The travel industry has a habit of predicting its own extinction.
Every time a new technology crops up, we hear cries of the “End of Times.” It happened with the OTA, it happened with the internet, and now, the hysteria is centered on Artificial Intelligence. Phrases like “game changer” or declarations that agencies are “facing extinction” aren’t just exhausted clichés — they are lazy analysis. My eyes aren’t just tired of reading them; they’re tired of rolling.
Technology is neutral; it reflects the user. Remember the panic over VHS tapes? Hollywood fought the VCR tooth-and-nail, convinced it would kill cinema. Instead, it unlocked a massive home video market. AI is no different — just infinitely more sophisticated than a VCR.
I speak to agency owners, hoteliers, and tech gurus daily. I don’t buy the doom narrative, but I also reject the opposing fantasy that AI is just a harmless sidekick for drafting emails. The reality is somewhere in the uncomfortable middle, and it requires us to cut through the noise.
Let’s rip the band-aid off: AI will eliminate certain kinds of travel work.
This isn’t ideology; it’s mechanics. Tern CEO David Shull built a company philosophy around “eliminating invisible work.” With 9,000 advisors on that platform alone, the shift is already here.
If you define yourself strictly as a travel “agent” — someone who simply executes transactions — you are in trouble. There is now a digital agent that learns faster than you, doesn’t need to sleep, and works for free. If your value proposition is purely mechanical — booking a seat, finding a room — you need to reconsider what you bring to the table.
AI can structure luxury travel, but only humans can validate it. Business travel and transactional bookings are squarely in the crosshairs of this technology. The relationship business is the only safe harbor.
The agent who pushes buttons is obsolete. The advisor who validates the experience is just getting started.
Business travel is squarely in the crosshairs because it is largely transactional. Agentic AI thrives on rules, repetition, and scale. It does not need to be perfect to be disruptive; it only needs to be good enough, faster, and cheaper. Just look at what Roy Golden has achieved with Travelin.AI and its integration with Sabre.
But does this mean travel advisors are finished? No. That argument is as lazy as it is tired.
The real shift is distinguishing between administrative roles and advisory roles.
We are seeing a split in the tech itself: Mechanical AI (e.g., Tern, TravelWits) is an efficiency engine. It summarizes notes and drafts itineraries, saving time in increments. Cognitive AI (e.g., Genieverse, Trip Boutique) understands intent and preferences. As Genieverse’s Neil Robinson says, “where there’s an API there’s an opportunity.”
The industry isn’t thinking about adopting this; it already has.
Two years ago at Traveller Made’s Essence of Marbella, I saw only 5% of luxury professionals in the audience raise their hands to indicate they were experimenting with AI. Fast forward 18 months to the Essence of Sardinia, and that audience hand count jumped to 75%.
This isn’t hype. It is a fundamental economic shift. One tech-savvy Boston-based advisor using platforms like the ones mentioned told me that a trip that once took 40 hours to plan now takes her only 20 hours, cutting her administrative time by half.
That is where the value lies: freeing up humans to do human work — negotiating, validating, and managing clients rather than formatting documents at midnight.
This is where the “AI will replace advisors” argument collapses. Luxury travel is not transactional; it is emotional, reputational, and high stakes.
Clients are not paying for information. They are paying for judgment. They pay for someone who can tell them when a glossy promise won’t hold up in real life, and who understands the difference between what looks good on paper and what feels right on the ground.
AI, as it exists today, cannot carry that responsibility. It can produce fluent answers that are dead wrong. We saw this recently when a convincing TikTok video fooled New Yorkers into thinking the Brooklyn Bridge would host New Year’s Eve fireworks. Spoiler: it didn’t.
That kind of hallucination is amusing on social media. It is not amusing when applied to a six-figure trip, a dietary restriction, or a politically sensitive region. Would I trust AI to research options? Absolutely. I use it for due diligence daily.
Would I trust it to take responsibility for a $100,000 decision? Absolutely not.
But we need to be honest about the ecosystem. Expedia generates roughly 900 billion searches a year, feeding vast data sets into powerful models. No individual “button pusher” can compete with that, and they shouldn’t try.
The advisors who thrive will not be the ones denying AI, nor the ones outsourcing their brains to it. True innovators will use it as leverage to think faster, test assumptions, reduce invisible work, and show up sharper for clients while ignoring the critics and naysayers.
AI is not an earthquake; it is a tectonic shift.
AI will do incredible things, but inevitably it will raise the bar for what “advisor” actually means, and in many ways it already has.
Don’t get me wrong: I hate a moving goalpost just as much as the next person, but why would you ever lower your standards?
The question for 2026 is how well luxury travel professionals adapt without confusing efficiency with value.
Jacques Ledbetter is a Luxury Travel Advisor contributor and founder of The Luxe Ledger newsletter.
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