The Front Door and the Back Office — Janette Roush at ATIA 2026

THE FRAMEWORK

Two sides of the same change.

AI touches two sides of every tourism business: how travelers discover you, and how your team gets the work done. You don't need a tech background to start on either one, and small experiments add up fast. Click between the two views to explore.

The discovery layer is being rebuilt in real time.

Travelers plan whole trips in a chat window. Google's AI Overviews answer the question before anyone clicks through. Personal agents are starting to book on a traveler's behalf. Each shift is an opening for tourism businesses that make themselves easy for AI to find, read, and trust.

AI rewards content only you could have written: specific, authoritative, and useful.
Write for the infrequently asked questions, the details someone currently has to call you to learn.
Put a real expert's name and credentials on your articles. A byline tells AI a person stands behind the content.
What third parties say about you matters more than ever. Travelers now add "Reddit" to their searches to hear from real people.
Your website stays the house you own on the internet. Fewer people may visit, and their AI will pull from it.

Let AI do the junk work.

Four examples from Brand USA, each a step more ambitious than the last. Janette built them herself as a theater major who spent 20 years on Broadway, with no tech background.

A task: translating a training video into another language with Descript.
A tool: an application form that routes each response to the right office.
A process: a strategic plan that lives on a website and updates from meeting transcripts.
An institution: fifteen offices' monthly reports, indexed so anyone can ask questions of them.
In every case, people kept doing their jobs the same way. AI made the changes around them.

THE NUMBERS FROM THE TALK

What we know right now.

of travelers used AI somewhere in planning their trips

Booking.com Global AI Sentiment Report, 37,325 travelers, spring 2025

travel advisors and influencers in Brand USA's Global Ambassador Program for America250

Applications ran through a form Janette built with Claude

~0 hr

to set up that form, its Google Sheet, and the automatic routing to each market's office

Janette's estimate, from the talk

international offices filing a report every month, now indexed so anyone can ask questions of them

Brand USA Global Office Network

or less per person a month for a business AI account that keeps company data under company control

ChatGPT Business and Claude Team list prices, monthly billing, October 2026

SIDE 01 · IN DEPTH

How travelers find you now.

Real searches Janette ran while planning this trip to Fairbanks, and what each one means for an Alaska business.

ZERO-CLICK SEARCH

Google answers first

Janette asked Google to plan a romantic date night in Fairbanks. The AI Overview suggested The Pump House as its second option, which is where she and her husband Jeff planned to go after the talk. The source link beside the answer pointed to an AI-built restaurant website, where every page was designed for AI discovery. Alaska's own voices can claim that ground. Tools like Claude and Lovable make an AI-ready website simple to build.

Google AI Overview suggesting date-night plans in Fairbanks, with source links on the right — The real search, as shown on stage.

CHAT PLANNING

Whole trips in a chat window

Before the trip, Janette asked ChatGPT whether she could get an Uber at the Fairbanks airport after a 12:45 a.m. landing. Travelers bring the whole trip to the chat now, from flights to the ride from the airport.

APPS IN CHAT

Brands move into the conversation

Southwest Airlines launched a ChatGPT plugin on October 6, 2026. Travelers compare real-time fares inside ChatGPT, then finish the booking on Southwest.com.

PERSONAL AGENTS

Agents that book

Meta's Muse app connects to a traveler's email, Instagram, and other apps. Janette asked it to book a car from the Memphis airport to Oxford, Mississippi. The first company's website blocked bot traffic, so Muse booked with the second. Travelers will expect their agents to finish the job.

The Mindtrip AI trip planner on VisitTheUSA.com answering a question about Fairbanks and Chena Hot Springs — The AI trip planner on VisitTheUSA.com, answering a question about Fairbanks and Chena Hot Springs.

FIRST-PARTY DATA

Learn from the visitors you still get

VisitTheUSA.com runs an AI trip planner built with Mindtrip. Brand USA can read every conversation and connect it to its website analytics. A paid campaign in India can be traced to the chats it started, what those travelers asked about, and even how many people are coming on the trip.

That is a much richer picture than page counts, bounce rate, and time on site.

