AI vs. Travel Advisors: When Humans Win

Skift Take

Chatbots are relying on 20 years of bad travel writing, while travel advisors can be a real source of truth.

Colin Nagy

Hotels are constantly changing and a great one can turn lackluster in the blink of an eye. Maybe it has a new GM or other personnel changes. Maybe the owners are facing financial pressure. 

Does that hotel with a legendary reputation still offer a truly great experience? You’ll never know before you book if you’re relying only on chatbots and past reviews. 

I give some travel advisors a hard time for acting entitled and expecting shrimp cocktails and a permanent red carpet. But the top tier continues to be very relevant. When they’re doing it right, they can be a source of truth: Regular sets of eyes and ears to see which properties are still up to snuff and which have gotten lazy. 

One surprising development: Gen Z is starting to believe in this value as well. You wouldn’t think that a super digitally native generation, adept at double-clicking, would opt for third-party arbiters to book travel. But in a 2023 survey of 2,000 American travelers, 38% of Gen Z and Millennial respondents said they preferred a traditional travel agent over online booking.

Business Insider recently hypothesized that this trend is partly based on logistics. Gen Z travelers are good at finding locations by mainlining their Instagram and TikTok accounts, but then want to hand over the complexity of bookings to someone else. Social media can be the inspirational spark, but then there are the mundane aspects of travel like securing visas, deals and upgrades — all of which fall into the sweet spot of travel agents.

True Value

But BI missed the other key value of travel advisors: Objectivity and their role as BS detectors. Perhaps Gen Z understands the reality distortion fields of social media and wants a seasoned third party to verify if that location or hotel will live up to the hype. Perhaps the generation that is repulsed by excessive public-image making wants the fact-check that comes from boots-on-the-ground observations. 

Or maybe they want to know how to hack the system, similar to knowing the bouncer at a club and being shown to the right table. Gen Z are hacking credit card points, finding loopholes and bugs in the system, and using technology as leverage. But there are some things you need human help for, and it is actually refreshing: specialized knowledge, the kind that is hard earned on the road, is still valuable. 

Travel advisors can also play a role in finding the lesser known gems: the smaller boutiques and founder-led labors of love that don’t always have the big brand PR war chest and soft diplomacy.

For all the promise of large language models, they are ingesting a lot of the garbage created in the past 20 years from SEO-driven travel content and bad writing, then regurgitating it back to us with hallucinations and all. 

When money, time, and vacations are at stake, putting too much emphasis on tech-driven unreliable narrators could be foolish at best and disastrous at worst. So it is not time to write the eulogy for travel advisors just yet: You can’t Google what they learned on their last visit to Baku and ChatGPT can’t tap into their lived experiences to craft an itinerary. That’s real value, even for generations used to dealing mostly with their phones.