Each time new technology arrives, someone predicts the end of travel agents. The internet was going to replace us. Online booking was going to replace us. Comparison sites were going to replace us. Now it’s AI.
But AI is different. It doesn’t just change how customers book — it changes the value they expect from us before the conversation even starts.
Every customer can now generate a polished, professional-looking itinerary in under a minute. They can compare destinations, plan a two-week road trip and arrive with a plan before they’ve picked up the phone.
The headlines ask whether AI is coming for our jobs. That’s the wrong question. The more relevant one is whether we still demonstrate the value only people can provide.
Judgement call
If our worth lies in finding a flight, recommending a hotel or producing an itinerary, we should expect AI to do more and more of it.
But if that’s how we’ve defined ourselves, we’ve been underselling our profession for years. The best travel agents were never valued for holding information, they were valued for the judgement they applied to it.
Here’s what I keep coming back to: AI can only reason with the information it’s given. It doesn’t know when something important is missing. Great agents do.
A customer asks for help planning a family holiday. A good agent asks who’s travelling. Whether this is the first trip since becoming a parent. Whether someone struggles with stairs. Whether a nervous flyer would do better on a different airline. Whether this is about celebrating 30 years of marriage.
Those questions and others don’t appear in a prompt. They come from curiosity, experience and listening, and that’s where our value begins.
The human touch
The irony is that AI doesn’t make expertise less valuable; it makes it more valuable. As information becomes abundant, judgement becomes scarce.
Customers don’t need another source of information; they have plenty. What they want is confidence. Confidence that they’ve chosen the right destination, the right supplier, the right trip. Confidence that when flights are cancelled and carefully laid plans unravel, someone will pick up the phone, fight their corner and find a solution.
AI can produce an impressive recommendation, but it can’t stand behind it. A travel agent can. When something goes wrong, AI doesn’t own the outcome. A travel agent does.
So should we see AI as a threat? Only if we refuse to evolve. The smartest businesses won’t ignore it and won’t try to out-compute it. They’ll put it to work, speeding up research, drafting, analysing reviews, comparing suppliers, clearing hours of admin in minutes, and then apply the one thing it can’t reliably replicate: professional judgement.
Used well, AI doesn’t replace the human touch, it gives us more time to deliver it. Every hour saved behind the scenes is another spent building relationships.
Become more scripted, and we become easier to replace. Become more curious, personal and accountable, and we remind customers why they chose us in the first place.
