How Artificial Intelligence is Redefining the Art of Real-Time Marketing—Helping Travel Advisors Turn Breaking News into Business Growth
Written By: Tom Ogg, Co-Founder and Co-Owner – Travel Professional NEWS
Digital marketing involves a number of different strategies. We’ve already explored marketing with memes, cartoons, comic strips, AI apps, and infographics. Now let’s look at how artificial intelligence is transforming newsjacking. It can help you grow your client database, improve SEO, build your social media following, and increase your business exposure year after year.
Newsjacking is defined as the practice of leveraging trending and popular news stories to increase media mileage. The term itself was popularized in the book “Newsjacking: How to Inject Your Ideas into a Breaking News Story and Generate Tons of Media Coverage” by Marketing and PR Expert and bestselling author David Meerman Scott.
You can take a breaking travel story and make it your own by adding opinion, experience, knowledge, or a fresh concept. In 2025, AI has transformed this entire process. It now helps you find trending stories, create compelling content, and track your results across traditional search engines and AI platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews.
Newsjacking is especially effective in social media to drive traffic to your business page or website. It elevates your overall brand before the readers of the newsjacked content and, depending on the overall popularity of the story or news item, can develop a great number of new followers. Newsjacking works especially well when your niche is well defined and you produce news content that is of interest to travelers in your niche.
Understanding the AI-Powered News Cycle
News can come from just about any place. Generally, when news first breaks it is followed by solid engagement until the interest peaks and then starts to fade before becoming “yesterday’s news.” The very best time to newsjack content is right after it breaks so that your content may be included when readers search for it using relevant keywords or hashtags.
However, you need to think beyond traditional search engines. With over 54% of consumers now using AI tools for research and decision-making, your newsjacked content must also appear in AI-generated responses. This means optimizing for both traditional SEO and what’s known as Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), ensuring your brand appears when potential clients ask AI assistants about travel topics.
AI Tools That Revolutionize Newsjacking
The integration of artificial intelligence into your newsjacking strategy can reduce content creation time by up to 70% while significantly improving your ability to identify and capitalize on breaking news. Here are the essential AI tools every travel agent should consider:
Trend Discovery and Monitoring
Perplexity AI has emerged as a game-changer for newsjacking. With over 780 million monthly queries and 22 million active users, this AI-powered search engine combines real-time web data with large language models to deliver fast, direct answers. For travel agents, Perplexity excels at identifying breaking travel news and trending topics before they peak. Its ability to cite sources and provide current information makes it invaluable for research phase newsjacking.
Google Trends remains essential, but now you can enhance it with AI automation. Tools like n8n offer workflow templates that monitor Google Trends, automatically select high-potential topics for your niche, and even trigger content creation processes—all without manual intervention.
Meltwater provides comprehensive social intelligence with AI-powered social listening and analytics. It monitors multiple platforms including YouTube, Pinterest, Reddit, and X, offering sentiment analysis and trend tracking with no data caps. Its 15-month rolling archive gives you historical context for emerging travel stories.
Unmetric uses AI to monitor competitors’ and top travel brands’ social media activities. It tracks the type of content they’re creating, hashtags being used, and engagement patterns, helping you identify newsjacking opportunities your competitors might miss.
Content Creation and Optimization
Claude, especially Claude Sonnet 4.5, excels at keeping context across long documents. It also delivers a measured, professional tone, which is ideal for travel agents who need to stay on brand while responding quickly to breaking news. It’s particularly strong when you’re newsjacking complex travel stories that require nuanced understanding.
ChatGPT (now GPT-5) remains the backbone of many content teams for newsjacking. With custom GPTs, you can train the model with your brand voice, travel expertise, and typical client questions, making it produce on-brand newsjacking content quickly. The latest version offers improved reasoning and can generate complete applications with minimal prompting.
Jasper specializes in marketing-specific templates with brand voice memory, making it ideal for multi-channel newsjacking campaigns. If you’re pushing your newsjacked content across email, social media, and your blog simultaneously, Jasper maintains consistency across all platforms.
