World Tourism Day 2026
Digital Agenda & Artificial Intelligence to Redesign Tourism
World Tourism Day 2026 asks how the digital agenda and artificial intelligence can create smarter, more inclusive and sustainable tourism. Discover how Uganda is embracing this transformation.
Our AI Assistant — Pearl
Discovery Starts Here
Pearl’s purpose is simple: to help you discover Uganda’s tourism offerings and understand the tourism sector — by answering from the official information on this very website. Every answer is grounded in our own content — destinations, parks, services, publications, news, events and businesses — with citations you can click to read the source page.
Find What You Need
Ask in plain language — Pearl searches the Ministry’s official content and points you to the right page, service, document or event.
Understand the Sector
Learn about tourism performance, wildlife conservation, heritage, policies and investment — from the Ministry’s own reports and statistics.
Promote & Plan
Turn discovery into action — plan a trip, check permits and fees, and share Uganda’s story with confidence.
💡 Pearl answers only from the official content published on this website — with clickable citations to the exact source page. She does not browse the wider internet, so you can trust every answer reflects the Ministry’s own information.
The Global Theme
How AI Is Redesigning Tourism
Artificial intelligence is helping destinations make better decisions, personalise visitor experiences, manage crowds and resources, and open tourism to more people — from AI assistants answering ministry and visitor questions, to demand forecasting and smart destination management.
AI Assistants
Instant, helpful answers for visitors and citizens — like our “Pearl” assistant, available on every page.
Personalised Planning
Recommendations and itineraries matched to interests, budgets and time — try our trip planner.
Data-Driven Decisions
TIMS turns tourism data into insight for the sector — arrivals, revenue, visitation and more.
Inclusive & Accessible
Digital-first, mobile-friendly, WCAG 2.1 AA, with voice input — so tourism information reaches everyone.
Uganda’s Digital Agenda
Government Services, Online
The Ministry is digitising the visitor and investor journey — permits, statistics, museums, licensing and more are now accessible through official online portals, with this website as the gateway.
- e-Services Portal — one gateway to 11 online services: CITES e-permits, TIMS statistics, museums, the tourism directory and more (explore).
- TIMS — Uganda’s tourism information management system turning sector data into insight (visit).
- Tourism E-Directory — a searchable record of licensed tourism businesses (search).
- Digital applications — online job applications, newsletter and event listings on this site.
In Action
Putting AI to Work on This Website
This portal — launched for World Tourism Day 2026 — includes “Pearl”, an AI assistant for the whole Ministry — services, careers, publications, events and travel — plus an AI-assisted trip planner built on the Ministry’s official content. Pearl is powered by a provider-agnostic server-side architecture using DeepSeek (primary) with Google Gemini as fallback, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) that indexes the website’s content — including full-text indexing of ministry publication PDFs with OCR for scanned documents — so answers cite official sources rather than general internet data.
Pearl — the Ministry's Assistant
Ask about policies, services, permits, careers, publications, events, destinations and more — live on every page, with voice input for accessibility.
Plan Your Pearl Experience
Get destination recommendations and an AI-generated itinerary tailored to your interests — with a “Verify & Book” panel linking to official government portals.
Plan a Trip →🔒 AI on this site is used responsibly: answers are generated from official Ministry content via retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), no personal data is collected, and all suggestions advise visitors to verify details on official portals. The AI systems comply with Uganda's Data Protection and Privacy Act, 2019 (DPPA 2019) and the National Information Security Framework (NISF) 2026. This website is also AI-agent-readable — with robots.txt, llms.txt, schema.org JSON-LD structured data, and an OpenAI-compatible API endpoint — so third-party AI travel agents can programmatically discover and query official Ministry services.