Artificial intelligence can play chess or pass the bar in every state, and do well on every medical credentials exam. It can fill in the next word in a sentence for you, which makes it seem capable of thinking. It can locate a missing child in the universe of refugee camps. But there is one question it cannot answer: “What would make my customer happy?”
Therein lies the future—and indeed the present—of travel advisors, says artificial intelligence expert Dr. Vivienne Ming. Mixed in with some interesting news about what’s coming at Global Travel Collection (Advisor Success teams and preferred cruise product and lifestyle hotels collections), at its partner Delta Airlines (private jet links for those changing planes) and in space, the keynote at GTC’s Elevate conference in New York was a fascinating discussion from a scientist who has spent her career building artificial intelligence.
“We are scared that modern AI is so much smarter than we are—but an interesting truth is that it cannot predict happiness,” Ming said. Scientists have measured AI by giving it questions that have a correct answer. But how to find happiness is not such a question; the correct answer differs from person to person and changes over time. AI “knows everything but it understands nothing—and once you [travel advisors] understand that, you understand why you are in a position to do something amazing.”
Only a human travel advisor can provide what clients are looking for. “We don’t have to think of AI as stealing our jobs. Being creative, exploring the unknown – those are things we alone can do.”
But ChatGPT can help us. When she is at a conference, for example, Dr. Ming likes to walk from one meeting to the next, and she loves chai tea. So her travel team asks ChatGPT to plot a route each morning that passes a coffee shop where she can grab a great cup of chai. “For me, telling me where to stop for my tea is a transformative experience,” she says. “ChatGPT can help you go out on the internet and find just the thing you are looking for – but you are the creative force that understands your client. You are still fundamentally at the heart of solving their problems.”
When teachers ask her how to deal with students asking ChatGPT for answers, she says, she suggests they print out the computer’s reply and say, “Here are the facts. But this is the generic answer – it’s worth a grade of D. If you want an A, your job is to make this your answer.”
News from Delta
From Delta Airlines came interesting news of a private jet partnership that will allow seamless connections with Delta itineraries, and a new class of premium airport lounges. NDCs also are on the way, but not right now, and sustainability is a key long-term goal, said EVP of global sales and distribution Steve Sear.
Chatting with Internova Travel Group’s EVP of partner relations Peter Vlitas, Sear promised that Delta’s investment in Wheels Up private jets will allow customers to get off a Delta flight and onto a jet in a partnership that delivers 100% on time performance. “Operational excellence is going to be the foundation,” he said. “It has to be 100%—they expect that jet to be there, to know the tail number. It has to work every time.”
Premium customers soon also will get a new kind of airport lounge, curated like the lounge in Charles de Gaulle in Paris, with a full dining experience. The first is scheduled to open in Los Angeles in Q3 2024, then in New York, Atlanta, Seattle and Detroit. Delta has opened nine new lounges in the past 15 months, adding 5,000 seats, and is enlarging others, including those in all eight of its hubs.
With the complexities of NDC plans, meanwhile, Delta’s focus is to do no harm to the travel advisor channel. “NDC is a small subset in our distribution strategy,” he said. “We believe the change to NDC is inevitable and we are committed to that, but in an evolutionary way, not a revolutionary way; we are going to do it right, and make it as simple as possible.”
GTC News
For GTC member agencies, the biggest news of the conference is the rollout of a program designed to provide one-on-one business coaching through a new Advisor Success organization, which gives everyone a single contact to whom to turn for help or support.
“This has been a very reactive business for a long time, so we decided we needed to change that,” said Internova CEO JD O’Hara. “We built an account management structure of small pods and taught people how to be consultative so they could work with advisors in small groups, and use the data and build a business plan.”
The point is “to help advisors maximize revenue—one of our most important initiatives,” GTC president Angie Licea told TRO. “I took a page out of my corporate background and said, instead of saying come to us when you need us, we’re going to come to you and tell you what we think you should do. And then you can tell us what you want to do.”
The program offers “a lot of GDS support with the NDC, triage wherever they have disruption related to a customer’s travel, general consultation on their overall business, thinking like a business. My mantra is that in many cases they think they are travel agents but they are business owners. We are educating them on the potential.” When it comes to adding an assistant to help grow the business, for example, travel advisors often say they can’t afford one—but a business person would think, “if I do this, what will the return be?”
