Travel advisors handle some of the most personal information in any service business: passport numbers, birthdays, home addresses, family situations, medical needs, spending patterns. So when an advisor tells me they're nervous about putting client details into an AI, I tell them they're right to be, and then I show them the setting that changes the conversation.
“We don't want to share any data with them.”
The 30-second move: opt out of training
Major AI tools let you control whether your conversations are used to train their models: but you have to flip the switch, and almost nobody does before they start typing. It takes about thirty seconds, and it should be the very first thing you do, before your first prompt, not something you get to later. This is Step 02 of my Travel AI Kit for a reason: everything else you build sits on top of it.
Claire's own numbers
How long each setup step actually takes
30 seconds, before your first prompt
a few clicks each
The step that protects your client data is the fastest one in the whole setup, and almost nobody does it first.
Source: Claire B. Soares, from her own travel business and live trainings.
The order matters: privacy, voice, then connections
- Privacy first. Flip the training toggle before anything touches the box. Thirty seconds, once.
- Voice second. Set your custom instructions so the AI knows who you are and how you work.
- Connections last. Only connect your inbox, calendar, and files after the foundation is set: connected tools inherit the privacy posture you configured on day one.
Sensible rules that still apply
The toggle is not a license to stop thinking. Keep the habits you'd expect of any professional handling client data: don't paste full payment card numbers anywhere they don't belong, share the details a task actually needs rather than a client's whole file, and treat AI conversations with the same discretion as your inbox. Privacy is a setup plus a standard, never one setting.
Set up once, benefit forever
The advisors who do this right do it once. The free Travel AI Kit walks the whole sequence, the privacy step, my custom instructions word for word, and the connectors, in one focused afternoon. Do the unglamorous part first, and every prompt after takes off without a second thought about what you just pasted.
Common Questions
Is it safe to put client information into AI?
It is safe once you have turned off model training in your AI tool's privacy settings, which takes about thirty seconds, and once you keep genuinely sensitive identifiers such as full payment card numbers out of any chat.
What is the first thing a travel advisor should do when setting up AI?
Opt out of model training before typing a single prompt. Everything else in the setup, including connected inboxes and files, inherits the privacy posture you configure on day one.
Do I need a paid AI plan to be private?
No. The training opt-out is available on free tiers of the major tools. Paid plans buy capability, not the privacy toggle.
Written By
Claire B. Soares
6× Condé Nast Top Travel Specialist, Certified AI Consultant, and founder of Travel AI University. $3.4B+ in enterprise travel software sold to Google, IBM, Boeing, the federal government, and the DoD; $16M+ in luxury travel sales with Up in the Air Life.
About Claire
