Chris Torres, Tourism Marketing Agency, opens with a truth most tour operators feel but rarely state: your descriptions answer the wrong question. They explain what happens. They don’t explain what it means. On a Get Your Guide listing for an Edinburgh walking tour, the original description reads: “Meet your guide and begin your walking tour of Edinburgh. Explore both the old town and new town, stopping at museums and galleries to see city attractions and artifacts.” Nothing false. Nothing missing from a logistics standpoint. And yet nothing there that makes anyone want to go.
The problem is structural, not stylistic. Most tour pages are built around a feature list: duration, stops, what’s included. Customers read that list and feel nothing, because feeling something isn’t what feature lists do. A guest booking a food tour isn’t buying cuisine. They’re buying connection. A history tour guest isn’t buying dates and names. They’re buying understanding. Adventure guests buy a sense of achievement. Wildlife guests buy wonder. Walking tour guests buy discovery. Until the description reflects that, it’s doing roughly 40 percent of its job and leaving the other 60 percent on the table.
What follows is the framework Chris walked through, start to finish: the rewrite model, the brand profile that makes AI produce useful copy, and the search shift that changes what good writing is worth.
The Edinburgh Rewrite: A Before and After Worth Studying
The original Edinburgh description is not bad writing. It’s inert writing. It names Maggie Dickens, Deacon Brodie, Mary Queen of Scots. It mentions Greyfriars Graveyard, Dean Village, the Scottish Whisky Experience. All of it accurate, none of it doing any work on a reader who hasn’t already decided to book.
Chris’s rewrite opens differently:
“Every city has stories. Edinburgh seems determined to keep some of hers hidden. Behind the elegant Georgian streets and medieval alleyways lies a city built in ambition, betrayal, innovation, superstition, and survival.”
— Chris Torres, Tourism Marketing Agency
By the close, the promise has shifted from “you will visit museums” to “Edinburgh won’t simply be somewhere you visited. It will be a city you truly understand.”
The mechanics behind the shift are worth naming, because they apply to any tour you’re trying to rewrite. Attractions became stories. Features became meaning. Locations became curiosity. History became human drama. The whisky tasting stopped being an inclusion and became part of a narrative arc. None of the facts changed. What changed is what the facts are doing for the reader.
Then Chris revealed the rewrite was fully AI-generated. That’s the part that lands: the gap between the original and the rewrite isn’t a question of human versus machine. It’s a question of what the AI was told before it wrote a single word.
Why Most AI Output Sounds Like Nobody’s Business
Type “rewrite my tour description” into ChatGPT without any other context and you’ll get polished, generic copy. Fluent. Completely interchangeable with every other tour in your city. The AI isn’t being lazy. It’s working with what it has, which is nothing about you.
AI doesn’t know what makes your business different from the one two blocks over. It doesn’t know your guides, your founding story, your tone of voice, or what you’d never say. It doesn’t know what would disappear if a large OTA bought your company tomorrow. All of that is still your job to provide. Once you provide it, the AI stops producing generic copy and starts producing yours.
The analogy Chris uses is the one that makes this concrete: you wouldn’t hire a copywriter and immediately say “write my website.” You’d spend time explaining the business first. What you stand for. Who your customers are. What frustrates you about the industry. AI is the same. Treat it like a new employee on their first day and the output reflects that relationship.
Building the Living Brand Profile
The brand profile is a document you complete once and upload into a ChatGPT project (or an equivalent AI tool). After that, it functions as the standing brief behind every piece of content you ask the AI to write.
The profile covers six areas:
- Foundations: Why does the business exist? What change are you trying to create? What do you believe that competitors don’t?
- Your story: What inspired the business? What challenges are you solving? What keeps you motivated?
- Your customers: Who are they, what worries them, what transformation are they seeking, what memories are they hoping to create?
- Your personality: How would people describe your brand? Are you conversational, serious, irreverent? What would you never say?
- Your guides: Who are they, what do guests love about them, what local knowledge can’t be found online?
- Your tone of voice: Examples of how the brand sounds, and equally important, how it doesn’t.
