my next vacation in the Cook Islands, Pierre. Maybe by this time I’ll be booking my flights all through chat

Pierre: I would be really interested to see how that, that user you know, experience goes, I think like you just start a, a cart, right? And, and confirm your card at the end, I guess. And they’d be like, you have these tickets and you have this hotel and you have these activities planned out. Confirm your cart.

Yes, there you go. You’re off in two weeks.

Angie: It’s gonna be a fascinating ride. And definitely a challenge for everybody out there in the ticketing world. You know, this is, this is gonna be the new normal gone as the user interface.

Pierre: True.

Angie: Well, on that note, have a fabulous weekend, Pierre. I’m off to go and do some research on that vacation.

Pierre: Thanks, Angie. Until next time!

If your goal is to get more visitors through the door, engaging and spending more, leaving happy and loyally returning – check out Dexibit’s data analytics and AI software at dexibit.com. We work with visitor attractions, cultural and commercial, integrating with over a hundred industry source systems across visitor experience and venue operations, providing dashboards, reports, insights, forecasts, data management and a unique data concierge.

Until next time, this is Dexibit!