AI REWARDS

Get it out of people's heads

The details your staff answer on the phone are exactly what AI looks for. Put them on your website as text, in as much detail as you can.

BYLINES

Name your experts

A DMO or chamber can choose an expert on a topic, explain what makes them an authority, and put their name on the article. That signal tells ChatGPT a real person was involved.

THIRD PARTIES

What others say about you

AI systems look for outside signals: press coverage, reviews, and Reddit threads. Earned media now shapes the answers AI gives about your business.

We still need a house on the internet that we own, to hold all of our content. People may visit it less, and they will expect to see what's in it inside their own personal AI.

— JANETTE ROUSH

FOR ALASKA, SPECIFICALLY

What does a small town in Norway have in common with Alaska?

A look at where booking goes over the next two to five years, through a rural destination already building for it.

The Voss gondola above a snowy valley in Norway — Voss, Norway. Photo: Wolfmann, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Voss is wiring every small business for AI.

Voss is a rural Norwegian destination known for outdoor adventure, with a very small DMO. Its leader came from e-commerce and marketing tech, and decided the most important thing Voss can do for its future is make every business in town bookable by AI.

Many of those businesses are one- or two-person operations renting snowmobiles or outdoor gear, without much search visibility. Visit Voss connects each operator's existing booking system, whatever it is, to an agentic booking layer. When more travelers plan with personal AI, everything in Voss will be ready to book.

The destination becomes the infrastructure.

The Voss model, top to bottom. Click a layer to open it.

LAYER 01

Where travelers decide

Every place a trip starts: AI assistants, social video, search and maps, partners and press.

AI ASSISTANTSSOCIAL VIDEOSEARCH & MAPSPARTNERS & PRESS

LAYER 02

Destination knowledge

One structured source of truth for the destination: places, experiences, prices, and availability, held by the DMO.

LAYER 03

Connected commerce

Live prices and availability from every member's booking system, connected so an AI assistant can complete a purchase.

LAYER 04

The businesses

The rafting company, the hotel, the ski resort, the restaurant. Each one keeps the booking system it already uses.

RAFTINGHOTELHIGH ROPESSKI RESORTRESTAURANT

STEP 01

Discoverable

AI can find your business, read it, and trust what it reads.

START THIS MONTH

STEP 02

Bookable

AI sees live availability and sends the traveler straight to buy.

COMING VERY SOON

STEP 03

Connected

Every business in the destination is wired to be purchasable through AI assistants, for travelers and for tour operators planning B2B.

WHAT COMES NEXT

What if Alaska worked as one connected destination?

A traveler or a tour operator asks an AI assistant to plan the trip. Every Alaska business is findable. Every one is wired to be booked through the assistant.

That future is a few years out, and the infrastructure to support it is worth planning now.

Twenty-five years ago, people swore they would never type a credit card number into a website. Two years from now, letting an AI agent book your trip will feel just as normal.

FOR SMALL BUSINESSES

Baby steps toward being found by AI.

Start with the basics. Click each step as you finish it; your progress stays in this browser.

0 OF 6 DONE

✓

Update your Google Business Profile

Google draws on it for AI Overviews.

✓

Put what your staff knows on your website

Get it out of employees' heads and onto the page as text. The more detailed and granular, the better.

✓

Claim your listings, and make them match

Apple Maps, Tripadvisor, Yelp, Bing. When your hours differ from one listing to the next, AI stops trusting any of them.

✓

Check for a crawler block

Type /robots.txt after your web address and look for "Disallow." Anything disallowed is blocked from finding your site.

✓

Add structured data

Schema is metadata on the back end of your site. People never see it, and AI agents read it.

✓

Ask the AI tools about yourself, monthly

Ask ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude what they know about your business and how they would book it.

YOURBUSINESS.COM/ROBOTS.TXT

User-agent: *
Allow: /

User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /

The top rule welcomes everyone. The bottom rule shuts out ChatGPT's crawler, the same way a taxi company's site turned away Janette's agent in Oxford. Page not found means nothing is blocked. If you see Disallow, talk with your web agency about staying secure and staying discoverable.

