The problem

Bhutan is one of the world’s most unique and sought-after travel destinations, a high-value, sustainable kingdom with a rich cultural identity. Yet behind its tourism experience lies an operational ecosystem that is almost entirely manual and deeply fragmented.

Hotels, tour operators, guides, transport providers, and government agencies operate in isolation from one another. Critical activities, including visa applications, entry permits, route permits, national park permits, and drone permits, are still handled through phone calls, emails, and informal messaging threads.

This creates cascading problems across the entire value chain:

• Scheduling delays and missed deadlines due to communication gaps between operators and government agencies
• Duplicated effort and compliance risk from disconnected approval workflows
• Limited real-time visibility for any stakeholder at any stage of the traveler’s journey
• Uneven and inconsistent guest experiences that undermine Bhutan’s premium brand

This raises critical questions:

• Can AI autonomously determine what permits and fees apply to each traveler?
• Can regulatory workflows be automated end-to-end without constant human intervention?
• Can all tourism stakeholders, hotels, operators, guides, and agencies be connected into a single intelligent system?

Without addressing these gaps, Bhutan’s tourism sector cannot scale efficiently or maintain its competitive edge against destinations that are already leveraging intelligent automation.

The project goals

This project proposes building DrukPass, an Agentic AI-powered tourism coordination and compliance system that automates regulatory workflows and operational communication across Bhutan’s entire tourism ecosystem.

The solution connects hotels, tour operators, guides, and government agencies into a single intelligent network, replacing fragmented manual processes with autonomous, reliable, and audit-ready AI workflows.

The project focuses on:

• Coordination & Disruption Management: Real-time communication and updates between all tourism stakeholders, including flight delay and cancellation alerts.
• Permit & Visa Determination: Automatically identifying which approvals each traveler requires: entry permits, route permits, national park permits, drone permits, and more.
• SDF Calculation & Automation: Computing the Sustainable Development Fee based on nationality, age, stay duration, and applicable policy rules, including waiver processing.
• Route Permit Automation: Generating temporary permits for border town travel and upgrading to full route permits on the day of travel across Dzongkhags.
• Application Preparation & Tracking: Generating application-ready documents, validating traveler data, and surfacing real-time status updates to all stakeholders.
• Lifecycle & Compliance Management: Handling extensions, cancellations, and refund workflows end-to-end with full audit-ready records.
• Operational Reporting: Delivering snapshot reports for governing agencies such as DOI and DOT.

Impact of the Problem

This project can directly transform how Bhutan’s tourism ecosystem operates, from the moment a traveler books their trip to the moment they depart.

Tour Operators & Hotels

• Dramatically reduced time spent on permit coordination and application follow-up.
• Fewer compliance errors and missed deadlines.
• More time and resources are dedicated to delivering exceptional guest experiences.

Government Agencies (DOI, DOT & Others)

• Real-time visibility into permit applications and approvals across the country.
• Audit-ready records of every transaction and decision.
• Faster processing times with reduced manual workload.

Travelers

• Seamless, compliant, and personalized entry experience.
• Fewer delays caused by missing or incorrect permit documentation.
• Greater confidence in the reliability of Bhutan’s tourism operations.

Bhutan’s Tourism Sector

• Strengthened competitive position against destinations using AI-driven automation.
• A scalable foundation for future digital transformation across the tourism value chain.
• Improved ability to enforce sustainable tourism policies, including SDF compliance.

Timeline

1

Sprint 1: Workflow Discovery and System Architecture (Weeks 1-2). 

The focus will be on mapping regulatory processes such as visas, permits, and SDF handling while defining the architecture of the Agentic AI system, communication flows, and integration strategy required for the platform.

2

Sprint 2: Automation and Workflow Intelligence (Weeks 3-4).

The team will begin building the core intelligent automation components of the system. This includes developing the permit determination engine, SDF calculation workflows, conversational AI interfaces, and validation pipelines for traveler applications and supporting documents.

3

Sprint 3: End-to-End Orchestration and Lifecycle Management (Weeks 5-6).

This sprint focuses on connecting all automation components into complete end-to-end tourism workflows. The team will implement status tracking, lifecycle management processes such as extensions, cancellations, and refunds, as well as audit-ready logging systems.

4

Sprint 4: Validation, Demonstration, and Prototype Delivery (Weeks 7-8)

During the final sprint, the team will validate the system’s performance across representative tourism scenarios and ensure the workflows operate reliably from submission to approval and tracking. The prototype, dashboards, and reporting capabilities.

**More details will be shared with the designated team.