More travel agencies look to AI tools to grow advisors’ productivity: Travel Weekly

Sifting through hundreds of emails. Searching for the perfect travel products from a sea of options. Crafting detailed itineraries. All are elements of what a typical day can hold for a travel advisor. 

But imagine a digital assistant that can handle a lot of the grunt work, freeing up advisors to do what they do best: connect with clients.

This digital innovation is becoming the new reality in the industry as generative AI has begun to reshape the profession one prompt at a time. But even now, experts say, the industry is only seeing the tip of the proverbial AI iceberg.

Since the first public release of tools like ChatGPT in late 2022, the agency community has been in a sprint of experimentation with the technology and how it can be applied to the profession via partnerships, acquisitions and the development of in-house tools.

The goal is not to cut humans out of the equation but instead to use AI to handle the more mundane tasks, enabling advisors to focus on the personal relationships a computer can’t replicate.

Christine Vincent

“We’re in the same spot now [with AI] that we were when computers first hit travel agencies,” said Christine Vincent, senior director of online strategies and consumer engagement for Travelsavers and the Network of Entrepreneurs Selling Travel (NEST). “Most people underestimated them, but look what happened.”

Agencies are taking divergent paths to bring AI to their advisors, from strategic acquisitions to partnerships and developing technology in-house.

For instance, Fora acquired AI startup Legends to integrate its technology into the agency’s platform. Legends’ platform collects data on customer behavior and preferences and will be used at Fora to augment advisors’ interactions with clients and enable smarter lead-matching.

Travelsavers has partnered with TobyAI to customize its technology for advisors via marketing platform AI Connect, released last fall with ongoing enhancements. It’s loaded with exclusive promotions around which to create content. Vincent said it has cut marketing time from hours a week to hours a month for some users.

“AI is the next evolution to how we serve clients,” she said. “It saves time. It scales ideas and puts energy back into human connection, the things that machines can never replicate.”

Embark Beyond (No. 47 on Travel Weekly’s Power List) is launching an AI-powered platform, Embark Blackbook, that will match client profiles with product profiles. It will also feature a dashboard dedicated to clienteling, a retail strategy based on forming strong relationships with clients (a client loves fishing? It will suggest an article to share with them). It has a September launch date.

OutsideAgents.com (No. 27 on the Power List) this month launched the AI-powered Maggie, which generates itineraries and proposals in addition to email and social media marketing campaigns.

Chad Burt

OutsideAgents co-president and co-owner Chad Burt said that advisors should be creating “recipe books”: a collection of their go-to prompts for generative AI systems like Maggie. That is the modern-day equivalent of the Rolodex of yore that many agents considered an essential business tool. Agents, in turn, should apply the time saved using AI to more important tasks, like client connection.

“Those travel agents that choose to ignore it, or even choose not to embrace it fully, will suffer,” Burt said.

While enthusiasm for AI is high, it still presents challenges, including ensuring it is trained on high-quality data and adoption among advisors reluctant to change.

Right now, many in the agency space are focused on building AI tools, said Jake Peters, co-founder and chief product and technology officer at Fora. There are a number of use cases, like parsing booking confirmations, embedded writing assistance and data cleanup.

“I think what will be very interesting is how AI will sit within the booking technology space, and I don’t know exactly how this is going to play out,” Peters said.

Jake Peters

Fora has a feature called “magic search” that is live for some advisors, enabling them to have a prompt-based discussion about what to book for clients. It then recommends hotels. While the feature “works pretty well,” Peters said, it suffers from the same problem all AI tech does: Something is built out, and a few months later, a new AI model comes out, or pricing changes.

“We’re simultaneously making the product better, while we also change the product infrastructure,” he said. 

Fora has a dual approach for AI technology. Its team is simultaneously working on projects for the next year as well as projects that will work for the next five years. It’s hard to do that, Peters said, but the agency is allocating resources.

He said he believes AI technology is not too far out from listening to a conversation between an advisor and a client and displaying, in real time, options like hotel availability on specific dates with an easy-to-send booking link the advisor can share.

While the technology and its uses continue to develop, advisors are encouraged to use it.

“Just try it,” Vincent said. “You don’t have to be tech-savvy in order to learn how to use it. You just have to be curious. Come from a place of curiosity and look for ways to work more efficiently and smarter.”

Correction: Christine Vincent is senior director of online strategies and consumer
engagement for Travelsavers and NEST; an incorrect title appeared in an earlier version of this article.