AI travel buddy for Visit Flanders

Making sense of a region packed with experiences

Flanders has it all: world-class art, rich history, vibrant cities, nature, food, and culture. But with so much to see and do, visitors often face the same question before their trip even starts: where do you begin?

Planning a journey can quickly become overwhelming. Balancing interests, seasons, weather, languages, and practical details takes time and effort, sometimes more than travellers would like to spend. Visit Flanders wanted to remove that friction and help visitors experience the very best of the region, effortlessly.

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AI as a smart travel companion

Together with Visit Flanders, Raccoons built an AI-powered travel guide that acts as a personal travel buddy. With just a few clicks, visitors receive tailor-made suggestions for activities, places, and sights that match their interests perfectly.

The guide delivers the right local content at the right moment, in the right language, and aligned with what each visitor cares about most. The result: a smoother, more inspiring way to discover Flanders without the planning headache.

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Behind the scenes: smart AI, thoughtfully applied

Before the travel guide ever went live, a robust AI-driven process was put in place behind the scenes:

• Visit Flanders curated a preselected list of relevant web pages, covering activities and attractions across the region.
• An AI model (GPT-4o) automatically generated structured content for each page, including titles, short descriptions in six languages, and relevant tags such as food, culture, art, sports, and nature.
• Practical details like location, accessibility, ticketing, and event type were captured and structured.

All this information was stored in a central database that powers the guide.

Importantly, once visitors start using the guide, no live AI processing takes place. Everything is preprocessed, by design.

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Faster results, clearer explanations, stronger privacy

This architecture brings several key benefits:

• Speed: recommendations load instantly from the database, creating a smooth user experience.
• Consistency: results are explainable and uniform across users.
• Privacy: no user preferences are sent to external LLM providers, minimising data exposure and risk.

AI does the heavy lifting in the background, while visitors simply enjoy the outcome.

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A proven formula for discovery

The results speak for themselves. Within just a few months, the travel guide has already been used more than 10,000 times by visitors from Belgium and across Europe, including Italy, Germany, France, the Netherlands, the UK, and Spain.

By using AI in a focused and thoughtful way, Visit Flanders elevated the relevance and quality of its digital experience, without making AI the centre of attention.

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