Gmail knows more about your business than your best friend does, every vendor you've ever emailed, every quote, every confirmation is in there. I tested that thesis with a single voice prompt: sweep my email and build me a vendor list. It went through roughly 41,000 messages from six months and returned 162 vendors, organized by country, each with a dossier the AI researched from the web. I've had people on payroll spend weeks assembling less.
“Gmail actually knows more stuff about us than probably our parents.”
The build, then the flywheel
- Sweep, then extend: start with six months, then run it back across every year, and every company, you've ever operated. The archive compounds.
- Turn the Rolodex into a pipeline: attach a trip itinerary and ask for ten vendor candidates per line item, drafted quote emails for each, and a tracking spreadsheet. Sourcing becomes an afternoon.
- One deliverability lesson from the trenches: my beautiful branded template emails to new vendors went to spam; the plain-text ones got answered the next morning. When you want a reply from a stranger, write like a human, not a brochure.
Claire's own numbers
The framework, step by step
- 1
Sweep
then extend: start with six months, then run it back across every year, and every company, you've ever operated. The archive compounds.
- 2
Turn the Rolodex into a pipeline
attach a trip itinerary and ask for ten vendor candidates per line item, drafted quote emails for each, and a tracking spreadsheet. Sourcing becomes a
- 3
One deliverability lesson from the trenches
my beautiful branded template emails to new vendors went to spam; the plain-text ones got answered the next morning. When you want a reply from a stra
Claire's own framework from this essay, in the order she teaches it.
Source: Claire B. Soares, from her own travel business and live trainings.
The part nobody notices: it's an asset
A curated, current, country-organized vendor list is exactly what newer advisors would pay for and what your VIP clients experience as magic. Mine is becoming a membership perk. That's the reframe this whole exercise teaches: your inbox is inventory, and you've been treating it like storage. You've been sitting on a product for years. The AI just does the unpacking.
Common Questions
How do you build a vendor list from email?
Ask AI to sweep your inbox and extract every vendor, then organize them by country with researched descriptions. Work that took staff weeks completes in minutes.
Can a vendor list become a product?
Yes. A curated, current, country-organized list is exactly what newer advisors would pay for and what VIP clients experience as magic.
Why do plain-text emails get better vendor replies?
Because they look human. Branded template emails to strangers frequently land in spam, while plain text gets answered the next morning.
Written By
Claire B. Soares
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 luxury travel sales.
About Claire
