Hanover CRM wins Best Use of AI at the Global Youth Travel Awards 2026

Hanover CRM has won Best Use of AI at the Global Youth Travel Awards 2026, presented by the WYSE Travel Confederation at WYSTC in Bilbao.

The award recognises Hanover Discovery: the part of our platform that makes an operator’s programs discoverable and citable by AI assistants, then captures and routes the student interest that follows.

Why this problem matters

Students have changed how they search. Two in three prospective international students now say they prefer AI chat search to a search engine (ICEF Monitor, 2026), and ChatGPT use among college-bound seniors climbed from 4% to 23% in two years.

Exchange programs, though, still live in prospectus PDFs, legacy systems and websites that assistants cannot read. Programs that change lives go uncited, simply because they are invisible to the place students now start. And the interest that does arrive often dies in a long application form or gets re-keyed by hand between systems.

What the judges recognised

Hanover Discovery closes that loop end to end, rather than bolting a chatbot onto a website.

Programs structured in minutes, not days. Point Discovery at a program URL or a prospectus and it extracts the overview, eligibility, dates, costs and accommodation into a consistent catalogue. Every field is flagged for human review — nothing is silently guessed.

Published so assistants can cite them. Each program ships with Schema.org structured data, an llms.txt index and WebMCP, so large language models can read it and cite it by name, linked back to the operator’s own branded surface.

Applications that start as a conversation. Students register interest in about 30 seconds through a two-stage flow, then choose when to complete the full application. A traditional form fallback keeps the journey accessible, and both routes produce the same structured applicant record.

Routing and attribution. Captured leads flow into the CRM, sponsor systems and marketing tools in parallel, with an audit trail per delivery, and a dashboard attributes each visitor to the assistant that referred them. For most operators it is the first time AI-search visibility has been measurable at all.

What it means for operators

Discovery sits alongside the website an operator already runs and routes into the systems they already use, so there is no re-platforming. It is built on Hanover CRM, the platform behind J-1 sponsorship, SEVIS reporting and education abroad operations for organisations across the industry.

That heritage shapes how the AI works: humans approve everything the AI extracts, citations preserve attribution to the operator’s own content, and student data is collected with consent, used only for the application journey, and logged on every delivery.

Thank you

Thank you to the WYSE Travel Confederation, to the judges, and to the operators who tested Discovery with their own programs and told us plainly what worked and what did not.

Youth travel changes lives. This award is recognition that it should still be easy to find.

Explore Hanover Discovery or book a demo.