More than 700 people packed the fifth annual Virtuoso Travel Tech Summit, proof that technology is no longer a side conversation for travel agencies. Five years ago, the Summit fit into a “very small room,” founder Gilad Berenstein said. Now, the ballroom-sized Summit has a new focus on closing the technology gap and accelerating adoption across travel.
Virtuoso says 74 percent of member advisors and 70 percent of preferred partners now use AI. But “use” covers a huge spectrum, from occasional experimentation to rebuilding the way a business operates.
That became clear to me over lunch. I was seated with about six travel advisors who seemed to be operating in completely different technological eras.
Michele Schwartz, founder of Jet Setting with Me, uses Claude throughout the day and has rebuilt much of her business around newer technology, including Tern. Others at the table had barely experimented with AI, largely because they didn’t know where to start and, working within older, established agencies, don’t have ownership pushing for adoption or investment.
That crystallized my biggest takeaway: the AI divide in travel isn’t between believers and skeptics anymore. It’s between those putting AI to work every day and those still figuring out the first steps.
That gap is only getting wider.
From Legacy Systems to Virtuoso Intelligence
The morning mixed talks and panels with product showcases. TBO.com came on as the Tech Summit’s first-ever sponsor, while companies including Bilt, Sion, Advance, Otonoma and Toggle showcased their technology alongside member case studies. Virtuoso’s Tech Marketplace extended that conversation, bringing together 25 vendors and partners.
Virtuoso leaders debuted what they are deliberately calling an Intelligence capability, not a product rollout.
“This is still very much in beta,” Helen McCabe Young, Virtuoso’s senior vice president of product, reinforced.
Built on the network’s own data, it allows advisors, partners and Virtuoso staff to query information they already have permission to access, making the network’s collective knowledge easier to find and use.
An advisor planning a trip to an unfamiliar destination could ask who elsewhere in the network has booked or traveled there, surfacing expertise and connections they may not have known existed. The same could apply to finding a highly specific property or experience.
The capability is being rolled out globally in early-access waves through My Virtuoso, at no additional charge for now. Virtuoso stressed that this is the foundation, with products and experiences to be built on top of it as the company learns how members and partners want to use it.
Security is central to that development. Virtuoso said the capability was included in its latest ISO 27001 recertification (a top global information security standard), with data encrypted, access audited and permissions tied to the individual user and organization.
The underlying travel infrastructure could certainly use the help. In a private Braindate after the Summit, Paul Kearney, senior vice president of technology at Virtuoso, walked me through decades-old GDS technology, disparate supplier systems, inconsistent commission processes and plenty of manual work.
His concise assessment? “It’s still a bit of a mess,” he said.
That was the irony of the day: while the industry is talking about autonomous AI agents, much of travel is still running on legacy systems that have been around for decades.
The New Goal: Kill the Admin, Not the Advisor
One thing was strikingly absent: anxiety about AI replacing travel advisors. That conversation has moved on. Shane O’Flaherty — Microsoft’s global director of travel, transportation, and hospitality — summed up the progression neatly: “Year one, it was a toy. Year two, it was a tool, and now year three, it’s our partner.”
It comes back to a philosophy Virtuoso Chairman and CEO Matthew Upchurch has championed for years: “Automate the predictable, so you can humanize the exceptional.”
Korea-based Tidesquare Travel showed what that can look like, saying its use of AI has reclaimed 10 to 12 hours of work a day, more than 200 hours a month, by automating routine tasks. Its philosophy: “AI first, human final.”
After years of hearing that technology might kill the travel advisor, the goal with AI now is to let it kill the admin.
Where Advisors Still Have the Edge
Brand USA Chief Innovation & AI Officer Janette Roush said the quiet part out loud: AI can already create a decent itinerary, and it’s only going to get better. She pointed to a global Booking.com study showing that 91 percent of travelers are excited to plan a trip with AI, but just 6 percent trust it to make the booking. Virtuoso noted another limitation: AI travel recommendations can have as much as 50 percent duplication, basically homogenizing the experiences travelers are looking for.
“That gap is your opportunity,” Roush told the room, because “planning and judgment are two different jobs.”
AI might know every hotel rate. What it doesn’t have is the accumulated personal knowledge an advisor has about a client: that she gets seasick, that her daughter got engaged at a particular vineyard, or the cell number of the GM who can solve a problem at 11 p.m. The opportunity, Roush said, is to capture that proprietary knowledge so AI can eventually make use of it, too.
The idea surfaced again during the opening panel, where Cara Whitehill of Travel Tech Insider hot take was for advisors to start thinking more about curation than personalization. Hyper-personalization can steer clients toward one supposedly perfect answer, when part of the pleasure is considering possibilities and making an informed choice.
When recommendations become almost free, taste, judgment and curation become more valuable, not less.
AI Adoption is Now a Leadership Challenge
The innovation panel brought the adoption gap into even sharper focus. Henley Vazquez of Fora said people are at “very different places in their adoption of AI,” while Rebecca Masri of Little Emperors described some as “living in the future” and others reluctant to change how they’ve always worked.
Both companies are actively upskilling their teams, reinforcing another theme of the day: AI adoption is a leadership and training problem as much as a technology one.
Asked for her advice to agency leaders, Vazquez was considerably less corporate: “F*ck around and find out. You don’t know what you can do until you just start doing it.”
Berenstein’s point was that there is no single correct way to innovate. Doing nothing, however, increasingly looks like a choice.
Upchurch offered useful advice for navigating all of it. When confronted with technology that feels threatening, rather than dismissing it, ask: “What could be right about this, and why is it working?”
The advisor using Claude every hour and the advisor who doesn’t know where to begin are both still here. That gap is also shaping next year’s Summit, which will split into two tracks: one focused on practical AI applications for now, the other looking further ahead at emerging technologies and what comes next.
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