Copy.ai is built for teams managing rapid A/B variants of newsjacked content. When a major travel story breaks, you can quickly generate multiple headline options, meta descriptions, and social media variations to test which messaging resonates best with your audience.
Visual Content Enhancement
Lummi offers AI-powered illustrations and stock images specifically designed for content teams. When newsjacking a travel story that lacks compelling visuals, Lummi can help you create stunning, on-brand imagery quickly and cost-effectively.
Submagic revolutionizes video newsjacking by using AI to add captions, B-rolls, zoom effects, and sound effects in minutes. Since short-form video content is increasingly crucial for social media engagement, Submagic helps travel agents create professional video responses to breaking travel news without expensive production resources.
Lumen5 converts your written newsjacking content into animated videos in minutes, perfect for LinkedIn or email embeds. If you’ve written a blog post about a trending travel story, Lumen5 can instantly transform it into engaging video content.
Do’s and Don’ts When Newsjacking with AI
Do’s
Be Positive: So much of today’s news dwells on the negative. But if you always make a positive spin on content that you are newsjacking, your readers will come to look forward to your next post. I learned this the hard way after a newsjacked post of the CDC’s anti-cruise position before they shut the cruise industry down because of COVID.
Leverage AI for Speed, Not Replacement: Use AI tools to accelerate research, generate initial drafts, and create visuals, but always add your unique travel expertise and human touch to the final content. AI should enhance your voice, not replace it.
Be Creative with Multimodal Content: In 2025, the most successful newsjacking combines text, images, video, and audio. Use AI tools to create immersive, interactive content that resonates across diverse formats and platforms.
Be Timely with AI Automation: Set up automated workflows that alert you when breaking travel news emerges. Tools like n8n can monitor trends and even begin drafting responses before you manually intervene, giving you a significant speed advantage.
Monitor AI Platforms: Research before hitting the send button by searching your keywords in both traditional search engines and AI platforms. Use tools like Perplexity, Claude and ChatGPT to see what responses currently exist for queries related to your newsjacked topic.
Have an AI-Enhanced Process in Place: When news breaks, your AI-powered workflow should be ready to: (1) identify the trend, (2) research context and competitors, (3) generate draft content, (4) create visual assets, (5) optimize for both traditional SEO, and (6) distribute across channels.
Don’ts
Negative or Offensive News:
Remember that your brand is benefitting from the additional exposure that you will receive from newsjacking. Always avoid anything controversial like politics, religion, crime, or any other topic which is local, regional, or national in scope that might offend a part of your readership.
Over-Rely on AI Without Human Expertise:
While AI can accelerate content creation by 70%, over-reliance results in generic content that lacks emotional depth and authentic storytelling. Your personal travel expertise and unique voice are what make newsjacked content valuable—AI should support, not replace, this human element.
Copy Content or AI-Generate Plagiarism:
Everything you see on the web, social media, and blogs is copyrighted by the person that created the content. Never copy any content (text, photos, graphics, video, or any other element) that is associated with the news that you are newsjacking. While AI tools can help you rewrite and recreate, always ensure your content is original and adds unique value.
Newsjack Fake News:
AI tools sometimes generate plausible-sounding but inaccurate information (known as “hallucinations”). Always verify facts from multiple reputable sources before publishing. While a catchy title may romance people to want more information, sending fake news brands you and your organization as, well, fake.
Bait and Switch:
Everyone knows that the more engaging a news title is, the more people will want to read it. AI can generate compelling headlines, but make sure your news actually relates to the title. If a reader clicks on a headline that promises something exceptional and the content doesn’t deliver, the result is more harm than good.
Ignore Ethical AI Considerations:
Be transparent when AI has significantly contributed to your content creation. Address potential biases in AI-generated content and ensure your newsjacking maintains authenticity and trustworthiness.
If you aren’t using newsjacking in your social media or AI marketing, consider adding it. It’s a powerful way to boost visibility and even go viral.