Although I am a strong advocate of AI tools in travel, I believe it will mainly serve as a co-pilot to human sales agents, as buying travel either requires a “Trusted” online brand or the trust built through a human sales interaction. After all, how many other products cost you £2,400 on average, and you only get a promise to deliver at a date often 6 months or more in advance?

Therefore, the primary threat AI tools pose to travel agents is that they allow nearly anyone to become one, leading me to predict a massive wave of new entrant travel agents working from home, part-time or full-time, over the next five years.

Many traditional consortia openly mocked Intelli Travel when it entered the UK market, offering an ultra-low entry point: you pay your money and get access to their platforms, commission, and personal holiday deals, with only a basic level of training required.

However, after signing up 37,000 agents, they are now recognised as a force to be reckoned with, even though some operators still complain about the number of calls they generate and feel that most deliver very few bookings and are only agents to obtain discounts on friends-and-family bookings.

AI Co-pilots will swiftly automate the booking process with tools like my own www.anybetter.com, enabling agents to compare all offers for a specific hotel from leading providers, including optional extras like baggage and transfers, to achieve an accurate final price comparison before booking.

Rather than relying on API feeds that only supply leading prices, this and similar systems use Agentic AI to script through sites to both retrieve pricing information and to deliver a customer to the final checkout page having used their profile information to complete all the required names, ages and address fields, along with the already expressed preferences in terms of baggage, seat selection and transfers.

AI tools also give agents access to the entire knowledge base of the internet about any hotel or destination in the world, so having been on multiple fam trips becomes less of a useful skill and more just a perk of the trade.

This means the primary skill for a travel agent will be generating leads, which is why we will see a wave of agents with million-pound turnovers, who are TikTok or Meta influencers, producing their own content and turning followers into customers.

We are already seeing leading social media players, such as Social Trinity and Trending Travel, enlisting influencers to license their content for lead-generation campaigns with partner tour operators, destinations, or hotel chains. How long before they form their own consortia and license booking technology?

Good agents need not worry, as the same AI tools will help them become even more productive by freeing up their time to focus on where the human agent truly adds the most value: talking to customers to fully understand all their needs and building trust, the basis of both conversion and repeat bookings.

AI-driven businesses like Travel Voice can even clone agents’ voices to assist customers while they are already on the phone or relaxing on the sofa with a glass of wine out of hours. This same voice can then power a personalised Travel Rep that accompanies customers on their phones to manage all their in-destination needs, such as recommending bars and restaurants, arranging taxis and excursions, and more. To be blunt, the agents themselves can never do this, so using AI can actually build trust and further enhance the customer-agent relationship.

Although many in the travel sector still dismiss AI as over hyped and claim that their customers still want the personal touch, smarter players are working out how to deploy AI to slicken up their operations and take a step ahead.

Take an honest look in the mirror and ask yourself, “Which one am I?”