Also just beginning to come together is GTC’s first preferred cruise program (though Virtuoso, a GTC member, has one). “As much as we do, we could do more by selling cruises,” Marni Becker, GTC’s senior director of cruise partnerships, told TRO. “My first objective is to train the Advisor Success organization so they all know that cruises are something people should be booking into and give them the education they need. It’s a work in progress; we’re just trying to offer advisors and their clients more opportunities.”
John Lovell, who oversees the Travel Leaders Network program, “is looking to expand that within the rest of the company,” hopefully by Q1 2024, Licea told TRO. Partners in that program include Oceania, Explora and Silversea. “I’d hope by Q1 we have it worked out,” she said. Where GTC sales before Covid were about 50-50 corporate vs. leisure, now they are 42-58, she noted.
Tips for travel advisors
In general, Licea said, “diversification in your portfolio is always a good thing.” Travel advisors should look for opportunities that offer enhanced commissions, including the partners in the GTC hotel program but also all-inclusive resorts and cruise lines.
And if we have learned anything in the past couple of years, it’s that you just never know what the future will bring. Travel advisors need to start thinking about “what happens if,” and charging fees, she said. “At any point, any part of the industry can decide it is going to cut commissions, and you need to have a plan to keep your business viable. We are professional services firms that specialize in lifestyle – we create experiences, we have a wealth of knowledge—but we are not charging the consumer.”
As far as the Israel/Hamas war, GTC is seeing a “little bit of cancellations in the next three months,” she said. “I think people will hold off [traveling there] into next year. We saw the same thing with Ukraine; people were nervous but then bounced right back. But now we are starting to see a guilt perspective; it’s more of that emotional connection than fear.”
On the hotel front, GTC is adding the Curated Hotel program, which will add upscale lifestyle properties like Virgin Hotels New York City, which hosted the conference.
Into the future
Looking into the future, Adida Tepper of Space Perspective offered a fascinating glimpse into the new niche of space travel—not up into outer space at $1 million a pop, but just in a spaceship into the atmosphere, where tickets run about $125,000 – “in the range of luxury travel” for clients who “have been all over the world and now want to see it from the outside. It’s an unbelievable privilege to see our planet in that context of space.”
“Many people think space travel is for everyone else, but we’ve reimagined space to make it easy, something we all can do,” Tepper said. “The demand is massive,” with 1,650 tickets already sold, including many customers who bought all eight seats on a flight—and advisors should consider educating themselves through webinars.
Atmosphere space travel will be a $10-12 billion business by the end of the decade, “limited only by the industry’s ability to service the demand.” The company plans 25-50 flights in its first year, in 2025, with flights from multiple locations and “will work with travel advisors to develop commissionable pre and post-packages.”
Chatting with the attendees
In a quick impromptu chat with TRO, JD O’Hara noted the rise of “mullet travel,” which “starts with a little bit of business on the front end and ends with a little bit of fun on the other.” He just this year sailed RCCL’s Wonder of the Seas on his first cruise ever, with his wife and four kids. “I really enjoyed the product, the hardware, the entertainment,” he said. “I was always apprehensive in the past about being on someone else’s itinerary but there was so much to do” that he already has sailed on three more cruises.
Luxury travel advisor Barbara Khan of Journeys by the Book, whose business often involves complicated international ticketing, likes the idea of the Delta/private jet partnership. “It’s been a while since I’ve booked a private jet but it’s an interesting partnership,” she said. “I’ve been booking air for 30 years, and if I have to call them it’s not over a little thing. I think Delta’s customer service for travel advisors is the best bar none; they are pleasant and knowledgeable and willing to find solutions.”
And Pamela Appleby of Protravel in Beverly Hills, whose business is almost all luxury and entertainment travel, loves the idea of one-on-one support the Advisor Success team offers. “It’s great because there’s somebody specific to talk to, someone who only works with a small number of advisors so they have time for you,” she said. “They can do a printout of your sales in each and every category and tell you where you fit in compared to every other agency in GTC. They can tell you if you are doing as much business class travel, and what you can do to push that.”
Cheryl’s 40-year career in journalism is bookended by roles in the travel industry, including Executive Editor of Business Travel News in the 1990s, and recently, Editor in Chief of Travel Market Report and admin of Cheryl Rosen’s Group for Travel Professionals, a news and support group on Facebook. As an independent contractor since retiring from the 9-to-5 to travel more, she has written regular articles about the life and business of travel agents for Luxury Travel Advisor, Travel Agent, and Insider Travel Report. She also writes and edits for professional publications in the financial services, business, and technology sectors.
