APEC tourism seminar highlights AI's influence on international tourism industry

AI is driving a "profound transformation" of the tourism industry and will be pivotal to the recovery of international travel, World Tourism Alliance Chair Zhang Xu told an APEC seminar on Thursday in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province.

The remarks came at the APEC Smart Tourism Seminar, an official APEC Tourism Working Group project focusing on how AI will influence travel services.

"From the development of smart destinations and personalized itinerary customization, to multilingual intelligent services and cross-border visitor flow forecasting, digital technologies are reshaping the entire process of tourism services," said Zhang.

Figures from UN Tourism's World Tourism Barometer show that an estimated 1.52 billion international tourist trips were recorded in 2025, almost 60 million more than in 2024, with Asia-Pacific, and China in particular, leading the growth.

According to China's National Immigration Administration, foreign nationals made 22.91 million inbound trips to the country in the first half of 2026, up 20.4 percent year-on-year.

China provides an excellent example of how AI and digital technologies can help improve tourist services, said Cihan Cobanoglu, professor of AI business at Virscend University in Irvine, California.

"I have been traveling to China for the past 15 years, and I have witnessed the huge changes during the period," he said. "Today, with all these different apps, such as Didi and Alipay, available in multilingual services, I can easily travel to the airport, check into my hotel and book train tickets, without any help."

Hangzhou has long been at the forefront of smart tourism in China. Ahead of the 2025 Spring Festival, for instance, the city introduced the "Easy Go" luggage service, one of China's first, which allows travelers to book luggage transfers via a mobile app and ensures their belongings are transported anywhere within the city while they move freely between attractions and shopping areas.