Smart Planner picks Queenstown for tourism AI pilot

Smart Planner has chosen Queenstown as the first pilot location for its Tourism Intelligence Platform. The New Zealand startup is developing the artificial intelligence-based system for travellers, tourism operators and destination organisations.

The pilot will focus on Queenstown as Smart Planner builds and tests a minimum viable product. The platform is designed to combine personalised trip planning, predictive analytics, accessibility information and sustainability data in one service.

Smart Planner is positioning the product as more than a standard itinerary or booking app. It plans to offer travel recommendations based on a user's interests, budget, available time, accessibility requirements and broader travel priorities.

Alongside its consumer-facing functions, the business is also targeting the tourism sector. Its longer-term plan is to give operators better visibility into visitor interests and provide destination organisations with aggregated, anonymised insights into seasonality, demand and how visitors move across a region.

Queenstown offers a test bed in one of New Zealand's best-known tourism markets. The region attracts international visitors for its alpine scenery, adventure tourism and wider outdoor offering, while also facing pressure on transport, accommodation, infrastructure, public services and the natural environment.

That backdrop matters for a platform built around local tourism data and planning. Queenstown has also made regenerative tourism central to its destination strategy and adopted a goal of becoming a carbon-zero visitor economy by 2030.

Smart Planner said those factors made the resort town a suitable place to assess how artificial intelligence could support more informed tourism planning. Its approach reflects a broader shift in the sector away from measuring success purely by visitor numbers and towards understanding where visitors go, what they want and what effects they have on local communities and ecosystems.

"Artificial intelligence should not simply recommend where people travel. It should help destinations become more sustainable, resilient and connected," said Tales Melo, Co-Founder | Head of Marketing & Commercial, Smart Planner.

Melo also linked the project to wider debates about how destinations balance visitor growth with local needs. "The future of tourism is not only about attracting more visitors. It is about creating better outcomes for everyone involved: better experiences for travellers, stronger opportunities for local businesses, better information for destination managers and better protection for the places people travel to experience," Melo said.

Pilot focus

Features under development include AI-generated itineraries, local recommendations, planning tools that take accessibility into account, sustainability and eco-impact information, carbon-footprint awareness, destination intelligence and predictive tourism analytics.

As development continues, Smart Planner wants to work with tourism operators, local businesses and destination stakeholders. It said the platform is not intended to replace tourism professionals or local expertise, but to connect different parts of the tourism system through more relevant information and recommendations.

That speaks to one of the commercial tensions in online travel. Large global platforms offer broad booking inventories and international reach, but often lack strong local context around accessibility, community priorities and sustainability targets in individual destinations.

Smart Planner's model is to combine artificial intelligence with local destination knowledge. If successful, it could help smaller tourism businesses gain exposure while giving travellers options beyond the most heavily marketed experiences.

Melo said Queenstown's mix of tourism scale and policy ambition made it a useful place to begin. "Queenstown has a history of tourism innovation and is demonstrating leadership in regenerative tourism," Melo said.

"It also faces many of the same challenges that successful tourism destinations around the world are trying to address. That makes it an important place to explore how artificial intelligence can support the next chapter of tourism," Melo said.

Wider market

The company's ambitions extend beyond the South Island destination. Smart Planner said its longer-term objective is to build a platform that could be used across New Zealand, Australia and other international markets.

That places the startup in a growing market for tourism technology that goes beyond bookings and marketing into destination management and data analysis. Tourism bodies and local authorities have been looking for better ways to understand visitor flows, smooth seasonal peaks and spread spending more evenly across businesses and locations.

For destinations under strain, that kind of intelligence can have practical implications for infrastructure planning, transport management and environmental protection. For operators, it can offer a clearer view of changing demand and the interests of different visitor groups.

Melo framed the project as as much an information problem as a travel-planning one. "Technology alone will not solve every challenge facing tourism," Melo said.

"But the right technology can give travellers, businesses and destination leaders better information. Better information leads to better decisions," Melo said.