How we use AI

01 Why we publish this

Emerging Travel covers aviation, hospitality and destinations in emerging and underreported markets for the travel trade. Our readers make commercial decisions on what we publish: where to route, where to invest, which markets to sell. That judgement has to come from people who know those markets.

AI tools now sit inside most newsrooms. Readers, advertisers and partners are entitled to know where those tools sit in ours, where they do not, and who is accountable for what appears under the Emerging Travel name. This policy sets that out, and sets the terms on which others may use our content in AI systems.

It applies to emergingtravel.news, our newsletters and social channels, the Agri-tourism section, sponsored and partner content, events, and everyone who writes or works for us: staff, freelancers and contributors.

02 Our principles

A named person is accountable for everything we publish. Every article carries a human byline or an identified editorial team, and an editor signs it off. Nobody at Emerging Travel can blame a tool when something goes wrong.

AI assists; it does not report. Reporting means talking to airlines, hoteliers, tourism boards and officials, reading the documents, visiting the places and understanding the market behind the numbers. No tool does that for us.

We do not pass off synthetic content as real. If AI has generated something a reader could mistake for reporting, a photograph of a real place or a real quote, we label it or we do not run it.

03 Where we do use AI

We use AI tools in limited, supervised ways:

• Translation. Our markets publish in Arabic, Persian, Russian, Portuguese, French and many other languages. Machine translation gives journalists a first pass at ministry statements, airline and hotel announcements, statistics releases and local press. The reporting journalist reads it in context and checks it against the original wherever we have a reader for that language. Where we cannot verify exact wording, we report the substance rather than quote.
• Transcription. Interviews, press conferences and trade-show briefings, transcribed for the journalist’s own use. Quotes are checked against the recording before publication.
• Research support. Summarising long documents such as tourism master plans, aviation agreements, tenders, IATA and UN Tourism data releases, so a reporter finds what matters faster. The underlying document is always read before we report on it.
• Press-release triage. Sorting and summarising the volume of releases we receive. A journalist decides what is news and writes the story.
• Data work. Cleaning and cross-checking arrivals figures, route schedules, hotel pipelines and similar datasets, with outliers flagged for human review.
• Sub-editing support. Suggesting headlines, standfirsts, SEO metadata and social posts, which editors accept, rewrite or reject.
• Drafting support. AI may produce a first draft of part of an article. A journalist then edits it, verifies it against sources and takes authorship of the finished piece. Nothing reaches a reader without that step.
• Commercial operations. Drafting marketing copy, media kits, proposals and internal analysis. A person reviews it before it goes out.
• Technology. Coding assistance in building and maintaining our website and tools.

04 Where we do not use AI

• We do not publish AI-drafted text that no journalist has read, edited and taken responsibility for.
• We do not use AI to generate sources, quotes, interviews or attributed comment.
• We do not publish AI-written destination, hotel, airline or attraction reviews, or present AI output as first-hand experience of a place.
• We do not let a tool decide what is true, what is significant, or what is fair to publish about a person, company or destination.
• We do not use AI to decide awards, rankings or “ones to watch” lists without human assessment.
• We do not use AI to rewrite a press release and present it as independent reporting.

05 Accuracy, disclosure and correction

AI tools make confident mistakes, which is why verification stays with people. Every figure, name, route, date and quote is checked against a primary source before publication, whatever tool helped find it.

Where AI has made a material contribution a reader would want to know about, such as a generated illustration or a machine-translated excerpt we could not verify, we say so on the piece.

Our correction process is unchanged: if we get something wrong, we fix it and say we have fixed it. Errors made with a tool’s help are still our errors. To flag an inaccuracy, contact info@emergingtravel.news.

06 Data protection and confidentiality

We handle personal data under the UK GDPR, the Data Protection Act 2018 and our Privacy Policy.

We do not enter confidential source material, embargoed information, unpublished investigations or personal data about sources into third-party AI tools. Embargoed releases from airlines, hotel groups and tourism boards are treated the same way until the embargo lifts.

Staff and contributors may not upload our archive, or any substantial part of it, to external AI services. Subscriber, reader and advertiser data is not used to train third-party AI models.

We use AI services from established providers under business terms that exclude our inputs from model training wherever such terms are available, and we review new tools for accuracy, security and data handling before adopting them.

07 Images and video

Travel journalism depends on readers trusting that a picture shows the real place. So:

• We do not use AI to generate or alter images of real destinations, hotels, aircraft, airports, events or people.
• We do not use AI to remove, add or “improve” elements of a real photograph beyond routine adjustments to exposure, colour and cropping.
• We may use AI to create abstract or conceptual illustrations, for example for trend or data pieces. These are labelled as AI-generated.
• Images supplied by partners, PR agencies or contributors must be real photographs unless clearly declared otherwise. If we learn a supplied image was AI-generated or materially altered, we remove or label it.

08 Contributors, partners and sponsored content

Freelancers and contributors work to this policy. They must tell their editor if AI tools were used beyond spelling, grammar, translation or transcription, and they remain responsible for the accuracy and originality of what they file.

Sponsored and partner content is labelled as such and held to the same rules: no fabricated quotes, no AI-generated images of real places presented as photography. See our Sponsored Content Policy.

When our content is shared with syndication partners, it carries the same standards, and those partners are bound by section 09 below.

09 Use of Emerging Travel content by AI systems

Emerging Travel content, including articles, headlines, photographs, graphics and data, is protected by copyright and database rights owned by Emerging Travel (Maximum Exposure) Ltd or its licensors. We expressly reserve all rights in it for text and data mining, including under Article 4(3) of Directive (EU) 2019/790 and equivalent provisions elsewhere.

Without a written licence from us, you may not:

• use our content to train, fine-tune, ground or evaluate any AI or machine-learning model;
• scrape, crawl or systematically download our content;
• use it in retrieval-augmented generation, embeddings, vector databases or similar systems;
• reproduce it, in whole or in substantial part, in the output of an AI system.

This applies however the content was obtained, including via our website, newsletters, RSS, syndication partners and aggregators. Our machine-readable preferences are in our robots.txt; content being publicly reachable does not imply permission. We license content on commercial terms and would rather agree a licence than send a legal letter.

10 Governance and contact

This policy is owned by the editors of Emerging Travel and reviewed at least once a year, or sooner if our practice, the tools or the law change materially. Staff and contributors receive guidance on what these tools can and cannot do.

Questions, corrections and licensing enquiries: info@emergingtravel.news.