Australian Traveller launches ‘world first’ AI-enhanced site
Australian Traveller – a new addition to the Solstice Media stable – is trumpeting its unique reader tool to curate the ideal holiday getaway.
Australian Traveller today unveiled what’s it’s dubbing a “world-first” reader experience, teaming its new website with a powerful AI-powered travel tool trained on the leading travel publisher’s extensive archive of premium content.
The tool – Ask AT – draws exclusively on AustralianTraveller.com content that includes more than 150 detailed destination guides, curated trip itineraries, outback experiences and road trip ideas, to give readers personalised holiday recommendations in seconds.
The large language model-powered tool can answer domestic travel questions, based on the 20 years of expert travel writing at Australian Traveller, an industry leading business recently acquired by InDaily’s publisher, Solstice Media.
The answers are local, vetted and 100 per cent focused on Australian travel. The tool also references articles for readers to verify the information in the answers.
Australian Traveller evergreen editor Rachael Thompson said the project was a “world first”.
“It’s an Australian-owned, human-powered AI that will help you plan your ultimate domestic holiday,” she said.
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“It’ll make the holiday planning process a lot easier for Australians. It draws exclusively from AustralianTraveller.com content that’s written by real travel journalists. That means the answers are local, they’re vetted and they’re 100 per cent focused on Aussie travel.
“We feel like we’re a step ahead of everyone at the moment with this. It’s very exciting for us.”
Australian Traveller readers can simply ‘Ask AT’ for domestic travel recommendations.
Unlike other LLMs trained using content from websites without permission or reimbursement, Australian Traveller has spent millions of dollars paying Australian writers for the content, Thompson said.
“We’re not taking whatever we want from the internet,” she said
“We’re an Australian company and we’re really invested in the community, so the more we spend on Ask AT and pay writers, the better Ask AT will get.”
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Thompson also made a commitment that the company would not use AI to write the site content.
“Our content is always going to come from real travel journalists that really know Australia,” she said.
“We would never use AI to produce any of our content as that goes completely against what we believe in as a media company.”
The Ask AT launch comes as Australian Traveller reveals its new website, which has been a “long time coming”, according to Australian Traveller head of content Katie Carlin.
“We completely reimagined the user experience,” she said.
“As a company, we exist to help connect Australians to their next incredible experience and our search functionality has never been great. We have so much content – 20 years of content – on there that we were constantly refreshing and updating, but it’s never been easy for readers to find all that content.
“So that’s where the reimagining of the user experience really came into play. Not only will they be able to find that content so much easier, but now the look and feel of the site is completely different.”
Video content is a cornerstone element of the new user experience too, Carlin said.
“We’ve been building out our video content for the last six months and so we’ve painstakingly been updating over 150 videos on the new site,” she said.
“Not only do readers get to read the content, not only do they get to find out about it using our new AI planning tool, but they get to watch the content as well.
“It’s definitely a new era for the brand.”
