For years, personalization on tourism websites has worked like this: Someone looks at a hiking page. We decide they’re an outdoor traveler. From there, they get trails, cabins, camping and more outdoor content.
Makes sense.
Until the same person wants a spa reservation, a great steak and a king-size bed waiting for them after ten miles on the trail. People are complicated. Their travel decisions are even more complicated.
Yet a lot of personalization technology still asks marketers to sort people into a handful of neat categories and hope they stay there. Meanwhile, the rest of the internet has moved on.
TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and Reddit have trained people to expect digital experiences shaped around what they care about right now. These platforms learn from hundreds of small signals, then keep adjusting as those signals change.
A community website can learn from the same idea.
And we think the next chapter of personalization starts there.
From Personas to Interests
Traditional personalization usually begins with a set of personas, pillars or audience buckets.
“The Family Trailblazer.”
“The Wilderness Wayfarer.”
“The Luxury Explorer.”
Pick your preferred naming convention.
This approach gave marketers a manageable way to personalize websites. Set a browser cookie, assign someone to a category and begin swapping banner images, headlines or featured listings based on their presumed preferences. And it worked.
Showing a family laughing on a beach to someone researching family vacations can increase engagement. The problem comes when one preference starts speaking for the whole person.
Someone can love hiking and luxury hotels. They can plan a museum visit in the morning and spend the afternoon at a baseball game. They can travel with their kids in June and return for a couples weekend in October.
People rarely experience communities through one interest at a time.
Our websites shouldn’t expect them to.
The Interest-Based Economy
Social platforms figured this out years ago.
Their algorithms don’t need to decide what type of person you are and leave you there. They pay attention to what you’re interested in, how strongly you’re interested and how those signals change.
Think of it less like putting someone into a filing cabinet and more like adjusting the volume on a mixing board.
Outdoors might be turned up.
Food sits somewhere in the middle.
Luxury starts low, then gets louder after someone spends fifteen minutes comparing resorts.
Family travel was important three months ago, but the signal has faded.
The result is a profile made from overlapping interests rather than one permanent identity. For tourism marketers, this creates a much more useful question. Instead of asking, “Which persona is this visitor?” We can ask, “What does this person seem to care about right now, and how can our website help?”
That small change opens up a very different digital experience.
Turn Your Website Into An Active Listener
Historically, visitor guides and newsletter signups have given tourism marketers some of their best audience information. Someone fills out a form and tells us they’re interested in family travel, luxury escapes, meetings or weddings. Great. They raised their hand.
But most website visitors never do.
They still tell us things. They read an article. Browse an event. Compare hotels. Spend twelve seconds on one page and four minutes on another. Each action is a small signal.
At KHM, we’ve been exploring an interest-based personalization system built around this idea. It uses non-personally identifiable browsing behavior to understand interests, then adapts parts of the website around them.
Underneath, there’s some fairly sophisticated technology.
For the visitor, the experience should feel remarkably simple: The more I explore, the more useful this website becomes.
Technology that Learns and Adapts
A system like this falls apart pretty quickly if a marketing team has to manually classify every article, attraction, hotel, event and listing. So we let natural language processing help.
The system reads site content and maps relationships between different topics using vectorization.
“Vectorization” sounds like something requiring a whiteboard and several cups of coffee, but basic idea is much simpler.
Imagine every piece of content on your website living on a giant map.
A scenic drive might sit close to sightseeing. It might also sit fairly close to family activities and adventure. A chef-driven restaurant could live near dining, luxury and nightlife.
Instead of forcing each page into one folder, the system measures how closely the content relates to many interests at once.
A scenic-drive article, for example, could score:
85% sightseeing
60% family friendly
40% adventure
The taxonomy starts managing itself, and the connections between content become much richer than a set of manually assigned tags.
Interests Have a Shelf Life
There’s another problem personalization systems have historically struggled with: memory.
More specifically, remembering too much for too long. Research one golf course and suddenly the internet decides golf is your entire personality. Our approach uses time-weighted data decay to prevent this.
Think of interests like footprints after a snowfall. The newest ones are easy to see. Older ones gradually fade.
