The future of travel advisors: Why AI will make expertise, more valuable, not less

The travel industry has spent the last two years asking whether AI will replace travel advisors. The evidence points to a different question entirely. Research through to 2026 shows AI is becoming a powerful tool for early-stage inspiration and research, but when travelers are booking complex, high-value trips, making significant financial decisions, or navigating disruptions, they still turn to a human advisor. 

AI may be changing how travelers discover, research and plan their trips, but it isn’t eliminating the need for expertise. In fact, as AI-generated recommendations become increasingly accessible, and increasingly similar, the value of knowing what works, what doesn’t and what to do when things go wrong becomes even more important. For travel advisors, the opportunity is not to compete with AI on information, but to become more valuable where information alone isn’t enough. 

Every September, World Tourism Day asks the industry to look ahead. In 2026, the one question everyone is asking is:  

What does AI mean for the people who’ve spent careers building travel expertise, and for the advisors deciding where to build their business next? 

It’s a question that’s generated more speculation than evidence. The easy narrative, repeated since generative AI first began producing itineraries, is that software is coming for travel advisor’s jobs. Ask a chatbot for a week in Kyoto and it can produce a plausible-looking itinerary in seconds. Why would anyone pay a human for that? And why would an experienced advisor need a host agency behind them at all? 

Because a plausible itinerary and a journey that actually works are not the same thing. Travelers are starting to notice the difference. So are the advisors building their careers around it. 

What the data actually shows 

The story emerging in 2026 isn’t AI replacing advisors. It’s AI sorting the market by what each side does well. 

AI has become genuinely good at the front end of travel planning: inspiration, research, comparing options, generating a first draft of an itinerary. Industry surveys back this up. Expedia’s 2026 travel technology research found travelers reach for AI for price monitoring, itinerary building, and destination discovery – the low-stakes, exploratory end of trip planning.1 Booking, and especially what happens when plans change, still depends on human expertise. 

That distinction matters more as the stakes go up. AI tools remain prone to hallucination: inventing flight schedules, suggesting connections that don’t exist, recommending hotels that are closed. A 2026 Squaremouth survey found that one in three travelers who had used AI to build an itinerary reported receiving false or misleading information.2 On a weekend trip, that’s an inconvenience. On a honeymoon, a multi-generational family reunion, or a corporate team-building retreat, it’s the difference between a memory and a disaster. 

And travelers are responding to that gap in a way few predicted. Among Gen Z, the generation everyone assumed would abandon advisors entirely, 38% now say they prefer working with a human travel advisor over booking platforms.3 But the sharpest version of this trend shows up in exactly the demographic that makes up most of our client base.  

A 2026 ALG Vacations survey found that among Baby Boomers who use AI tools, 59% trust a human travel advisor over AI for final vacation decisions, compared with just 15% who trust AI more, a far wider gap than any younger generation reports.4 Only 12% of Baby Boomers say they completely trust AI-generated travel recommendations, less than half the rate among Gen Z and Millennials.4  

The generation planning some of the biggest and most important trips is also one of the most cautious about relying on AI to make the final call. They’re happy to use it for ideas and research, but when the trip really matters, they still want the reassurance of a human who understands what they need and can step in when things don’t go to plan. 

AI could give advisors more time to focus on clients 

There is another side to this shift. AI isn’t just changing how travelers plan their trips; it’s changing how advisors spend their time. 

For experienced advisors, much of the value they provide has always sat alongside a considerable amount of administrative and transactional work. From building itineraries and managing bookings through to supplier processes and back-office tasks, there are plenty of areas where greater automation could make a difference. 

Alex Locke, 1000MTG General Manager UK, sees this as one of the biggest opportunities for AI in the industry. 

“Having operated across both the corporate and leisure travel sectors for many years, one of the common challenges has always been finding efficiencies and streamlining the booking process – from creating a quality itinerary through to back-office finance and supplier settlement. 

AI could help reduce some of that workload, allowing advisors to spend more time on the parts of the job where their experience makes the biggest difference. 

AI has the potential to bring significant improvements to all these areas, reducing the time, effort and resources required for administrative and transactional parts. This will allow travel advisors to focus on where they add the greatest value: understanding and servicing their clients, sharing deeper travel knowledge, providing personalised recommendations and creating high-quality, bespoke itineraries, rather than being consumed by the mechanics of systems and processes.” 

There is also a potential benefit for people considering a career as a travel advisor. Specialist travel technology and complex booking systems have traditionally required significant training and experience, creating a barrier for people entering the industry. 

As Alex points out, AI could help simplify some of these processes and make the industry more accessible to new talent, while allowing advisors to focus more heavily on the human skills, expertise and relationships that sit at the heart of great travel experiences. 

