World Tourism Day is on 27 September. For 2026, UN Tourism chose the digital agenda and artificial intelligence in tourism as its theme, with El Salvador as host country.
The talk is of automated bookings, virtual guides, itineraries built by algorithms. It is the tourism of people who still travel, becoming more digital.
For some people digital is not a trend. It is the only way of travelling they have left.
Those who cannot go
A bedbound person, someone who has been in hospital for weeks, a care-home resident who can no longer manage a car journey. For them, tourism is over, not for lack of wanting, but because the body stopped keeping up.
For these people a virtual reality session can take them somewhere for twenty minutes. It is not the same as going. We will never say it is.
The most requested destination
When the palliative care service in Leiria, Portugal, started using the system, the television channel SIC went to see it and reported the most requested place. It was Fátima, the Catholic shrine.
Not a tropical beach, not Paris, not a snowy mountain. A place half an hour from Leiria that many of those people had already visited dozens of times.
What this says about travelling
Brochure tourism sells the new: the place you have never been. At the end of life, the wish usually runs the other way. People ask to go back: to the church where they married, the beach of their childhood summers, the shrine where a promise was made.
That is why, in a clinical setting, a scenario is not chosen for being beautiful. It is chosen for meaning something to that person, and it is the team, with them, who finds out what that is.
A theme for next year
If tourism wants to be more digital, it could also be more accessible: thinking of people who no longer leave the house, or their bed, as part of its public. Not as charity: as travellers whose way of going has changed.