If someone spends a week researching golf and then begins exploring family attractions, their profile changes with them. Golf doesn’t disappear immediately, but it carries less weight as newer behavior gives the system better information.
Personalization becomes responsive rather than permanent. Because people change their minds. They plan different trips. Sometimes they were researching the golf course for their father-in-law, and that context matters.
Personalization That Supports Search
For tourism marketers, a smarter website doesn’t mean much if Google or AI engines can’t understand it. So the architecture matters.
Search engine crawlers need access to the site’s full default content. Human visitors can receive personalized elements immediately after the initial page load. In development terms, this uses delayed hydration.
In more simple terms: Google sees the full page it needs to understand context. Your visitor gets the version that’s most useful to them. This approach protects on-page SEO while allowing personalized copy, visuals and featured listings to appear for real visitors.
It also means marketers don’t need to maintain five completely different versions of the same page. Editors can manage a strong default experience and add variations to specific content blocks where personalization can make a meaningful difference.
Give People a Say
Passive behavior can tell us plenty. People should still have control over what the website learns.
A “Personalize Your Visit” experience could let someone tell the site exactly what they want, like “I love sports and museums.”
The system can connect that statement with relevant interests and begin adapting the experience immediately. Visitors could also see the interests associated with their session and clear them whenever they want. That matters.
Useful personalization should feel like good hospitality. You notice what someone needs, remember enough to be helpful and respect their space.
Nobody enjoys a hotel concierge who follows them around the lobby taking notes.
The same principle applies online.
Paid Media Tells Us Why Someone Showed Up
Paid media makes this even more interesting.
When someone clicks an ad for a downtown hotel deal, they’ve already given us an important signal before reaching the website. The ad told us why they walked through the door.
By connecting interest signals with standard UTM parameters, the website can carry that context into the landing experience.
Someone arriving from an arts campaign could see relevant events or artists. Someone coming from a hotel-deal campaign could receive content better suited to planning an overnight stay.
And because personalized content can fire measurable events through Google Tag Manager, the media team can learn from what happens next.
The website stops being the place where campaign context disappears.
It becomes part of the conversation.
Community Partners
For DMOs, personalization can create value well beyond website engagement. Consider partner visibility. A traveler showing strong interest in local food could see a relevant restaurant offer higher on the page. Someone exploring arts content might encounter a partner experience aligned with what they’ve already shown interest in.
That’s a much stronger proposition than selling every partner the same placement and hoping the right visitor notices.
The same interest profile can eventually connect with email marketing.
If someone chooses to subscribe, the interests they’ve already shown can help shape what arrives in their inbox. A person spending their time with food and arts content doesn’t need the same newsletter as someone planning a family weekend around sports.
More relevance for the traveler.
More meaningful opportunities for community partners.
And a marketing ecosystem where the pieces actually learn from one another.
Privacy As Part of the Architecture
None of this works without trust.
The system we’ve outlined relies on non-personally identifiable behavioral signals, with consent controls built around applicable privacy requirements.
In regions requiring stricter consent, personalization can remain off until someone opts in. Elsewhere, visitors can still have clear ways to adjust, opt out or erase stored session preferences.
The exact implementation requires careful review against applicable privacy requirements and consent policies.
The principle is: personalization should earn its place by being useful.
People should understand what’s happening and have control over their experience.
A Website That Pays Attention
For years, marketers have tried to predict people’s actions before they make a move.
We built personas. Segmented audiences. Created content paths. Asked people to identify themselves through forms. Those tools still have a vital place.
But we can also listen to what people tell us through the choices they’re already making.
Someone came looking for a trail and found a restaurant.
They arrived for a concert and started comparing hotels.
They searched for something to do with their kids and discovered a neighborhood they hadn’t considered.
Those little turns are where travel gets interesting.
Technology can help community websites notice them. Done well, interest-based personalization makes a website feel less like a directory someone has to navigate and more like a local who starts to understand what you’re looking for.
And when technology can do that while respecting privacy, protecting search performance and giving marketers more useful signals?
We think that’s a direction worth exploring.
