How AI Search Is Changing the Way Guests Buy Theme Park Tickets

AI still feels like the Wild West (yee-haw) in digital marketing strategy, but there are a few things you can do as an operator to make sure your wagon doesn't get left behind.

HubSpot just released its State of Marketing 2026 report with one finding sticking out to me for anyone who sells tickets or hotel rooms.

58% of marketers say traffic from AI tools like ChatGPT has much higher intent to buy than traditional search.

Ok, yeah, that makes sense, I guess.

A mom in Ohio asks her LLM (Large Language Model) of choice for the best water park near Orlando for a 6-year-old.

Let's say your park shows up in the list with plenty of information to decide which one to pick. So she clicks through, ready to pick a date and pay.

Instead, she hits a homepage built for browsing, hunts for the ticket link, gets a date picker that hides prices, and sees fees on the last screen.

She might just choose to close the tab and hit up the playground instead.

But all hope is not lost! As you plan for 2027, here are a few things you can do to ease the transition into the new AI frontier.

Ask the AI what your guests ask

Type "best things to do in [city] with kids" and "is [your park] worth it?" into a few AI bots (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity).

See if you even show up. Check if your prices and hours are right. Look at where the link sends people: your site or a reseller.

AI can only repeat what it can find.

If your prices live in a PDF, there's a good chance it skips right past them and grabs a blog post from two summers ago. Now a guest is planning around old prices and hours.

The fix is pretty simple (for now!). Build an FAQ page that answers the questions guests actually ask, in plain sentences.

What does a ticket cost? What time do you open? Are you a great option for families? (serious about the last one: if you're not going to say it, who will?)

Then keep your Google and TripAdvisor listings current. AI pulls from those too, and they're usually the first thing to go stale given they are not your direct site.

Make pages worth linking to

Right now, when AI recommends your park/attraction/hotel, it often sends people to your homepage. That page is usually built for browsing, not for buying.

Perhaps we give every product its own page. Day tickets, season passes, birthday parties, cabanas. Each one gets a clean URL, the price, what's included, and a buy button at the top.

Now when someone asks ChatGPT about birthday parties at your park, it can send them to the birthday party page instead of making them dig for it.

Easier the flow, better the conversion.

To be fair, nobody has great attraction-specific data on AI referrals yet, but since we're already lagging in our understanding of chatbots, you don't want that gap to widen.