Tourism businesses in Australia and Canada: how to use AI more sustainably

At a recent Tourism Tribe workshop, one of the participants asked if it was possible to use AI more sustainability – and if programs like the Sustainable Tourism accreditation program or GreenStep might eventually downgrade businesses based on their AI use?

It’s a great question. The truth is, no tourism accreditation program is yet measuring your AI use. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be paying attention. Sustainable operators aren’t just ticking boxes to keep a badge – they’re making conscious choices to reduce their impact while delivering unforgettable visitor experiences. And with AI now part of the day-to-day toolkit for many businesses, it’s time to consider its role in your sustainability journey.

Accreditation landscape

The Sustainable Tourism accreditation program in Australia as well as several destination sustainability certifications available in Canada are well-established programs that help tourism businesses benchmark and improve their sustainability practices.

• Sustainable Tourism accreditation program (Australia) focuses on areas like reducing energy and water use, waste management, and protecting natural and cultural assets. It’s an extension of the Quality Tourism Framework and helps operators align with best practice in sustainability.
• GreenStep Sustainable Tourism certification (Canada) provides a detailed assessment across energy, water, waste, community impact, and climate action. Businesses get a Sustainability Score and a roadmap for improvement.
• Check out other sustainability certification program options in Canada

Neither currently includes AI in their assessment, but as AI becomes a major part of how businesses operate, it’s only natural to expect more conversation around digital sustainability. The smart move is to get ahead – adopting sustainable AI habits now, not because you have to, but because you want to.

AI is here to stay – let’s use it wisely

We’re strong believers that AI is the way of the future. From helping visitors plan itineraries, to generating marketing content, to automating repetitive admin, AI is becoming essential for tourism businesses in Australia and Canada to stay visible and competitive.

But AI isn’t free of environmental cost. Training and running large models consumes significant amounts of electricity and water (for cooling). While the tech companies work to make their models and data centres greener, we can all take conscious steps to reduce waste in how we use these tools every day.

Practical tips for tourism businesses to use AI more sustainably

Here’s the part that really matters – what you can do now in your tourism business.

1. Reduce unnecessary use

• Be intentional: Don’t ask AI for things you don’t need. If a quick search or your own knowledge will do, skip the prompt.
• Batch tasks: Instead of running 10 small queries, structure your prompt to cover everything in one go.

2. Write efficient prompts

• Be clear and specific: Vague prompts lead to retries, which wastes compute.
• Reuse prompts: Keep templates for social media, itinerary building, or email writing so you’re not reinventing the wheel each time.

Now here’s the catch – when you first start using AI, you’re not efficient with your queries – you need to ask a lot of questions to get quality useable content, and that’s OK! Don’t feel guilty if you’re just starting out and you need 20 prompts to get a good social media post. That learning process, of asking a lot of questions and challenging AI to improve the output, is necessary for you to one day get proficient in crafting great prompts to get that excellent output using less. It just about being intentional about learning this efficiency.

3. Choose lighter, more efficient AI models

Not all AI models are created equal. You don’t need the “Ferrari” every time you drive to the corner shop. Did you know there are lighter AI models and even downloadable models that can be run on your PC?

• Cloud-based lighter models
  • Microsoft’s Azure offers GPT-4o mini is optimised for speed and efficiency, perfect for lightweight marketing tasks.
  • The new GPT-4.1 mini and nano models – released April 2025 – are cheaper and faster, and available free in the standard ChatGPT app, great for operators testing AI without extra cost.
  • GitHub’s public preview of GPT-5 mini in Copilot offers a speed-focused, resource-light coding model with model-picker access across GitHub.com, VS Code and mobile.
• Local open-weight models
  OpenAI recently released models like gpt-oss-20b and 120b that can run on a standard PC with 16GB RAM. Running models locally means you’re not hitting massive cloud servers for every query.
  • Energy impact: Running on your own hardware uses a fraction of the energy of querying a 1.8-trillion-parameter model like GPT-5, which requires industrial-scale data centres powered and cooled 24/7.
  • Water impact: Large data centres consume millions of litres of water per day for cooling. Local inference avoids this entirely.
  • Availability: These open-weight models are free to download and already available globally, including in Canada and Australia.
  • Practical step today: A small tourism operator with a mid-range laptop could install one of these models (via Hugging Face or similar), and handle tasks like rewriting emails, drafting blog outlines, or summarising reviews—without touching the cloud.

This isn’t the right solution for every task – you still need the big models for complex or high-accuracy work – but it’s a concrete example of how to cut the footprint of everyday AI use.

4. Reduce data clutter

• Don’t oversave: Keep only the AI outputs you’ll actually use. Cloud storage has an energy footprint too.
• Archive and delete: Schedule regular clean-ups of drafts, reports, and test files.

5. Support greener AI providers

• Check their pledges: Microsoft, Google, and Meta have committed to running their AI data centres entirely on renewables. (read the admittedly American-focused Forbes article for more information). Meta recently signed 791 MW of new solar and wind deals, while Nvidia and Schneider are working on data-centre cooling that uses 20% less energy.
• Ask the question: As a paying customer, you can influence AI providers by choosing the greener option.

Some interesting articles about green energy and AI

6. Apply AI to your sustainability efforts

• Use AI to cut paper and manual admin.
• Optimise itineraries to reduce visitor travel emissions.
• Analyse your own utility bills to find energy savings.

7. Human responsibility

• Educate your team: Teach staff how to prompt efficiently and avoid waste.
• Balance automation: Use AI where it makes sense, but don’t flood channels with content no one reads.

Looking ahead

Tourism businesses in Australia and Canada don’t need to wait for accreditation programs to tell them to use AI more sustainably. The choice to adopt efficient, conscious AI practices now puts you ahead of the curve, reduces costs, and aligns with the values that your visitors increasingly care about.

AI is the future of the visitor economy. Using it sustainably is simply good business.

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