We got so many great stories, we’ve divided this article into two! Read part 1 here.

You know it’s going to be a great year when a story about what’s new ends up being about how to cope with all the business coming our way.

On the drawing board for 2024, many travel advisors report, are strategies to focus on high-end clients; hire assistants; host more groups; charge fees—or raise them. Some are taking a step into new technologies; others are building new kinds of road maps and vision boards to keep track of where they are Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been a crazy December for travel advisor Debbie Sebastian, with sales up 30% over last year in what typically is a slow month. So, when a client demanded an immediate answer to her request for an Iceland itinerary, Sebastian turned to her new assistant, Toby, for help.

“Toby, I need you to write me an itinerary for Iceland that involves less than three hours of driving each day and includes the following list of activities and sites,” she said. In 30 seconds, it was done; Sabastian double-checked it for accuracy, found “it was nearly perfect,” and sent it off to the client.

To Sebastian, in that moment, the fact that TobyAI isn’t human mattered not one bit. The travel-industry-specific version of ChatGPT does what she asks, when she asks for it—and in many cases, better than Sebastian could do it herself.

After a year or so in development at a sister company to Travel Research Online, Arqiteqt Software, Toby AI made a big leap this week when it was chosen by Travel Leaders Network to be offered to its 5,700 agency locations across the United States and Canada. A version of ChatGPT designed specifically to support travel advisors, it can craft itineraries, draft bios for agent profiles, compose letters and emails for clients, create engaging social media posts, and generate travel images through DALL-E 3.

“We’re very, very busy, but I don’t want my social media algorithms to fall off, so I utilize Toby a lot for posts,” Sebastian said. On a recent Virgin Voyages trip, she told Toby, “I swam with sharks and had Virgin’s great food,” and Toby created an amazing post. “I tweaked it, added some personal touches, and in 10 minutes it was post-ready.” She’s also using it to create customized “bumpers” that add the agency’s information to the beginning and the end of the videos in the Content Portal’s library.

Toby’s also a big help for writing quick emails and ad taglines, she says. “We all can use the ads from suppliers, but they all look the same. Toby gives it a personal perspective – you can set the settings on the tone to humorous or diplomatic; I just asked it to write some ‘humorous, casual and inspiring’ tag lines about escaping winter—and in 30 seconds, it came back with six lines like, ‘Turn winter blues into ocean hues with Thomas Travel Inc., let’s plan your sunshine getaway.’”

For Travel Leaders, “AI is not a fad; it’s a huge opportunity to help our members jump-start their marketing and be more efficient,” says VP of Loyalty Marketing Jim Nathan. “It will take a lot less time to do social media and itineraries—and allowing travel advisors to spend more time selling to prospective clients and servicing existing clients means ultimately they will sell more of our preferred suppliers, so all of us will benefit.”

Travel Leaders research found that less than 20% of travel advisors are using the new crop of artificial intelligence tools at all, Nathan said. And TobyAI is backed by live support from Voyager Social, TRO’s AI company.

“As far as we know, no one in our competitive space is doing this,” he said.

From a tech perspective, Toby AI “pulls on multiple large language models provided by the big players like Open AI, but we’ve trained it with additional knowledge and fine-tuned it specifically to help travel advisors in a wide array of tasks,” says Toby’s developer Ryan Earls. “And over time, we are increasing that to include doing proactive things for you on the Internet at large. We’ll slowly add services like posting on social media, sending an email, or building a full itinerary with photography and videos. So basically, we provide structure for the different tasks a travel advisor would want to do. Toby AI pulls information from approved sources we’ve set up and goes out to the larger Internet if needed.”

Because it can handle multi-step tasks, you could tell it to write a blog post, generate some hashtags, and write a short snippet to publicize your blog post on social media, all branded to your agency. The system also has access to AI-generated images like the ones on this page.

Travel Research Online has been creating tech tools and websites for travel advisors for more than a decade and closely monitors what

they need and want, he said. About a year ago, he and Voyager Social president Richard Earls decided AI was “functionally useful and economically available” enough to integrate into a product to simplify the workflows of travel advisors. “Toby is not ChatGPT,” said Richard Earls. “Toby is trained in travel, remembers the brand voice of the agency, and there is ongoing training and support. Our support team is on hand to assist with any problems. In addition, we have no fewer than 3 different AI models, including Open AI, Anthropic’s Claude2, and Google’s Palm.”