Expertise is the product, not the itinerary 

This is the more important question on World Tourism Day: what is the real value of a travel advisor in an industry increasingly shaped by AI? It isn’t the ability to produce an itinerary. It’s judgment. The ability to evaluate suppliers, design an itinerary that works in practice, anticipate risks before they become problems, and act decisively when plans change. That’s the work clients are paying for, and it’s the capability experienced advisors build over years, not prompts. 

As Ben Johnson, 1000MTG Executive Director of Sales and Customer Service in North America, puts it, AI is forcing the industry to rethink where the value of an advisor actually sits. 

“I believe AI will force us to rethink value in a positive way. For too long, value in our industry has often been attached to the transaction rather than the expertise behind it. When information and itineraries can be generated in seconds, simply providing options is no longer enough. 

Clients are paying for expertise, judgment, relationships, time saved and the confidence of knowing someone is there when it matters. That doesn’t mean advisors need to prove they can do everything AI can do. In fact, the opportunity is almost the opposite. 

The future will not be about proving that humans can do what AI can do. It will be about demonstrating the value that only genuine expertise can create.” 

AI can’t take responsibility for a trip. It can generate a hundred options in ten seconds, but it can’t stand behind any of them when a traveler is standing in an airport with a missed connection.  

That accountability, someone who knows the traveler, knows the destination, and will pick up the phone, is exactly  what travelers are willing to pay more for. 

But expertise isn’t the only part of the equation. 

Travel is personal. For many clients, the trips being planned aren’t simply transactions. They’re honeymoons, milestone celebrations, strategical meetings and conferences, or once-in-a-lifetime experiences they’ve been saving for years for. 

That makes the relationship between advisor and client just as important as the advisor’s knowledge. 

Jeff King, 1000MTG Head of Sales and Account Management in Australia, has worked alongside travel advisors for years and believes this is the part of the role that technology can’t replace. 

“When people ask me what AI means for travel advisors, I think they expect me to talk about technology. However, I am always drawn to talk about people, because that is what it ultimately comes down to.” 

For Jeff, the value of an advisor has never simply been about mastering the mechanics of putting a trip together. 

“It is their care and the experience they create. They lie awake a little when a client is travelling. They pick up the phone at any hour. AI does none of that, and honestly, I don’t expect it to.” 

That doesn’t mean Jeff sees AI as something advisors should resist. Quite the opposite. 

“What it can do is remove the admin burden, which is worth it, and I embrace it. But I see the tools as something that should give our advisors more room to be human, not less.” 

That may be one of the biggest opportunities AI creates for advisors: not to replace the relationship, but to create more time for it. 

“Our clients don’t stay because a booking was efficient; efficiency is the expectation. They stay because someone looked after them and kept looking after them, trip after trip. That is the part of this business no machine can replace, and it is the part I am most proud of.” 

The advisors who win from here 

The advisors who thrive over the next decade won’t be the ones competing with AI to generate itineraries. They’ll be the ones who let AI do the heavy lifting on research, administration and logistics and spend the time it frees up doing the one thing AI structurally cannot: knowing their clients, standing behind their recommendations, and being the person on the other end of the phone when a trip needs a human. 

The question isn’t whether AI will change the travel advisor profession. It already has. The question is what advisors choose to do with it. 

The routine work will become faster. Research will become easier. Information will become abundant. That makes human expertise more important, not less. The advisors who succeed will be the ones who use technology to remove workload while doubling down on the things clients actually value: judgment, relationships, advocacy and confidence. 

AI can help build the itinerary. The advisor is still responsible for making sure it deserves to be taken. 

Sources 

1. Expedia Group travel technology research, cited in “AI Travel Recommendations Distrusted by Most Travelers, Multiple Reports Find,” Travelers Today, July 2026. https://www.travelerstoday.com/articles/60573/20260723/ai-travel-recommendations-distrusted-most-travelers-multiple-reports-find.htm ? 

1. Squaremouth 2026 traveler survey, cited in “The Only Travel Trend You Need to Know for 2026,” Elliott Report, January 2026. https://www.elliott.org/on-travel/the-only-travel-trend-you-need-to-know-for-2026/ ? 

1. Skyscanner research, cited in “Gen Z Travel Trends 2026: Most Digital Generation Is Turning to Human Advisors,” Travelers Today, July 2026. https://www.travelerstoday.com/articles/60333/20260703/gen-z-travel-trends-2026-most-digital-generation-turning-human-advisors.htm ? 

1. ALG Vacations survey conducted by Atomik Research (1,000 U.S. AI-using adults, fieldwork April 24-28, 2026), cited in “Gen Z is the AI generation. So why are they calling travel advisors more than Boomers?”, Stacker, May 2026. https://stacker.com/stories/travel/gen-z-ai-generation-so-why-are-they-calling-travel-advisors-more-boomers ? ?2