Conversational AI in an Official Tourist Information Office: A Smart Tourism Case Study of MATEIN in Oviedo

Conversational AI is increasingly used to personalise tourist information, yet evidence from official destination services remains limited. This case study examines MATEIN, a retrieval-augmented conversational recommender tested in Oviedo’s main tourist information office during a peak holiday period. A two-stage field design linked 85 logged AI interactions with 68 matched post-visit questionnaires. Visitors reported positive but differentiated evaluations of plan fit, route fluency, discovery and overall experience quality, while 83.8% followed the proposed itinerary in its main part. Overall experience quality was strongly associated with recommendation intention. Exploratory analysis also indicated that itinerary adherence should not be treated as equivalent to experiential success. The case contributes real-world evidence on conversational AI embedded in an official destination service and highlights the need to evaluate these systems through both experiential and behavioural indicators while allowing flexibility in how visitors appropriate AI-generated recommendations.