With the advancement of science and technology, AI has become widely integrated into the tourism industry. However, owing to current limitations in AI development, AI-powered virtual tourism assistants occasionally experience service failures. To reduce the impact of these failures, AI-powered virtual tourism Assistants typically employ two verbal recovery strategies: apology or gratitude. In order to figure out the most suitable strategy to recover tourists’ satisfaction in the event of service failure, our study use the method of laboratory experiment to exam the mechanism of verbal recovery strategies. The results reveal that the use of a gratitude strategy by AI-powered virtual tourism Assistants results in higher post-recovery satisfaction among tourists. Additionally, trustworthiness plays a mediating role in this process, while the type of service failure moderates the relationship between the verbal recovery strategies and tourists’ post-recovery satisfaction.