World Tourism Day: NATOP Equips Tour Operators with AI, Digital Marketing Skills

By Stella Okocha 

The Nigeria Association of Tour Operators (NATOP) has marked the 2026 World Tourism Day by taking its members back to the classroom, using artificial intelligence (AI), digital marketing and destination promotion as key tools for strengthening Nigeria’s tourism industry.

The association’s South-West Zone brought together nearly 200 tour operators at Ziba Beach Resort, Lagos, for a capacity-building session focused on the application of AI in tour operations, content creation and destination marketing.

The training formed the centrepiece of NATOP’s World Tourism Day activities, held in line with the 2026 theme, “Digital Agenda and Artificial Intelligence to Redesign Tourism.”

Speaking at the event, NATOP President, Hajia Bolaji Mustapha, said the association deliberately combined training with the World Tourism Day celebration to ensure that members acquire practical digital skills that can help them grow their businesses and promote Nigerian destinations.

According to her, tour operators must embrace the digital revolution and learn how to use AI tools to create compelling content and tell Nigeria’s tourism stories to local and international audiences.

“We follow the theme and blend it with the current situation. Let’s do the training so that we attach it to World Tourism Day with the theme, so that we have achieved something and also celebrate,” she said.

Mustapha said the training would enable operators to produce better digital content, promote destinations more effectively and use AI as a tool for expressing and marketing tourism experiences.

She added that NATOP deliberately chose Ziba Beach Resort as the venue to combine capacity building with destination exploration.

“We always attach World Tourism Day to a tourism site. If you look at this whole area and this community, that’s why we see that Ziba is a tourism site,” she explained.

According to her, the resort’s newly launched third phase provided an opportunity for members to inspect its facilities and consider how the destination could be packaged and marketed to visitors.

She noted that the resort’s name and setting could also provide an opportunity to promote a Nigerian destination that could easily be mistaken for a foreign location.

“As tour operators who are willing to tell the good story of our Nigeria, we need to bring ourselves up to speed and align with the digital revolution. Let everybody go digital,” Mustapha said.

She further urged tour operators to embrace the techniques being used by content creators, while leveraging their professional knowledge of tourism to provide more accurate and commercially viable destination stories.

“We are the ones that understand the business and we’ll be able to tell the story better, so that anybody coming to Nigeria will be able to discover Nigeria with the experts,” she said.

The Vice President, South-West, NATOP, and Chairman of the World Tourism Day Organising Committee for the zone, Mrs Wonuola Olatunde-Lamidi, said the training was also designed to address gaps in professional knowledge among some operators, particularly in tour packaging.

She said operators needed a proper understanding of the fundamentals of the business if the industry was to achieve sustainable growth.

“Many don’t understand the foundation of what it is to create a tour package. And when you have people that are not well-trained in an industry, the industry will not grow,” Olatunde-Lamidi said.

She stressed that effective destination marketing could influence travellers’ choices and help position lesser-known Nigerian destinations for greater visibility.

According to her, tour operators can play a major role in determining where people travel by properly packaging and marketing destinations and communicating their attractions and benefits.

The Lagos programme also featured a tour of Ziba Beach Resort, giving participants an opportunity to explore the facility while considering its potential as a tourism product.

Beyond Lagos, NATOP extended its World Tourism Day activities to other parts of the country.

In Abuja, the FCT and Northern Zone, in collaboration with Naija Adventurers, organised a Tourism Awareness Walk and Hike to the Centre of Nigeria, combining outdoor recreation with tourism awareness.

The South-South Zone also marked the occasion with a destination tour and other activities aimed at celebrating World Tourism Day and promoting tourism experiences within the region.

Through the multi-zone activities, NATOP used the 2026 World Tourism Day celebration not only to commemorate the global event but also to combine professional development, digital transformation, destination marketing and domestic tourism promotion.