If you’ve never called in to watch a Tern webinar before, one thing you should know is that the attendees are very enthusiastic.
The chat is constantly scrolling up the screen with new messages from travel advisors across the globe saying “Hi from California!” or raving about a newly announced release with exclamations like, “OMG amazing!” or just simply exclaiming, “YES!”
Each webinar the Tern team takes turns talking about the various new features the platform has recently developed. CEO David Shull will kick it off on high level themes before Molly Johnson, the company’s head of product, takes the reins with more big updates.
Then, Tern’s head of design, Brad Turner comes on, and the chat simply explodes with messages flying up the screen faster than one can even read.
In a video interview in January, Luxury Travel Advisor sat down to learn more about the professional path of this industry heartthrob.
The funny thing is that when Brad Turner talks about his career, he doesn’t start with travel.
He starts with Michigan.
Turner grew up in Bay City, about two hours north of Detroit and a place he describes as unremarkable in the best possible way.
In college at Michigan Tech, he found his first creative outlet in Adobe Photoshop and photography, tinkering with design tools in his spare time.
It was that tinkering that got him noticed by a then-teaching assistant named David Shull.
Perhaps ever the go-getter, Shull recruited Turner to design marketing materials for a student organization. Then came a scrappy 2014 startup idea for a wearable concept which they pitched before the Apple Watch ever launched.
It didn’t go anywhere, but it did lead to something more consequential for Turner and Shull: a position at a new company named Handshake, an educational startup based in San Francisco.
Handshake, then a fledgling college recruiting network, hired Shull as one of its earliest employees and Shull asked if he could bring two interns with him. Turner was one of them.
What began as an unpaid internship in a house full of college coders became a four-year crash course in how startups actually grow.
From 2016 to 2020, Turner watched Handshake evolve from a near-zero customer base to a national recruiting platform, eventually expanding to hundreds of employees.
He finished college while working remotely and saw firsthand what it meant to build what he calls a “three-sided marketplace” which connected students, employers, and universities — a critical lesson that he’d eventually bring with him to a more pivotal role in travel.
In early 2020 Turner left San Francisco. His partner, Jack, had grown up in Philadelphia, and the couple wanted a different pace of life. San Francisco, Turner recalls, could feel one-dimensional.
“Every conversation orbited around tech, ambition, and work,” he said.
In Philadelphia, he felt more relaxed, balanced, and closer to family.
(Tern)
As the pandemic set in, Turner joined a small health-tech company and rediscovered what it meant to work with a tightly knit team. The experience rebuilt his confidence after being seen as “the intern that grew up” back in Silicon Valley.
Meanwhile, Shull had left Handshake and launched Tern, an AI platform for travel advisors which has earned increasing attention and usage over the last few years.
Turner watched from a distance as former Handshake colleagues began migrating over to Shull’s new company. While joining tempted curiosity, he still liked his job and the balance he had in Philly.
The turning point came when his company asked him to lay off the two designers he managed. Walking home that day, Turner texted Shull.
“Any chance you need design help?” read the message.
A Leap of Faith
At the time, Tern didn’t have the budget for another full-time hire, but Turner offered to join anyway. Relying on three months of severance, his intuition was telling him that working on a team with such strong bonds was worth the risk.
“It felt like going back to work with my best friends,” he remarks about nudging his way into the company in December of 2023.
That leap of faith has proved to be prescient as the company has gained significant momentum.
Funny enough, one defining moment of his path didn’t happen in a boardroom, but backstage on a cruise ship during Tern’s user conference at sea last year.
The event was partly a product sprint, partly an advisor summit, but nevertheless an ambitious experiment: five days of live trainings, keynotes, feature releases, and product development in real time.
After the final keynote wrapped, Turner stood backstage with Shull and the team.
“I’m so lucky,” he recalls thinking. “People’s jobs aren’t supposed to be this rewarding.”
(Tern)
Ambition on the Horizon
Tern now has more than 9,000 advisors on its platform and, according to Shull, processed $170 million in bookings this past January alone (nearly $2 billion annualized). The team stands at roughly 40 people — including the newly acquired Lucia platform, which came under the Tern umbrella soon after a $17 million round of funding.
Twelve months earlier, that booking figure was $100 million, which signals that the value of the platform’s bookings has nearly doubled in the last year.
Shull recently wrote on LinkedIn that the narrative predicting the demise of travel advisors — first OTAs, then mobile, now AI — is wrong. Full disclosure: this publication agrees.
His argument is simple enough: Remove invisible admin work to help advisors grow, and it’s Turner who sits at the center of that bet.
The platform’s challenge, Turner explains, resembles Handshake’s marketplace problem but with more complexity.
Advisors, suppliers, and travelers all want straightforward outcomes. However, connecting the dots to achieve those outcomes requires not just well-designed software, but understanding workflows that often exist only in people’s heads.
According to Shull’s LinkedIn post, Tern’s engineering team can build faster than its product team can think of new features thanks to the company’s own internal AI adoption.
The company’s build efficiency has become so high that the challenge no longer lies with the development process itself, but knowing exactly what to build.
For Turner, the hardest part has become managing the expanding breadth of expectations. For example, what started as a CRM became an agency back office, then group features were introduced. Now supplier integrations are the main priority for this year.
This expansion of expectations could be in part attributable to the pace of the company’s production, as it claims to put out new releases on almost a weekly basis.
In recent months, Turner has focused on building direct integrations with suppliers such as Project Expedition, allowing advisors to quote and book tours inside Tern without re-entering client credit card details.
While Shull repeatedly stressed during the December 2025 webinar that Tern will remain a tech company, the question lingers about the allure of inevitable ambitions.
More than 9,000 advisors and growing is a number that is comparable to the size of some consortia and as the company courts more partners to integrate, Tern could potentially become its own B2B distribution channel for suppliers.
But that’s a topic for another day and is reportedly not aligned with the company’s current priorities.
That’s in part why insurance integrations are next on the list, as Turner cautions that hotels present a deeper design challenge — not just technically, but also politically given commission structures and booking channel sensitivities.
In short, the goal for 2026 is pretty cut and dry: Double output without doubling headcount, an ambitious roadmap for a team that’s already as lean as it is mean.
More personally, and parallel to his professional acceleration, Turner and his partner Jack are beginning another journey: starting a family through surrogacy.
The process has tapped some of his startup instincts. For example, building setups and iterating through uncertainty, but this time it of course has higher emotional stakes.
After months of searching, they had their first promising call with a potential surrogate.
Turner stepped outside and nearly cried, because for the first time it felt real.
The match didn’t work out, but “the journey is continuing with all the emotional highs and lows that come with it,” he adds.
Intuition and Heart
The unifying theme in Turner’s story is not about travel or even about AI. Instead, it’s about people: the mentor who recruited him, the colleagues he followed, and now the advisor community that has flooded his personal social media posts with a deluge of support as he begins to build a family.
Success is sometimes about being in the right place at the right time. At other times it’s about keeping an open heart and an open mind.
Setting out to design the future of travel infrastructure was never the ambition for Turner; he simply followed the right team and his intuition into an industry with outdated technology and a host of big problems to solve.
Now, as AI accelerates development cycles and Tern seems to be positioning itself as the connective tissue between advisors and suppliers, Turner’s task ahead is more about judgment than about code.
Ultimately the travel industry is a people business, a reality which guides what is probably the most important part of his job: figuring out how to make AI reflect the best version of its users and their businesses.
That’s exactly the reason the chat explodes whenever he appears in a Tern webinar.
Jacques Ledbetter is a Luxury Travel Advisor contributor and founder of The Luxe Ledger newsletter.
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