Cheyenne wasn’t on the itinerary for a British tour group traveling the American West recently on its way to an Alaska cruise. Then AI told them to hit Wyoming’s capital city.
So, they made an impromptu stop to see Big Boy No. 4004 in Holliday Park, and now Wyoming’s capital city could become the tour’s first official stop.
The Wonders of the Wild West tour combines a land tour through the West with a cruise to Alaska. It is offered by cruise.co.uk, a British travel company recently acquired by a larger operator. It’s planning to significantly expand its American tours, according to the group’s guide, James Muessig.
The company sent a representative on its most recent trip. By the time she left Cheyenne, Muessig said she was researching whether the city had hotels large enough to accommodate future groups.
The answer was yes.
"There are three or four that could handle their groups,” Muessig told Cowboy State Daily.
Hey Ara … What’s There To Do Around Here?
The impromptu Cheyenne visit happened as Muessig was considering stops along a six-hour drive from Denver to Rapid City, South Dakota, for his tour group of English, Irish and Scottish travelers.
“It’s an easy six hours to drive from Denver to Rapid City,” he said. “So, I have to come up with some places to stop. So I talked to my AI, Ara, and said, ‘What’s of interest?’ And she said, ‘Well maybe they want to see Big Boy over in Cheyenne.'”
Cheyenne has two Big Boy locomotives, made during World War II to carry heavy equipment from coast to coast.
One is Big Boy No. 4014, a working locomotive that’s kept in the Union Pacific Steam Shop near the Cheyenne Depot. The other is Big Boy No. 4004, which hangs out in Holliday Park.
Muessig hadn’t heard of Big Boy trains, but after a few more questions he was satisfied his tour group would probably like seeing Big Boy No. 4004. If they didn’t, that would be OK, too, because the main thing was just stopping to let them stretch their legs and go to the restroom.
He needn’t have worried, however. Big Boy No. 4004 is 132 feet and 1.2 million pounds of awe. It had no trouble impressing a little tour group from across the pond.
The 4004 moved to Holliday Park on June 28, 1963, and is one of eight remaining Big Boys on display throughout the country. Twenty-five Big Boys were built during World War II in all.
“They really liked it,” Muessig said. “They spent a lot of time around that locomotive. I gave them a little background on it, but you have those information plaques there, and they’re actually reading stuff and taking photos.”
How About 8-Foot-Tall Cowboy Boots?
The unexpected Cheyenne stop kept delivering surprises.
After taking a group selfie with Big Boy, members of the group spotted several red squirrels as they were walking around the park’s lake, enjoying a pretty, blue-sky day.
“They told me that in England the red squirrels have been killed by the gray squirrels,” he said. “So they were fascinated to see those. We had a good time.”
As the group watched the red squirrels, a passerby asked Muessig whether he knew about Cheyenne’s 8-foot-tall, hand-painted cowboy boots. That was news to Muessig and the group — news they were excited to hear.
“So then we went to check out the cowboy boots,” Muessig said. “And I actually had someone from the tour operator along on the tour, so I said, ‘You really ought to think about moving your tour.’”
Right now, the tour starts off in Denver, which means driving a half-hour in the wrong direction, Muessig said.
“Why not just land and spend your day in Cheyenne?” he said.
Whether cruise.co.uk will ultimately revise its starting city is uncertain. But Muessig sees it as a possibility, given that the tour operator was already researching how many of Cheyenne’s hotels could accommodate the group.
Result Was No Accident
It was no accident that Cheyenne’s Big Boy No. 4004 came up in Muessig’s search, Visit Cheyenne’s Jim Walter told Cowboy State Daily. His team has gone to great lengths to make sure Cheyenne will come up in AI searches asking what there is to do in the area.
“We’ve spent a lot of years with traditional search-engine optimization, making sure we come up high,” Walter said. “And it’s the same thing with AI.”
Given the “Wild West” environment right now, AI is looking for trusted sources that it can use to craft its answers, Walter said. Visit Cheyenne has made it a mission to be one of them.
“Our team spends a lot of time putting fresh, new content on our website on a regular basis,” he said. “If AI picks you as a trusted source, that they know your information is correct and up-to-date, they’ll go back to that well again and again.”
Cheyenne is referred to by many as America’s Railroad Capital because it was founded in 1867 when Union Pacific was building the Transcontinental Railroad. That’s one of several hooks Visit Cheyenne uses to get people to spend more time exploring in the city.
The fact that Cheyenne and Big Boy No. 4004 came up in Muessig’s AI query wasn’t all that Walter loved to hear, though. He was also pleased that a passerby had suggested Cheyenne’s Big Boots to the group.
“When we did our resident sentiment study back in the spring, I think it was something like 70% of people from Cheyenne consider themselves ambassadors and tour guides,” Walter said. “So, I really loved to hear that. That tells us anecdotally what the survey told us, too.”
Walter added that he and his group feel they spend a lot of time “chasing shadows.” To hear their efforts are paying off in the real world was great to hear, he said.
AI Changing Travel Strategies
Efforts similar to Visit Cheyenne’s are also playing out statewide, Wyoming Office of Tourism’s Piper Singer told Cowboy State Daily.
“The way travelers search for and plan trips is changing quickly and the Wyoming Office of Tourism is actively adapting our content strategy to meet that shift,” she said. "We create and update content on TravelWyoming.com with AI-powered search in mind.”
The effort includes actively tracking how Travel Wyoming is appearing across AI search platforms, to make sure that the content it is providing fits what people are asking and that Wyoming is being appropriately referenced on relevant inquiries.
The recent British tour group finding Cheyenne through AI is a great example of how the travel industry is changing, Singer added.
“Increasingly travelers may discover a destination or an unexpected stop not by scrolling through traditional search results, but by simply asking an AI tool what they should see along the way,” she said. “Our goal is to make sure accurate, compelling information about Wyoming is available for those tools to find when those conversations begin.”
About Those Oysters
The next Wyoming stop after Cheyenne was Lusk, where the travelers were offered the chance to try out Rocky Mountain Oysters.
“I had to tell them the Rocky Mountain oysters weren’t seafood,” Muessig admitted. “So, they all changed their orders. But I did try them myself.”
Rocky Mountain oysters are actually fried bull’s testicles.
They were not bad, Muessig said, though they were definitely what he would call “chewy.”
The group toured the Badlands in South Dakota before returning to Wyoming to spend the night first at Sheridan and then Cody on their way to Yellowstone National Park. There, some also bought Stetson hats to commemorate the occasion, including Muessig himself.
Then it was off to Seattle, and the group is now on a ship bound for Alaska.
“Everyone was so friendly and nice,” Muessig added. “They really liked that. (Wyoming) is so different from anything they know back home.”
Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.