One question in particular tends to surface the most useful material: “What would disappear if a large OTA bought your company tomorrow?” The answer to that question is precisely what should be leading your tour descriptions. Whatever would be lost is what makes you worth booking.
If the written questionnaire feels slow, Chris suggests an alternative that often produces better results: use ChatGPT’s voice conversation mode and let the AI ask you the questions in real time. Speaking naturally in a 20-minute conversation surfaces instincts and details that don’t always come through when you’re filling out a form.
The Fast Prompt and the Deep-Dive Option
Once the brand profile is loaded into a project, rewriting a tour description becomes a single prompt: paste or link the tour page, ask the AI to identify the likely emotional outcomes, the transformation, and what makes the experience different, then ask it to rewrite in a way that makes a potential customer want to keep reading. One prompt, after the setup work is done, produces a meaningfully better draft.
For tours where the existing page description is thin or doesn’t accurately reflect the experience, there’s a deeper version. Before asking AI to write, answer a second layer of questions about the tour itself: what surprises guests, what they tend to remember, what stories they tell afterward, what the wow moments are, what gets photographed. Feed that into the AI alongside the brand profile and it has enough raw material to write with real specificity rather than educated inference.
One formatting note that matters: the story-driven writing belongs in your description sections, not at the top of your listing. Duration, pick-up times, inclusions, and exclusions belong near the top in scannable format. Guests skim for logistics first. Once they’ve confirmed the tour fits their time and budget, the description is what closes them. That’s where the emotional writing earns its place.
The Brand Voice Document and the Audit
Once the profile is built, two additional outputs follow naturally.
First, ask the AI to generate a brand voice document from the profile: a description of how the brand sounds, what it values, and what it would and would never say. That document goes to your social media manager, your contractors, new guides, anyone creating content on behalf of the business. Everyone writing for the brand draws from the same source, which is the version of the brand you actually defined rather than whatever they infer on their own.
Second, use ChatGPT’s deep research mode to run an audit. Upload the brand profile, point the AI at your live website, and ask it to identify where the site reflects the brand’s stated values and where it falls short. The AI will compare what you said you are against what the site actually communicates, and flag the gaps. You may think everything aligns. You may be surprised by what doesn’t.
Search Changed. Writing That’s Human Is What Gets Recommended Now.
Story-driven copy has always ranked better in traditional search. That’s not a new finding. Human, specific, authoritative writing has consistently outperformed generic keyword-optimized content in Google results, even before AI-generated search came into the picture.
What’s changed is the direction of the advantage. Chris frames it this way:
“Google was a search platform. AI is a recommendation platform. To recommend you, you need to show that you are a trusted company, the one who can deliver that experience for the person searching for it.”
— Chris Torres, Tourism Marketing Agency
When a traveler asks an AI assistant for a food tour in your city, the AI is not scanning keyword density. It’s weighing authority and specificity. The businesses that show up are the ones that have written about their experience with enough human detail, enough genuine knowledge, enough specific story to be recognizable as the real thing rather than a listing that could belong to anyone.
The operators who write with authority and human specificity are the ones who get recommended. That’s what story-driven copy is actually for, and it’s why the brand profile investment pays in more than one direction.
One More Multiplier
Once the living brand profile is in place, a two to three-minute video becomes a content engine. Feed the video into AI alongside the brand profile and ask it to generate captions, blog sections, social posts, and email content. Because the brand context is already loaded, the repurposed assets carry the same voice as the original. The profile you built once keeps returning value across every format you produce from here.
The starting point is the same in every case: give the AI the information it needs to write as you, not as a generic tour operator. The setup takes a few hours. Everything after that is faster, more consistent, and more distinctly yours than what you’d get by prompting cold.
About Chris Torres
Chris Torres is the founder of Tourism Marketing Agency and the author of The Loving Brand, a guide to humanizing travel and tourism businesses. He works with tour operators and activity providers on marketing strategy, brand positioning, and content that reflects what makes an experience worth booking. To connect with Chris, search for Tourism Marketing Agency online.
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