There is an absurd amount of travel information available. But more information hasn’t necessarily made researching and planning travel any easier. The sheer volume of information creates its own problem.
Yeah, Google is still there, but it doesn’t use any judgement to return results. Once you wade through the sponsored results and the ads, the results are based on an algorithm ranking, not human judgement about what might matter to you. AI Overviews are adding another layer of synthesis. It’s not clear how competing stances are weighted and the selection process for sources is murky. Is the overview from the perspective of the tourism board, the first time visitor, the local resident or a collection of stories? It can provide a very authoritative sounding answer without the evidence to understand if that is earned.
In this state, trust becomes the scarce thing. When it’s nearly free to produce content, having a person whose judgement you’ve learned to trust becomes more valuable. And while an LLM and an algorithm can both be factually correct, travel information is often about the experience that only the human layer can provide. It may be, in fact, fastest to get from point A to point B by a local ferry, but if you’ve traveled that route and know the rough seas and the fact that the ferry is often cancelled, you might steer someone away from depending on that for their connection.
Enter the curator. If we use the art curator analogy, the job isn’t aggregation. Curation requires selection, rejection, context and judgement. Their knowledge and experience inform what they decide to show the public. They then organize and present the art in a way that makes it worth strolling through.
I think the same idea applies to the travel research experience. And the value includes what you don’t see. The product isn’t the six articles about where to stay in Belize that might help you. A huge part of the value is the 34 that the curator decided weren’t worth your time.
I’ve heard frustration from travel writers and bloggers about how much harder it is to get their work in front of an audience. They’re already losing some of the traffic that used to come through search, because people are increasingly getting an answer from the AI Overview and never making it to the source, never mind the Google results. Increasingly, people are bypassing the search altogether in favour of their AI tool. And that’s before getting into the fact that even when the AI Overview does attribute information to writers, attribution isn’t the same thing as compensation or traffic. There’s a human labour issue beneath it all.
Travelers are overwhelmed trying to find trustworthy info, while travel writers struggle to get their work discovered. Google is no longer connecting the two sides as effectively as it once did. Google search referrals to thousands of publisher sites fell substantially between 2024 and 2025.
But Cathy, what about Lonely Planet? I just go there and get all my research in one spot. I don’t think that’s a bad idea; I’d rather someone do that than depend on ChatGPT. But if you want different perspectives and to hear different experiences, you may want to read a few different sources. And that’s where Feral Travel comes in.
The heart of Feral Travel is the Country Research. I do a lot of research before I travel. I also save that research in case any of my travel friends head to the same spot. I built it because I needed it, but now it’s available for everyone.
But a static product becomes outdated fast. So I used my experience in intelligence-led research and analysis to build an operating system that keeps adding fresh resources, and I publish those updates so you can stay current too.
And since I’m always planning my next trip, I also built Travel Planners and share my planning insights so you can join me walking down the aisle. (Plane aisle, obviously.)
Cheers, Cathy.
Sources and Reading:
- Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results [Pew Research Center]
- Overview and key findings of the 2026 Digital News Report [Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism]
- Emerging uses of AI chatbots for news and what it means for journalism [Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism]
- The information ecosystem is being redrawn by AI. That might be good news [Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism]
- Control content use for AI training with Cloudflare’s managed robots.txt and blocking for monetized content [Cloudflare]
- 25 Key Statistics That Show How AI Is Changing How People Search [Social Creators]