How Generative AI Is Learning to Read Your Travel Mood and Personalize Trips in Real Time
Generative artificial intelligence is steadily reshaping how people plan, experience, and even reflect on travel. According to recent academic research, AI systems are now capable of interpreting a traveler’s mood, energy level, and emotional context to deliver highly personalized recommendations before, during, and after a trip. This emerging capability goes beyond traditional travel planning tools and points toward a future where AI acts more like a responsive travel companion than a static search engine.
This idea comes from research by Juan Luis Nicolau, a professor of revenue management, published in the Journal of Smart Tourism in 2025. His work explores how generative AI adds what he describes as a cognitive layer to tourism—one that can sense, interpret, and respond to the emotional state of travelers in real time.
Generative AI as a Cognitive Layer in Tourism
Tourism is fundamentally experience-driven. Unlike physical products, travel experiences are shaped by mood, expectations, energy levels, and personal preferences that can change from day to day or even hour to hour. The research argues that generative AI is uniquely suited to this space because it can simulate human-like reasoning, generate contextual content, and adjust recommendations dynamically.
Earlier forms of AI in tourism focused on logic-based systems. They handled tasks like booking optimization, automated customer service, and rule-based recommendations. Generative AI, by contrast, can co-create experiences with travelers. Instead of simply answering questions, it can imagine possibilities, adapt suggestions, and engage emotionally based on how a traveler is feeling at a given moment.
This shift allows AI to function less like a tool and more like a collaborative partner in travel planning and decision-making.
Personalization Before, During, and After a Trip
One of the most important aspects of the research is how generative AI can support travelers throughout the entire travel journey.
Before a trip, AI can help travelers explore multiple destination options, activities, and itineraries tailored to their preferences. Rather than offering generic “top 10” lists, the system can adapt its suggestions based on expressed interests, travel style, and emotional goals—such as relaxation, creativity, or adventure.
During the trip, generative AI becomes especially powerful. Travelers can interact with AI in real time through websites or smartphone apps, describing how they feel and what they want to do. If a traveler says they feel energized and eager to explore, the AI might suggest outdoor activities like hiking, biking, or visiting lively neighborhoods. If the traveler indicates they are tired or seeking something calm, the recommendations may shift toward leisurely options such as visiting a local café, art gallery, or quiet scenic spot.
After the trip, AI can assist travelers in reflecting on their experiences. This includes helping generate online reviews, summarizing highlights, or even organizing photos and notes in a way that captures the emotional tone of the journey for future reference.
Understanding Mood-Based Travel Recommendations
A central idea in the research is that generative AI can interpret high-energy versus low-energy prompts and adjust its responses accordingly. This doesn’t require invasive emotional tracking technologies. Instead, it relies on conversational cues provided voluntarily by the traveler.
For example, a traveler might mention feeling energized after a good night’s sleep and wanting to explore outdoors. The AI can recognize this context and prioritize physically engaging or adventurous activities. On another day, the same traveler might mention feeling sore or mentally drained, prompting the AI to suggest slower, more restorative experiences.
This flexibility highlights how AI-driven travel planning can move away from rigid itineraries and toward fluid, emotion-aware decision-making.
Eight Key Tourism Research Areas Affected by GenAI
To better understand the broader implications, the research identifies eight core tourism business areas influenced by generative AI, each intersecting with multiple thematic topics that define how GenAI operates in tourism.
One major area is consumer behavior, particularly the growing interest in slow travel and mindful tourism. While it may seem counterintuitive to use advanced computing power to encourage people to slow down, generative AI can actually support mindfulness by recommending experiences that foster deeper engagement with local culture. Examples include choosing independent coffee shops over chains or attending small-scale local art exhibitions.
Other research areas include supply, disruptors, sustainability, ethics, performance, product development, and demand. Across these areas, generative AI influences how tourism products are designed, marketed, delivered, and evaluated.
Sustainability and Mindful Tourism Applications
The research highlights how generative AI can play a role in promoting sustainable and responsible tourism. By understanding a traveler’s values and emotional intentions, AI can recommend options that align with environmentally conscious or community-focused travel choices.
Instead of automatically promoting high-traffic attractions, AI can suggest lesser-known experiences that reduce overcrowding and distribute tourism benefits more evenly. It can also encourage travelers to engage more thoughtfully with destinations, supporting local businesses and cultural initiatives.
In this way, generative AI becomes not just a personalization tool but also a potential sustainability facilitator.
Ethical and Privacy Considerations
Despite its promise, the research is careful to acknowledge the ethical challenges associated with emotionally aware AI systems. When travelers share information about how they feel, that data becomes sensitive. Emotional data, if mishandled, could pose privacy risks.
The research emphasizes the need for travelers to remain conscious of what information they share and how AI systems store and use that data. It also calls attention to the responsibility of developers, platforms, and tourism businesses to establish safeguards that protect user privacy and prevent misuse.
As generative AI becomes more embedded in the tourism ecosystem, addressing these ethical and data governance issues will be critical for building trust and ensuring long-term adoption.
How Generative AI Differs From Earlier Tourism Technologies
Another key point in the research is how generative AI differs from earlier tourism technologies. Traditional systems excelled at efficiency, automation, and optimization. Generative AI adds a new dimension by being able to engage emotionally, adapt creatively, and produce original content in response to nuanced human input.
This capability enables AI to function in contexts that were previously difficult to automate, such as interpreting subjective preferences, emotional states, and evolving desires during a trip.
What This Means for the Future of Travel
The research suggests that as generative AI continues to evolve, travelers may increasingly rely on AI companions that help them navigate not just destinations, but also their own changing moods and expectations. This doesn’t replace human travel agents or personal intuition, but it adds a flexible layer of support that can adapt moment by moment.
At the same time, widespread adoption will depend on transparent design, ethical data practices, and a clear understanding of how much personalization travelers are comfortable with.
In essence, generative AI is positioning itself as a tool that can help travelers make more intentional, personalized, and emotionally aligned choices, while also reshaping how the tourism industry thinks about experience design.
Research Reference:
https://doi.org/10.1177/27652157251371101