WHAT A PERSON READS

"Open daily, mid-May to mid-September, 8 AM to 6 PM."

WHAT A MACHINE READS

"openingHoursSpecification": {
  "dayOfWeek": ["Monday", … "Sunday"],
  "opens": "08:00",
  "closes": "18:00",
  "validFrom": "2027-05-15",
  "validThrough": "2027-09-15"
}

Same fact, twice. With schema, an agent gets your seasonal hours directly, without digging through image tags and design code to find them.

SEE YOUR SITE THE WAY AI SEES IT →

Janette's free audit tool. Paste in your page's HTML to see your robots.txt rules and the schema on the page.

SIDE 02 · IN DEPTH

Four things Brand USA actually did.

Each step is more ambitious than the last: a task, a tool, a process, and finally an institution. Click through them in order.

Translate a training video nobody could translate.

Brand USA trains travel agents in South and Latin America with videos from destinations and businesses. Plenty of those partners have no Spanish speaker on staff.

Descript edits video and audio, and it connects to ChatGPT or Claude. You tell your AI what you want done to the video. It produces translated captions and can translate the speaker's voice, so viewers hear the new language.

Keep a human in the loop. The French version came out with a Québécois accent, and only a French speaker would catch that.

Descript editor with a video transcript and a request to redo the voiceover and captions in French

The same video with a French voiceover and French captions — Ask Descript's AI to redo the voiceover and captions in French, and it does.

The form that sorts itself.

For America250, Brand USA brought on 250 travel advisors from around the world who are also travel influencers, as Global Ambassadors. They applied through a form.

The plan was a plain Google Form, with each response emailed to headquarters and forwarded by hand to the right international rep firm. Janette asked Claude how to make it look more professional. The answer: a branded page that writes to a Google Sheet, with a tab for each market and an automatic email to the right office.

Setup took about an hour, close to what the Google Form alone would have taken. A small business can use the same approach to refresh its own website.

Branded Global Ambassador Panel Application form — The branded front end. Responses land in a Google Sheet, sorted by market.

A strategic plan that stays alive all year.

The old way: every department fills out a PowerPoint template by a deadline, someone chases the stragglers, an intern merges the decks, and the plan goes on a shelf until next year.

Brand USA now records its strategy meetings with a Plaud pin or Granola, and builds the strategy as a website. After each meeting, AI checks the transcript against the site and proposes updates for review before anything goes live. The whole company can use it, and board updates come together faster.

"The PowerPoint should be serving the work we want to do."

A Plaud recording pin — A Plaud pin recorded this talk. This site was built from that transcript.

A corporate hive mind.

Brand USA's fifteen international offices each send a monthly PDF report into Box. Unless someone goes digging, nobody reads them.

Janette pointed Claude at the folders where the reports already lived and had it build an index: each report, the topics it covers, and a link. A shared Claude project connects to that index. Anyone with access can ask what luxury travelers are doing across the fifteen markets, and Claude answers from the actual reports, then offers to turn the answer into a slide, a PDF, or an executive summary.

The idea comes from Y Combinator, where meeting transcripts, calls, and emails go into one shared memory everyone can use. For ATIA: put three years of convention recaps and booking information in one place your AI tools can reach.

Diagram of a new note feeding an index, next to the Claude project that answers questions from it — A new report feeds the index; the shared Claude project answers from it.

MONDAY MORNING

How to get started.

Stay focused on your mission.

Start with the problems you solve for your stakeholders, then ask where AI helps you solve them better, faster, or cheaper.

Buy your staff a paid account.

Business plans keep company data under company control, and the chat history stays with you when someone leaves. You would never let a departing employee keep their email.

Keep AI open on your second screen.

Pick one thing a day and try it there first. Skip waiting for the perfect task, and try again in a month, because the answer may change.

Share what you learn.

Nobody from OpenAI or Anthropic is coming to show the travel industry how to work with these tools. This is our chance to figure it out together, starting with the breakouts at this conference.

At work, it's not cheating to use AI.

Many of us are stewards of public funds, and there is no reward for spending seven hours on a seven-minute task. Commercial businesses need it to stay competitive. Talk to your IT team, do it safely, and start exploring.