We Tested an AI Tour Leader in Taiwan. Here's What It Could and Couldn't Do.
This is part twenty of our Putting AI to Work in Your Tour Business series. Watch the full series here and read part one here.
We were standing in a covered market in Taipei with one earbud each, and our tour leader was narrating the dried-fish stall in front of us. Which locals buy there, why the woman running the stand probably inherited it, etc. Our tour leader was Claude.
If you build tours, activities, or experiences for a living, you should know what that feels like from the guest’s side. Because for twelve days in Taiwan, Claude was more than our planning assistant. It was our on-demand tour leader and our concierge, and we tested it hard enough to tell you exactly where it earns its keep and where it still falls short.
What We Tested
We ran two real tests. A market walk through a Taipei night market, and a half-day bike ride through the rice fields outside Chishang, in Taiwan’s East Rift Valley. Same setup both times: earbuds in, phone in a pocket, and we asked Claude about whatever we passed: A temple, a dragon carving, a dish we didn’t recognize. With Taiwan’s strong mobile coverage, we could lean on it constantly and see what held up.
How We Planned This Trip with Our AI Brain
Out of the Box, It Was a Mediocre Guide
Here’s the part that surprised us. Claude and ChatGPT, straight out of the box, are not good tour guides. If you’ve tried asking either one to play tour leader, you’ve probably had the same experience we did. Long, encyclopedia-style answers, dry delivery, sometimes too short and sometimes way too long.
So we trained it. We built a project called Tour Guide Claude and loaded it with our own Guest Focus material, the same coaching content we teach our members. We told it to tell stories instead of listing facts. To engage the senses. To nudge us toward real interaction, like a phrase to try with a vendor or a small task to complete.
“The exact training that turned AI into a fabulous guide is the same training that turns one of your new hires into a fabulous real-world guide.”
The knowledge was never the hard part; delivery and execution were. That’s true whether you’re training an AI or onboarding a new hire, and it’s worth sitting with if you’ve been putting off building a real training process for your team.
Four Things It Could Not Do
Even after training, four gaps showed up every time, and none of them closed no matter how good the narration got.
Reading the room was the first miss. It never noticed when Sarah’s energy dropped and we needed food instead of another story, the kind of thing a good guide senses before anyone says a word.
Relationships were the second, and probably the deeper one. Claude could describe the market, but it could not walk us behind the counter because it went to school with the owner’s son. Some of the best moments on any tour come from a person unlocking a door, literal or otherwise, and an AI has no doors to unlock.
Feeling hosted didn’t come through either. Nobody was proud to show us their city through that earbud, and any warmth in the delivery came across as manufactured. That human-to-human charge isn’t something a voice model fakes convincingly yet.
The last one showed up by contrast. On a traditional food tour through a Taipei street market, we got something Claude never gave us: a host who introduced us to fellow travelers as we sampled our way through, including a German backpacker who mentioned he’d ridden a scooter through the Taroko Gorge despite the timed closures left over from an earthquake.
“That conversation with a fellow guest ended up shaping some of the highlights of our entire trip.”
Every online source we’d checked, including our own AI trip planner, had told us the gorge wasn’t worth the hassle. One conversation on a food tour changed our itinerary and gave us one of the best days of the whole trip. No AI earbud makes that kind of thing happen.
The SPAM Framework: What AI Cannot Touch
If the core of your tour is information, stories, or facts an AI voice agent can already deliver in your customer’s ear, that’s a real exposure point. We teach our coaching members a framework called SPAM: special people, special access, special moments.
Double down on what an AI assistant cannot deliver: relationships, access nobody else can get, feeling hosted and cared for, and a shared experience with other travelers, the kind where a group goes through something together. If any of that is missing from how your tour is designed, that’s the work in front of you now.
Purpose-Built Apps Still Beat One AI Doing Everything
Claude was not the only tool in our pocket. AllTrails handled trail data offline. Google Translate read menus instantly. Google Maps handled walking and biking directions in cities we’d never seen. Local apps got us bike-share rentals and train tickets. Each of those apps does one job extremely well, and none of them have been replaced by a general AI assistant. Claude was the brain that tied the specialists together, recommending which app to grab and when, not a replacement for any of them.
Hallucinations Still Happen, Less Often Than Before
AI still gets things wrong with full confidence sometimes, less often than a year ago, but it still happens. Whenever we could, we checked our plans against actual people: hotel staff, shopkeepers, train staff, fellow travelers. That habit protects you from bad information and it’s also a better way to travel than staying heads-down in your phone the whole trip.
Three Things to Try with Your Own Tours
First, go on your own tour with an AI tour leader in your ear. Train it with custom instructions, pull transcripts from your own YouTube content if you have any, and score it honestly against your best human guides.
Second, notice exactly where it fails. Those gaps tell you where your moat sits, and where your tour design might need to change as guests start showing up with their own AI assistants running in the background.
Third, if this raised an uncomfortable question about where your tours are exposed, that’s a conversation worth having with a coach. You can book a free strategy call and we’ll help you work through it.
Life is too short for forgettable, phone-it-in mass tourism. Build the parts of your tour that no earbud can replicate, and the rest of this shift works in your favor instead of against you.



