AI's New Frontier: What Healthcare Can Learn from the Travel Industry

NEW YORK, NY – December 10, 2025 – In the relentless pursuit of innovation, healthcare leaders often look inward, focusing on clinical trials, medical devices, and internal process optimization. Yet, some of the most transformative lessons in patient engagement may be emerging from an entirely unexpected sector: the travel industry. While selling a vacation and managing a patient’s health seem worlds apart, the underlying challenge is the same: understanding, predicting, and influencing individual human behavior in a complex digital landscape. A new report from the tourism sector offers a compelling playbook that healthcare administrators would be wise to study.

Decoding the Digital Individual: A New Playbook Emerges

This month, Trove Tourism Development Advisors and Adara, a RateGain company, released a guide titled “The US Outbound Market in 2026.” The report dissects a fundamental shift in consumer behavior, noting that American travelers are now planning earlier, staying longer, spending more, and discovering destinations through entirely new digital channels. It serves as a wake-up call for Destination Marketing Organizations (DMOs) still relying on what the authors call “tactics built for a pre-digital world,” which result in wasted budgets and poor return on investment.

The solution proposed is a radical shift toward data intelligence. By leveraging Adara’s vast repository of real-time, anonymized travel data—gleaned from over 270 global partners like airlines and hotels—the playbook provides a roadmap for precision targeting. It advises DMOs to abandon generic campaigns in favor of performance-driven partnerships, sentiment-aware storytelling, and measurable digital strategies. The core message is a principle that should resonate deeply within healthcare: “This isn't about doing more — it's about doing the right things, in the right order, and proving that they worked.” This focus on demonstrable ROI is precisely where many patient engagement initiatives falter.

From Traveler Journeys to Patient Pathways

The parallels for healthcare are striking. The journey of a modern patient—from noticing a symptom and searching online, to evaluating providers and scheduling care—mirrors the traveler’s path from inspiration to booking. The Trove/Adara playbook highlights that travelers are now heavily influenced by “video-first discovery.” This insight is directly applicable to healthcare. Patients are no longer passive recipients of information; they are active researchers on platforms like YouTube and TikTok, seeking authentic, relatable content about their conditions and potential treatments. A health system that continues to rely solely on static website pages and traditional advertising is missing the primary channels where patient perceptions are now being shaped.

Furthermore, the report advocates for “sentiment-aware storytelling.” In travel, this means understanding the emotional drivers behind a desire for a relaxing beach trip versus an adventurous mountain climb. In healthcare, it means moving beyond clinical descriptions of a procedure to address the underlying patient emotions: fear, hope, and the desire for a return to normalcy. AI-powered sentiment analysis tools, similar to those used by Trove, can analyze online conversations and patient reviews to uncover these emotional drivers, allowing providers to create marketing and educational materials that build trust and resonate on a human level. By mapping these complex patient pathways with the same rigor that Adara maps traveler intent, health systems can move from reactive treatment to proactive, empathetic engagement.

The Attribution Challenge: Proving Impact Beyond the Appointment

One of the most persistent challenges in both destination marketing and healthcare administration is attribution. A DMO struggles to prove that its digital ad campaign directly led to a specific tourist booking a hotel and spending money at local restaurants. Similarly, a hospital struggles to prove that its digital wellness campaign directly resulted in fewer ER visits or better chronic disease management within a target population. Both are plagued by the difficulty of connecting marketing spend to real-world outcomes.

Here, the travel industry’s advancements offer a tangible model. Adara's platform, for instance, works to close this loop by correlating visitor spending data with digital advertising efforts, giving DMOs unprecedented visibility into the effectiveness of their campaigns. Imagine a parallel system in healthcare. A health system could launch a targeted digital campaign encouraging diabetic patients to use a continuous glucose monitor. By integrating data from pharmacy benefit managers, EHRs, and patient-reported outcomes, an AI-powered analytics platform could correlate exposure to that campaign with tangible health metrics—such as improved A1c levels, higher medication adherence, or a reduction in hypoglycemic events. This would transform the ROI conversation from measuring clicks and impressions to quantifying improved health outcomes and cost savings, finally proving the value of patient engagement initiatives.

Precision Targeting for Population Health

The playbook’s guidance to focus on high-value traveler segments—such as luxury, wellness, and long-stay visitors—provides a powerful framework for population health management. The goal for DMOs is not just to increase visitor numbers, but to attract the right visitors who contribute most to the local economy sustainably. For health systems, the goal should not be to simply fill beds, but to engage the right patient populations to improve community health and prevent costly acute events.

Using the same AI-driven segmentation techniques, healthcare providers can move beyond generic public health announcements. They can identify and target specific, high-risk cohorts with personalized interventions. For example, instead of a mass email about heart health, a system could deliver a tailored video message about a new, minimally invasive cardiac procedure directly to individuals whose data profile suggests they are potential candidates. The report’s specific mention of the growing “wellness” travel segment underscores a broader consumer trend toward proactive health management. By applying these sophisticated marketing and data analysis techniques, healthcare organizations can finally meet patients where they are, transforming from institutions that treat sickness into partners that actively support a person’s lifelong journey toward wellness.