AI for travel advisors, from someone who runs a travel business.
Everything I teach travel professionals about AI, in the order it should be learned. The setup, the systems, and the sales and marketing engine, all of it running inside a real luxury travel company first.
6x Condé Nast Traveler Top Travel Specialist · Certified AI Consultant
teaching the room
your guide, Claire
building the systems
Admitted07Chapters · Aug 2026
read it in order, the order is the point
your guide, Claire
Admitted07Chapters
Inquiry and email✦Proposals and itineraries✦Trip operations✦Marketing✦Research✦Privacy first✦Your AI brain✦Your first AI Employee✦
Inquiry and email✦Proposals and itineraries✦Trip operations✦Marketing✦Research✦Privacy first✦Your AI brain✦Your first AI Employee✦
01
Chapter one · The definition
What is AI for travel advisors?
AI for travel advisors is the practical use of general AI tools to run the repeatable work of a travel business: answering inquiries, drafting proposals and follow-ups, building trip documents, and handling operations such as rooming lists and dietary matrices. It is set up once, taught your voice and your business context, then assigned specific recurring jobs.
That definition is narrower than the hype and wider than most advisors assume. Nobody is handing your clients to software that talks to them unsupervised. What changes is the assembly layer of your business, the sorting, drafting, cross-referencing and formatting that eats your week, which stops needing your hours. The advisor still advises. The judgment, the taste, the supplier relationships and the client relationship all stay human.
02
Chapter two · The problem
How many travel advisors are using AI?
⅔of Virtuoso advisors use AI · Jan 2026
Two thirds of Virtuoso advisors reported using AI tools in their business in a January 2026 pulse survey, and roughly a quarter of the remaining non-users said they planned to adopt within the following year.
So the open question is who set it up properly. In practice the divide runs between advisors who did a one-time setup and advisors who keep opening a blank chatbot, getting a generic answer, and deciding the technology isn't ready. See the Virtuoso figures.
Sources. Virtuoso advisor pulse survey, January 2026, as reported by TravelAge West. The other numbers in this guide come from Claire's own travel businesses and are her first-party data.
03
Chapter three · The work
How do travel advisors actually use AI? The five workflows.
Five workflows account for nearly all of the return: inquiry and communication handling, proposal and itinerary drafting, trip operations, marketing content, and research. Each one is a defined job you hand to a trained AI Employee rather than a prompt you retype.
Workflow
What AI does
What stays human
Inquiry and email
Sorts the inbox, drafts replies in your voice, surfaces what needs you
Sending, and every judgment call
Proposals and itineraries
Drafts day-by-day plans and proposal copy from your notes and call transcripts
In this order, and the order matters more than the tools.
1Create an account and switch off model training
2Write custom instructions that teach the AI your voice
3Load your business contextthe one people skip
4Connect your inbox and calendar
5Build one AI Employee that owns a single job
Run the steps out of order and the results degrade in predictable ways. Connect your inbox before setting privacy and you have handed a tool your client correspondence under whatever defaults it shipped with. Write instructions before loading context and the AI sounds like you but knows nothing about what you sell. The third step, the business context most people skip entirely, is what separates an AI that produces usable work from one that produces plausible filler.
The free Travel AI Starter Kit walks through the first four steps, including my custom instructions word for word. Teaching the AI your voice is the first part of the V.O.I.C.E. Method: Voice, Outcomes, Implementation, Curriculum, and Engagement.
Do chapters four and five with me, live
We build the setup and your first AI Employee together, in 45 minutes.
A Travel AI Employee is an AI set up like a new hire: taught your voice, briefed on your business, connected to the tools where your work lives, and given one defined job it runs every day.
The framing is deliberate, because you already know how to do this. You have onboarded people. You handed them an operating guide, your policies, your products and pricing, and the process start to finish. An AI Employee needs exactly the same four things, saved as a reusable skill.
the best first hire?
The inquiry responder. Speed on a new inquiry is the highest-stakes moment in a travel business, and the lead who emails three advisors usually books with whoever answers first and best.
The member training, the Travel AI Black Book, and weekly live training live inside Travel AI University.
06
Chapter six · The stakes
Will AI replace travel advisors?
It replaces tasks rather than advisors. The judgment, the taste, the supplier relationships, and the client relationship stay human. What changes is that the assembly work, drafting, sorting, and cross-referencing, stops requiring human hours.
The uncomfortable half of that answer is that roles built purely on assembly are genuinely at risk. An assistant whose day was spreadsheets and confirmations is competing with a tool that does it overnight. An advisor whose value is knowing which villa suits which family, and who to call when a flight cancels at midnight, is not.
07
Chapter seven · Privacy
Is it safe to use AI with client data?
It is safe once you turn off model training in your AI tool's privacy settings before your first prompt, keep payment card numbers and government IDs out of any chat, and read each connector's permission list before approving it.
Travel advisors hold unusually personal information: passports, birthdays, home addresses, medical needs, spending patterns. The corporate advice to simply keep company data out of AI was written for organizations with departments to do the analysis another way. A company of one has to make the trade consciously instead, with training switched off, identifiers stripped where they add no analytical value, and genuinely sensitive personal research kept in a separate account.
Claire B. Soares is the founder of Travel AI University, a 6x Condé Nast Traveler Top Travel Specialist, and a Certified AI Consultant with a B.S. in Computer Science. A top 10% enterprise sales executive, she sold $3.4B+ in enterprise software to Google, Microsoft, IBM, Boeing, the federal government, and the DoD, then built $16M+ in leisure travel sales. Every system in this guide runs in her own luxury travel company first.
AI for travel advisors is the practical use of general AI tools to run the repeatable work of a travel business: answering inquiries, drafting proposals and follow-ups, building trip documents, and handling operations such as rooming lists and dietary matrices. It is set up once, taught your voice and your business context, then assigned specific recurring jobs.
How many travel advisors are using AI?
Two thirds of Virtuoso advisors reported using AI in their business in a January 2026 pulse survey, and roughly a quarter of the remaining non-users said they planned to adopt within the following year.
How do travel advisors start using AI?
In this order: create an account and switch off model training, write custom instructions that teach the AI your voice, load your business context, connect your inbox and calendar, then build one AI Employee that owns a single job. The order matters more than the tools.
Will AI replace travel advisors?
It replaces tasks rather than advisors. The judgment, the taste, the supplier relationships, and the client relationship stay human. What changes is that the assembly work, drafting, sorting, and cross-referencing, stops requiring human hours.
Is it safe to use AI with client data?
It is safe once you turn off model training in your AI tool's privacy settings before your first prompt, keep payment card numbers and government IDs out of any chat, and read each connector's permission list before approving it.
What is a Travel AI Employee?
A Travel AI Employee is an AI set up like a new hire: taught your voice, briefed on your business, connected to the tools where your work lives, and given one defined job it runs every day.
Free Masterclass · Every Wednesday
Build your first AI Employee in 45 minutes.
A free, hands-on class for travel advisors, live at 12:00 PM ET. We get you set up in your AI workspace, connect your accounts, and build the first one together. You leave with it running, and the recording is yours to keep.
