Even for a cohort as resilient as travel advisors, the rise of artificial intelligence inevitably triggers fears that the robots are taking over and coming for their jobs one bleep-bloop at a time. Advances in A.I. could leave 300 million jobs vulnerable to automation, according to a 2023 report from Goldman Sachs economists Joseph Briggs and Devesh Kodnan. What’s more, the economists’ analysis of the tasks involved in more than 900 jobs led them to conclude that about two-thirds of U.S. occupations are susceptible to A.I. automation.

Innovation, of course, creates new opportunities. Some 60% of workers today have occupations that didn’t exist in 1940, according to a study from economist David Autor. Naturally, some jobs also go obsolete from technological advances: bowling alley pinsetter, switchboard operator, town crier, and toll booth operator to name a few. But for others, like travel advisor, technology has a long history of enhancing the way they’re able to access information, communicate, and maximize their ability to perform.

With the advent of each invention, there’s been much Sturm und Drang from folks who fear the obsolescence of the travel advisor profession. A.I. feels a lot like another the-internet-killed-the-travel-advisor story. It didn’t, of course. Nor did the rise of OTAs. Ditto A.I. The democratization of information and technological utilities has never leveled the industry. If anything, the recent popularity of ChatGPT, with travelers going so far as to generate itineraries using the chatbot, has likely revealed the shortcomings of A.I. but also the ways travel advisors can employ A.I. to enhance their ability to execute for clients.

Travel advisors’ relationship to A.I. runs the gamut from absolute repulsion to warm acceptance. One thing is clear, though: the quickly adopted technology is sticking around. Some are approaching it with hesitant skepticism, others with open arms.

Gaining efficiencies by outsourcing certain tasks to A.I. in order to then focus on more nuanced elements of travel planning is the cornerstone of Virtuoso’s approach to A.I.

It’s a wave: Ride it or get washed away.

Whatever each particular advisor’s relationship to generative A.I. may be, it’s crystal clear that artificial intelligence cannot replace actual intelligence earned from boots-on-the ground experience in a location or extensive client work that allows for empirically better advice and decisions. Add in empathetic understanding of a client’s needs when planning a trip and fleet-footed action plans when something goes awry, and the role of advisor seems secure. Some want to kick it old-school and stick to what’s familiar. Others want to gain efficiencies in their workflow through A.I. and enhance the quality of their services they’re providing.

The ability for travel advisors to adapt to challenges and integrate new technology is part and parcel of their survival capabilities. And though the speed at which advisors are adopting A.I. varies, it’s demonstrably true that A.I. is more asset than liability for the industry.

The state of play: Travelers using A.I. discover its shortcomings

Whether travel advisors like it or not, travelers are already employing A.I. to plan their trips. In fact, a study from market research consultancy Longwoods International revealed that a third of travelers admitted they’d use ChatGPT to plan their vacation.

Travelers now have the opportunity to have an all-the-more frictionless A.I. planning experience: in April 2023, Expedia unveiled a ChatGPT-powered travel planner in its app that recommends hotels, restaurants, and more based on conversations in the chat. There’s even an Expedia plugin for ChatGPT that facilitates direct bookings on the Expedia website according to itineraries discussed with the chatbot. That innovation could be construed as a double-whammy for travel advisors faced with the technology threats of yore (OTAs) and of late (A.I.). This sort of integration promises to catch on with other OTAs like Priceline and Booking.com.

According to a recent survey conducted by travel insurance company VisitorsCoverage, when asked if they will utilize A.I. in the future to plan an ideal trip, a resounding 59% answered “yes, it is the future.” But the A.I.-generated information is dangerously imperfect. The infamous rise of A.I.-written travel books during the widespread adoption of ChatGPT in 2023 revealed the shortcomings of A.I. in its current form. Much of the information proved false or faulty. With much of the data inputs limited after 2021, the guides actually recommended long-since closed restaurants and hotels. Plus, many of the guides extolled the virtues of mass-aggregated highlights that any traveler would have on his or her radar. And because of pooled information related to historical figures or buildings bearing their names sometimes nationwide, these error-prone books often contained incorrect information.

Of course, we live in a world beholden to the algorithm. The more we buy on Amazon, click on news articles, stream movies on Netflix, favorite on Instagram, and converse in general (Big Brother is always listening), the smarter technology becomes at recommending books, shows, gifts, and travel experiences. Iterative machine learning ingests the preferences and generates offerings that cater to the taste. The thought is that A.I. can be smarter about getting to know the tastes, but it still lacks the human touch and experience. It may have something of a brain, but it lacks a heart, one fueled with passion for discovering beautiful corners of the world, experiencing new cultures, and soaking up the pleasures of transformative travel.

