Now, imagine you're a traveler planning a family vacation that will cost you thousands of dollars. How do you know those stunning beach shots or mountain vistas are actually real?
A vacation is often one of the most significant purchases people make without being able to "test drive" it first. Photos and videos are the critical evidence customers rely on to make their booking decisions. This is why photos and videos have always been so critical to our industry—they’re the proof travelers rely on when deciding to book.
But as AI gets better at creating fake content, traveler skepticism is rising, especially when they're planning trips somewhere far away.
So, how can we assure visitors that our "authentic" images are genuinely real?
New Tools For Authenticating Imagery
Thankfully, there are solutions brewing: Content Credentials is a universal system that can prove what's real and what's not. It's being developed by the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI) and uses technical standards from something called C2PA (Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity—yeah, it's a mouthful).
Here's how it works: Every image carries with it a sort of digital passport, a “manifest” according to C2PA. This "manifest" shows you exactly how that image was created and what happened to it along the way. It’ll tell you what equipment it was shot on and how many edits were made and what they were. Changed the lighting? The manifest will tell you. Removed some birds and cleaned up the clouds in the sky? Yep, in the manifest. Or, was it generated by AI? Yep, the manifest will tell you that, too.
The simplest way to check this stuff out is on the Content Credentials Inspector website—you can just drag any image in there and see if it has credentials attached, and if it does you can explore the changes that have been made to the image.
The Catch (because there’s always a catch): Now, before you get too excited, there are some limitations. You can't just slap credentials on photos you already have sitting in your asset library. If you want that digital passport, the photo has to be shot on a camera that supports C2PA from the get-go—and right now those options are pretty limited. And it's not just about the camera; you also need to edit the files with compatible software. Adobe Photoshop has a beta plugin you can enable, but that's about it for now.
How to Get Started
Content Credentials are still in their early days, with limited camera support and software compatibility. But the technology is moving fast, and consumer awareness is growing. Travelers are already getting more skeptical about online content, and as AI-generated visuals become mainstream, that skepticism is only going to grow.
If you're a travel marketer, now's the time to start planning. Take a look at your content creation process, think about equipment upgrades and consider how you'll communicate authenticity to increasingly skeptical travelers.
If you work with photographers or agencies, you might want to start requiring C2PA-compliant equipment and software for new shoots or for vendors that edit photos on your behalf. Then, once you have images with Content Credentials embedded, you’ll need a way to quickly demonstrate that to your visitors.
The Content Credentials website shows some examples of this—note the CR “bug” in the upper right corner of an image—and links to detailed information about implementing credentials for images and videos on your site.
