User Experience (UX)
Alma AI, the virtual travel companion, was named Travel Tech Project of the Year
At the Game Changer Ljubljana conference, held on 24 November 2025, the project Virtual Travel Companion around Slovenia – Alma AI was selected as Travel Tech Project of the Year. The award highlights an important step in the digital transformation of Slovenian tourism. It confirms the strategic focus on developing advanced solutions that provide visitors to Slovenia with modern and efficient digital support when planning their experiences.
Who is Alma – a virtual companion for discovering Slovenia
Alma is an AI assistant on the slovenia.info portal, developed by Creatim for the Slovenian Tourist Board (STO). Instead of acting as a classic chatbot, she engages in conversation with visitors like a digital tour guide that can:
- understand the user’s questions and intent,
- take into account location, time, interests, and needs,
- Turn all this into concrete experience suggestions, itineraries, and practical advice.
Alma speaks seven languages, supports hundreds of visitors at the same time, and operates 24/7. In the first ten months of 2025, she answered more than 70,000 questions from portal visitors, most of them in Slovenian, Italian, English, and German. Equally telling is the fact that in October, she achieved a 91% positive feedback rate on her answers – proof that users see her as real help, not just a technological gimmick.
Users most often turn to Alma when they:
- Plan day trips or multi-day itineraries,
- Look for ideas for family outings,
- Need advice on hiking and cycling,
- Choose culinary experiences and festivals,
- Check information about transportation, vignettes, and parking.
Alma, the AI Destination Expert
The technology behind Alma: from data to a personal experience
Alma is an AI agent based on Creatim’s Scoutbuddy platform and tailored to STO’s needs. In such projects, the data model is of utmost importance, so we
- Designed a dedicated data model based on the Slovenian Tourist Board’s database and more than 50 carefully selected Slovenian tourism websites,
- Ensured hourly data synchronisation so that information on offers, events, and experiences is always up to date,
- Implemented personal data protection in line with GDPR – all transmitted data is encrypted, and communication with the AI is designed with a high level of privacy.
- Built an interface that combines a chat assistant and a content recommender – alongside the conversation, users receive personalised content and offer suggestions.
Alma is not “just another” chatbot. She is the result of combining advanced AI technology, local expertise, a carefully designed user experience, and a consistent focus on answer quality. Together with STO, we continuously monitor her performance, filter out inappropriate answers, refine the context, and develop new functionalities.
What’s next? Alma as a laboratory for the future of tourism
Today, Alma is recognised as one of the leading travel technologies of the future, while remaining a dynamic laboratory for new ideas:
- The Admin Alma concept is being developed, which will enable destinations to add their own content and gain insight into information gaps.
- In the future, Alma will gradually evolve into a voice-based guide that accompanies travellers on the go and provides stories, tips, or guidance at just the right moment.
- She will continue to promote sustainable mobility and direct visitors towards less crowded regions.
The Travel Tech Project of the Year award for Alma is not only recognition of a single project – it is confirmation that with responsible and intelligent use of artificial intelligence, we can create a better, more personalised and more sustainable tourism experience.
Alma proves that a digital companion does not replace human warmth – but it complements it perfectly by always being available, speaking the visitor’s language and knowing Slovenia almost as well as if she had walked every corner of it herself.
If your company is also exploring how a virtual assistant could improve user experience, productivity, or customer support, we would be happy to talk about your challenges.