The true transformation of A.I. in the travel industry may be in assisting travel advisors in doing their jobs more efficiently and more effectively as a way to supplement their vast experience and human intelligence.

How top A.I. tools can transform your travel business

• ChatGPT : From emails to blog posts, social media posts and beyond, ChatGPT has its limitations but is far and away the first A.I. tool anyone should start with.
• Midjourney : Stop searching for (or paying for) the “perfect photo” and create it with generative A.I. instead.
• Grammarly : Once a simple grammar checker, this tool has exploded in popularity and features. Imagine an entire customer service team speaking in one, unified, professional voice across email, chat widgets, social media and more.
• Semrush : This SEO tool has been reimagined with A.I. bells and whistles, giving single users the ability to do the same work of massive teams in a fraction of the time.
• CapCut : The second-most downloaded app in the world, this tool doesn’t just let you use A.I. to edit videos. It will even create them for you.

Helping advisors do their job, eliminate drudgery, and focus on clients

Advisors are getting wise to the benefits of A.I. enhancements and incorporating it into their own workflow. TobyAI, for one, helps travel advisors tackle a number of tasks, from itinerary creation to biography creation for the lead generator Agent Profiler. The A.I. tool can also help them with more mundane tasks like email correspondence and social media posts. It allows advisors to toggle back and forth between ChatGPT, Claude, or Google Bard depending on the task at hand and also gives them access to DALL-E 3, the image generating tool from ChatGPT.

William Lee, a travel agent and head of marketing at Chima Travel in Akron, Ohio, says his firm has embraced A.I. for many components of its business, with forays into Claude, Midjourney, Perplexity, Photoshop’s A.I. (Adobe Firefly), Notion A.I., and Fathom A.I. in addition training its own bots to help in various situations.

Chima Travel largely uses A.I. for assistance with creative work – putting together pamphlets, promoting itineraries on its website, punching up visuals for presentations. Midjourney, for example, is capable of creating customized realistic images for instances when the advisory doesn’t have internal images on file or when stock images prove insufficient. Perplexity allows Chima Travel to expedite research and incorporate sources into reports, and the team’s experimentation with Claude and ChatGPT – along with greatly anticipating OpenAI’s Sora – is part of a project to determine which might be best in terms of helping to generate informational blog posts.

For Lee of Chima Travel, A.I. does not replace the human touch but just removes some of the drudgery from his work life and makes other tasks more efficient.

Lee said he’ll also feed ChatGPT info on the trip such as flights, hotels, activities, and dates, and the bot ingests it all to help create a full itinerary he can vet to then give to clients.

Upchurch of Virtuoso said his company has looked to employ A.I. first by thinking about how it might benefit the end consumer looking to book a trip.

Virtuoso has also partnered with A.I.-driven technology players, including Microsoft.

Increasing the quality of travel advisor services through A.I.

Beyond the efficiencies gained, A.I. can also help travel advisors increase the quality of their work.

Creating a viable itinerary is a necessity, but how it ultimately resonates with the traveler is the true test.

A.I. can, of course, sketch out an itinerary for a trip, but the new technology might not ultimately serve the travelers and leave them with a positive experience. A travel advisor can gain efficiencies through A.I. but must bring that human touch to ensure travelers have a positive experience planning the trip and experiencing the journey.

It’s also possible that A.I. will help planning within specialized travel niches that might require more sophisticated data analysis to get credible and actionable results. More than half of Virtuoso advisors believe A.I. will play a role in the future of sustainable tourism, according to a new Virtuoso survey.

Within a month of introducing A.I. on a small scale at Fox World Travel, 80% of vacation travel advisors there had adopted the A.I. assistant and were already employing it for research and in the drafting of emails. Some advisors used A.I. to simplify their messaging as they catered to specific clients.

The energy Fox associates spent in crafting messaging, whether to vendors, customers, or internal associates, had previously proved time consuming.

Now the A.I. assistant helps Hilgendorf and his team write first drafts based on bullet points and key themes they provide. It then allows Fox associates to just focus on the editing, putting the message in their own words with finesse. Hilgendorf and his team now spend all of their creative energy in thinking about their audience, their specific needs, and how they can make the message more personal. With A.I., the messages take less time to execute and ultimately result in higher quality output that will better serve the clients.

