With the development of communication and information technologies, smart tourism is gradually changing the tourism industry. Internet of Things (IoT) plays an important role in smart tourism. However, it is a challenge to apply IoT for smart tourism because of the need for dealing with a vast amount of data and low-latency communication. To this end, in this article, we outline 5G and AI-empowered IoT systems for smart tourism. Efficient data transmission based on 5G technology and smart data processing based on AI technology are significant to unlocking IoT based smart tourism applications. To demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed method, we perform a case study on POI recommendation. The experiment results demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our proposed method.