Why Humans Still Create Our Tours (And AI Does Everything Else)

The Question That Won’t Go Away

I’ve been asked countless times: “Why don’t you just train a model to build tours? Aren’t you worried that AI will soon replace the Tourific app? Why would people pay for self-guided tours when AI can generate them?”

It’s a fair question in our AI-obsessed world. Every day, we see headlines about artificial intelligence revolutionizing industries, automating jobs, and seemingly making human expertise obsolete. So why haven’t we jumped on the bandwagon?

The simple answer: we tried. And it doesn’t work.

What Happens When AI Builds Tours

Like any tech-forward company, we couldn’t resist testing AI’s tour-generation capabilities. We fed it data, gave it prompts, trained it with our own best-selling tours as inputs, and waited for the magic. What we got instead was a lesson in why some things still require the human touch.

Issue #1: When AI Becomes a Confident Storyteller (Of Fiction)

The problems with AI-generated tours go far beyond simple inaccuracies. We encountered three fundamental issues that make AI unreliable for creating tours.

The biggest problem wasn’t just inaccuracy—it was confident fabrication. AI models tend to produce compelling stories that sound authoritative but are completely false. Don’t believe it? Here’s an example:

Then there’s geographic confusion. AI struggles with places that share the same name across different locations. Should it talk about Cambridge, UK, or Cambridge, MA, when discussing the city’s history? The Bridge of Sighs exists in Venice, Oxford, and Cambridge, but each has its own distinct history and significance. AI conflates facts, creating misleading narratives.

Perhaps most importantly, AI lacks the personal touch that makes tours memorable. It can’t recommend the family-run café that locals actually visit instead of a tourist trap with better SEO. It doesn’t know which viewpoint will capture the most breathtaking sunset. It can’t explain why a particular street corner holds personal significance, nor judge whether a museum entry fee is worth it for your specific interests. Tours require taste, preference, and lived experience—qualities AI simply cannot replicate.

Issue #2: The Visual Challenge

Tours aren’t just about words—they are deeply visual experiences. Obtaining accurate, location-specific images through AI proved nearly impossible. We encountered landmark mix-ups, such as different “Dancing Houses” across cities, missing context for important architectural details, and AI’s inability to capture specific viewing angles that enhance the experience.

The visual component of tour creation remains stubbornly resistant to AI automation. Even simple queries often result in links rather than usable images.

Issue #3: The Navigation Nightmare

Perhaps the most critical issue is that AI cannot provide the detailed, location-specific guidance essential for self-guided tours. Tours require precise positioning to see particular carvings or architectural details, as well as optimal viewing angles for photos and observation. In this aspect, AI fails completely.

The Verdict: Humans Still Win

Our conclusions after extensive testing are clear: humans decisively outperform AI in creating meaningful, engaging tours.

Will this change? Probably. In a few years, with more advanced AI and hundreds of tours in our training dataset, we might be able to develop a specialized model that actually works. But today’s reality is clear: authentic, engaging, and accurate tours require human expertise and experience.

Why We DO Use AI for Translation and Narration

While AI fails at creating tours, it excels at delivering them. Many argue that nuance is lost or that AI makes mistakes in pronouncing proper nouns and dates, but here’s why we consciously use AI for translation and narration.

The Scale Reality

Today, our platform hosts around 90 tours, each with about 15 stops and 3 minutes of audio per stop, available in 9 languages. That’s over 35,000 minutes of narrated content — and we expect to double that within a year. With regular updates on closures, the addition of new stops and content, and improvements driven by user feedback, we need to update thousands of minutes of audio every month.

The Economic Reality

Using traditional voice artists at this scale would be logistically impossible, especially when coordinating updates across 9 languages. Recording quality would be inconsistent due to different voices and recording conditions. Every small change would require new recording sessions, creating a true update nightmare.

AI, on the other hand, excels at providing consistent voice quality across all languages, instant updates when content changes, and cost-effective scaling. For these repetitive, scalable tasks, AI is the perfect tool.

The Future: Partnership, Not Replacement

The question isn’t whether AI will eventually create good tours — we believe authenticity cannot be algorithmic. Real travel experiences come from genuine human connections to places. The value of human-created tours goes far beyond simply conveying information. When someone personally researches every story and refines the experience based on real user feedback, users trust that content in a way they don’t with AI-generated material. Tours created by passionate locals or travel experts carry emotional weight that resonates with people seeking authentic experiences.

We’re not afraid of AI taking over — quite the opposite. We’re excited to use it to make authentic human experiences accessible to more people. We use AI to make our human-curated tours available to more people, in more languages, and more affordably than ever before.