Author
Former active travel guide and tour operator executive. Building AI systems for travel and tourism.
Ali Murphy is the founder of Afuera. She spent a decade in the active travel industry, first as a wilderness guide running multi-day trips, then as an executive at a global tour operator where she led operations, product, and guide training. She now runs Afuera, an AI consulting and implementation firm built specifically for travel and tourism businesses.
Her work sits at the intersection of three things most AI consultants don't understand together: how a trip actually runs on the ground, how a travel operations team actually spends its day, and where AI can create real leverage without breaking the human parts of the guest experience. She writes about AI strategy, field operations, office operations, and the unglamorous operational honesty that separates travel businesses who ship with AI from those who stall in pilots.
Ali is based in Colorado. She works with tour operators, custom trip designers, travel advisors, DMCs, and experience companies across four continents.
A practical guide to automating the supplier confirmation chase using Claude or ChatGPT. Covers the email-parsing workflow, the status tracker, the auto-follow-up system, and the three things to set up first.
Ali Murphy
A practical guide to using Claude or ChatGPT to draft custom travel proposals in 20 minutes instead of four hours. Includes the exact prompts, the document setup, the brand-voice trick, and the three workflows that actually save time.
Ali Murphy
A ranked list of the 12 tour operator workflows with the highest ROI when automated with AI. Each entry includes estimated time saved, setup cost, and the practical path to build it. Written for operations leaders who want to know which one to tackle first, not which one sounds most impressive at a conference.
Ali Murphy
Most tour operators know their annual margin. Very few know which specific trips made money and which quietly lost it. The post-trip reconciliation that would answer the question almost never gets completed. Here is why it is broken, what it is costing, and how AI closes the loop.
Ali Murphy
A 12-question self-assessment for tour operators, travel advisors, DMCs, and trip designers trying to figure out if they are ready to adopt AI. Written by someone who audits travel operations for a living. Covers operational, data, team, and strategic readiness, with scoring and what to do next.
Ali Murphy
Google Docs is not a tour operations system. It is a document editor holding together workflows it was never designed to support. These are the eight signs your operation has outgrown it, and what a real system actually looks like.
Ali Murphy
Most custom trip designers are already using AI to plan itineraries. Almost none are using it to remember what clients told them, catch logistics problems before departure, or deliver proposals that look as good as the trips themselves. Here is how to close that gap.
Ali Murphy
An honest workflow-by-workflow comparison of Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini for tour operators, DMCs, and travel advisors in 2026. The short answer is Claude. The longer answer explains where each tool wins, where each falls short, and the one thing none of them solve on their own.
Ali Murphy
Most new independent travel advisors run out of friends and family to book within six months. Here is how to build a real client pipeline using AI-powered outreach, a personal site that gets found, and content that works while you sleep.
Ali Murphy
A decade ago, tour guides ran trips on folded printouts and paper cue sheets. In 2026, after the rise of ChatGPT, most still do. The paper is the visible tip of a deeper problem: every operational layer of the travel business still runs pre-AI, and operators are losing hours, margin, and guest experience every day.
Ali Murphy