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For years, experts have talked about AI disrupting the travel space. Just not like this.
An Australian travel operator has landed in hot water after an AI-generated article sent tourists to an out-of-the-way location in Tasmania looking for non-existent hot springs.
On the Tasmania Tours website, a since-deleted article urged travellers to explore the “peaceful escape” of Weldborough Hot Springs, one of ‘7 Best Hot Springs Tasmania Experiences for 2026’, according to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).
Weldborough, however, has never had hot springs, and anyone looking for a refreshing dip might be alarmed to find a cold plunge in the Weld River to be their only option.
Travellers get lost on the way to non-existent sites
The article was posted in July last year. Since then, the remote locale – a former tin mining village in the country’s northeast, about 45 kilometres away from game-fishing hub St Helens – has seen a steady stream of duped travellers.
“I actually had a group of 24 drivers turn up there two days ago that were on a trip from the mainland, and they’d actually taken a detour to come to the hot springs,” Kristy Probert, owner of a nearby pub, tells ABC.
“I said, ‘If you find the hot springs, come back and let me know and I’ll shout you beers all night’. They didn’t come back.”
In its ‘best experiences’ article, the (non-existent) Weldborough Hot Springs is listed alongside the (real) Hastings Caves and Thermal Springs in southern Tasmania.
But the article also has odd inclusions, such as Liaweenee – described as ‘the coldest place in Australia’, where temperatures have reached a record low of -14.2°C.
How AI is helping tour companies make content
Tasmania Tours had published several articles and blog posts on must-see destinations that appeared to have been written by AI, complete with AI-generated images. That it resorted to AI for content marketing likely comes as no surprise to travel professionals.
Everyone from Google to Expedia has extolled the power of AI for trip-planning, as enthusiasm for the technology has reached full-throated support in boardrooms.
For smaller, boutique operations like Tasmania Tours, AI’s unstoppable rise has pressured many to adopt the same tools to keep up.
“We’re trying to compete with the big boys, and part of that is you’ve got to keep your content refreshed and new all of the time,” owner Scott Hennessy says.
He explains that Tasmania Tours had outsourced its marketing to a third party that used AI. He adds that the company normally reviews all posts before publication, but that some were made public ‘by mistake’ while he was out of the country.
“Our AI has messed up completely,” he says.
This isn’t the first time AI has misled travellers
Last year, the BBC reported that travellers are routinely getting duped by AI.
In one case, two tourists in Peru set off to find the “Sacred Canyon of Humantay” in the Andes Mountains – before a local tour guide overheard them and stopped them from continuing. They had reportedly paid about €140 to reach a remote rural road “without a guide or [a destination],” the guide told the BBC.
In another, two travellers used ChatGPT to plan a romantic sunset hike up a mountain in Japan. After they reached the top, they realised the AI tool had given them incorrect operating hours for the ropeway to get down and they were stuck in the dark.
This problem could get worse before it gets better.
A Booking.com survey revealed that 89 per cent of consumers want to use AI in future travel planning. Already, according to the survey, AI assistants are considered a more trusted source than travel bloggers or social media influencers.
With AI becoming more prevalent, it’s possible that travel misinformation will continue to spread, leaving disappointed travellers to discover errors like Weldborough Hot Springs only after they arrive.