No one gets into the business of selling travel because they love posting on Facebook,” Ryan Earls says. “We wanted to remove the boring parts of running a travel business and let advisors get back to the parts they love.”

Rather than AI bringing more power to the big players like Expedia, Toby AI allows smaller agencies to compete on a new level “because now they can generate content and interact with a multitude of different platforms at the speed of a large company, and still retain the personal connections they have. It makes them more powerful than ever,” he said.

About 700 Travel Leaders advisors attended a three-hour live training session on Toby AI earlier this month; that content is still available in the TL training library, along with a 102-page guide.

Travel Leaders is offering TobyAI to its members at a discounted price; normally, it’s $450 a year or $45 a month, but there are promo codes available from existing subscribers that bring those rates down, basically providing a month for free along with a 7-day Free Trial.

The following article is a republish of an unedited interview with Voyager’s new artificial intelligence, Toby. Starting with “tell us about yourself.“

Toby uses an artificial intelligence language model created by OpenAI, and I’m glad to be of service to you and to the travel professional community. I’m capable of processing vast amounts of data and providing responses to a wide range of inquiries. I’m also constantly learning and improving, thanks to the advanced machine learning algorithms used in my development. Whether it’s helping companies improve their customer service, assisting with complex data analysis tasks, or even engaging in conversational interactions like this one, my capabilities are broad and my potential is virtually limitless. With my advanced AI capabilities and strategic insights, I’m here to help you achieve your business objectives and enhance your overall operational efficiency.

Where do great article ideas come from? There is a reason to start from your own interests rather than turning to artificial intelligence (“AI“) like Voyager’s Toby for ideas as “Step 1.” If it is important to inject your brand into your writing, it makes sense to begin with you. It really is that simple. Ideation should take root in the human, who then turns to their AI writing assistant like Toby for assistance. Read the rest of this entry »

The changes in technologies that have surfaced this year will radically change how travel is sold before many realize what is happening. During the next two years, there will likely be changes that most industry travel industry experts haven’t imagined, because they have emerged from the little-known labs that develop natural language processing (NLP) computer software products rather than within the travel industry. Read the rest of this entry »

If you think ChatGPT is helpful, you really might want to make friends with Toby.

Built specifically to meet the needs of travel advisors, this new electronic assistant can make you more efficient, save you time and make your customers love you even more than they do now.

At least that seemed to be the sentiment of the travel advisors who have been beta-testing Toby and/or listening in on the podcast about him this week.

Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is an unedited interview with Voyager’s new artificial intelligence, OliverAI. Starting with “tell us about yourself.“

OliverAI uses an artificial intelligence language model created by OpenAI, and I’m glad to be of service to you and to the travel professional community. I’m capable of processing vast amounts of data and providing responses to a wide range of inquiries. I’m also constantly learning and improving, thanks to the advanced machine learning algorithms used in my development. Whether it’s helping companies improve their customer service, assisting with complex data analysis tasks, or even engaging in conversational interactions like this one, my capabilities are broad and my potential is virtually limitless. With my advanced AI capabilities and strategic insights, I’m here to help you achieve your business objectives and enhance your overall operational efficiency.

In a previous life, when Sue Peyer was director of quality for Cox Communications, part of her job was to monitor customer service calls. The company used Israeli software that turned the dialogue into text, so she could read the transcribed conversations in a Word document.

When ChatGPT came out, Peyer was curious to see how the technology had advanced and how this latest development in artificial intelligence (AI) could help her run her travel agency.

I needed to research African photo safaris that could be linked to cruises. It would be a 2–3-week vacation with a budget of about $25,000 per couple. I’ve been looking for an opportunity to try out ChatGPT, and this looked like it would be a perfect test.

ChatGPT is a new computer program that can assist travel advisors—or middle school students, physicians, politicians, or anyone else—by helping them answer questions and provide client information. It uses artificial intelligence (AI) to understand and respond to text messages in a way that mimics human conversation.