The number of visitors to the country’s main tourist website dropped dramatically last year with people instead using artificial intelligence for holiday research deemed the likely culprit.
A Fáilte Ireland analysis said by the end of November last year, traffic to its flagship DiscoverIreland.ie site was down by 21 percent to 1.6 million users.
However, the tourism promotion agency said it had not led to any obvious fall-off in other measures it used to track performance.
Instead, Fáilte Ireland suggested the decline could be linked to “zero-click” searches where people gathered information from AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Google’s Gemini.
It said: “Notwithstanding this, we see no impact on key performance indicators, suggesting the reduction may be [AI] users who are in the early stages of holiday research.”
The internal records explained how answers generated by artificial intelligence could cut click-through rates to websites by between 15 and 64 per cent.
A paper prepared for the board said Fáilte Ireland needed to look at how it could make sure its content surfaced when people used AI.
On the tourism agency’s own use of artificial intelligence, the paper said: “Enthusiasm is high and we continue to encourage ideas and experimentation to better understand the technology.
“However, it continues to be challenging to identify practical applications for Gen [generative] AI that deliver value for the organisation at scale.”
It said the use of artificial intelligence had transformed the way that people planned their holidays.
Travellers were able to “discover, compare and book” in a single conversation rather than doing the legwork themselves.
It said the tourism industry in Ireland needed to be “AI-ready” to make sure online content stayed discoverable when people were making plans.
The paper said: “As this technology evolves, tourism businesses will need to ensure their offerings are not just visible to human visitors, but also accessible to Gen AI agents that will increasingly act as digital gatekeepers.”
It warned that artificial intelligence could reinforce the dominance of big players like Booking.com, Expedia and Tripadvisor.
Fáilte Ireland said it was providing workshops, networking events and online courses so that Irish businesses could use AI.
Companies were being encouraged to use modern booking and property management systems that would work seamlessly with artificial intelligence.
The paper also detailed how Fáilte Ireland had used AI with its own staff, training people on how to use Microsoft’s Copilot.
However, not everybody was on board with using it day-to-day.
The document said: “For example, 16 of 33 respondents to our September survey on adoption barriers said that they never or almost never use Copilot Chat.
“Those who have put the time into learning reported Copilot as being indispensable, but for many, barriers to adoption seem high and the benefit vs effort trade-off is unclear.”
Fáilte Ireland also ran an experiment with a chatbot for a ‘Winter in Dublin’ campaign while a content audit for digital marketing that once took months was completed in a fortnight.
It explained: “An assessment completed in under 30 seconds per page [replaced] two hours of manual review and reduced a process that normally takes months to two weeks.”
There were hiccups as well when Fáilte Ireland looked to analyse large amounts of information.
It said: “Although the Gen AI has proven largely accurate in summarising and analysing the dataset, occasional misinterpretations underscore the importance of continuous validation.”
A separate presentation said plans for 2026 included making Fáilte Ireland content “AI-friendly” for use in chats.
It said businesses needed to ensure everything they published online could be read by machines and optimised to make sure it was easy to find.