Ivan Saprov, CEO and founder of Voyagu, a travel advisor platform with machine-learning technology that provides tools to automate search and workflow to increase sales and efficiency, said his platform allows travel advisors to search for travel products such as flights, create personalized travel itineraries, and generate proposals for travelers.

At Voyagu, his team uses ChatGPT to assist advisors in navigating through their customer base more effectively and to help increase their performance and business metrics by analyzing data regarding customer behaviors and agent interactions.

Five A.I. tools to supercharge your productivity

• Undetectable AI : Worried your A.I.-generated content will sound, well, like A.I.-generated content? Use this tool to take A.I. text and make it sound more human and bypass detection tools from Google or email platforms.
• Clara : Stop going back-and-forth about calls, meetings or zooms. Instead, CC Clara on your emails, and it will go through each recipients calendar and find times for you to connect.
• Alli : Potentially the most powerful SEO tool there is, Alli promises everything to keep your website running smoothly all with a couple of clicks on their dashboard.
• Otter.ai : Imagine a world where every meeting comes complete with searchable transcripts and automatically generated action items.
• Coral AI : Upload any document (from a blog post to a legal contract) and get it translated into layman’s terms, summarized and more.

A healthy dose of skepticism and caution

As travel advisors have already realized, they themselves are a necessary ingredient to planning a trip, even if A.I. is involved. Yes, ChatGPT can create itineraries. But they’re not vetted. An expert hasn’t necessarily pounded the pavement. A lot of the information is just scraped data that’s repurposed as suggestions.

Sahara Rose De Vore, the Milwaukee-based founder and CEO of the Travel Coach Network, a global community of travel coaches, many of whom are travel advisors, thinks “travel is far too personal” for A.I. to take on the entire planning.

Aggregated information and data-scraped itineraries aren’t necessarily going to provide a traveler with the best, personalized itinerary. It lacks a human touch.

In all likelihood, A.I. will help in simple bookings – getting from A to B and finding a hotel near a particular location. It’s possible for travelers or travel advisors alike to put in detailed prompts to create itineraries. But they’re largely unvetted. If used alone, it means travelers are rolling the dice.

Tom Abraham, the Bali-based founder of World Travel Index, an online travel advisor website, began experimenting with ChatGPT 3 in November 2021. After leaving his IT career in banking and insurance to travel the world and start a travel advisory, he found himself craving a place with reliable information collated en masse.

He encountered many moments where he wished to access all travel-related data and information at an aggregated level but often encountered conflicting data. One person’s experience can be a valuable data point, especially if that person is reliable and in-the-know. Of course, a travel advisor cannot be ubiquitous. Though he may have traveled to Bangkok, it’s possible he hasn’t been there in 10 years and is lacking up-to-the-minute 411. Pooling the data and feedback of thousands of travelers can be effective.

That said, like De Vore, Abraham found travel advisors that use A.I.-generated itineraries may find the information faulty and insufficient.

And beyond the inadequacies of A.I. to plan trips, there are other elements that are giving advisors pause, such as data protection concerns.

Hilgendorf of Fox World Travel said his team started using its own A.I. personal assistant in September 2023 by taking Microsoft’s private integration of ChatGPT and building it into the advisory’s Azure environment before deploying it into Microsoft Teams.

Privacy considerations drove this specific approach to A.I. integration.

The inability for A.I. to bring the human touch to trip planning and also some of the data protection concerns around this new-fangled technology mean that travel advisors are all the more of the essence.

Not a replacement - travel advisors as resilient survivors

At the dawn of the internet, fears mounted that it would kill the travel advisor. Reality proved quite the contrary: the internet, by increasing the information at advisors’ fingertips, has allowed them to do their jobs in a more efficient and informed capacity. Same goes for A.I.

When it comes to A.I., said Virtuoso’s Upchurch, travel advisors have nothing to fear.

Indeed, rather than fearing knowledgeable travelers with access to information, advisors embraced the opportunity to have more successful collaborations with them.

In today’s world, where everyone can find an answer, Upchurch said, mastering the art of asking the right questions has also evolved into a valuable skill.

Ultimately, the threat of A.I. is greatly exaggerated.

That’s exactly how advisors got through the advent of OTAs, the aftermath of 9/11, the 2008 financial crisis, and the Covid pandemic. Nimbly navigating a new set of circumstances is all part of survival.

Whereas A.I. might enhance the ways travel advisors do their jobs, Lee of Chima Travel doesn’t think consumers are finding it essential.

Saprov of Voyagu also doesn’t believe A.I. will take travel advisors’ jobs. On the contrary, it enhances their ability to knock it out of the park.