Lea Diele, CTIE, vice president of education for Travel Leaders Network, was named the 2024 recipient of The Travel Institute’s Educational Excellence Award. This annual award recognizes organizations and individuals demonstrating a significant, ongoing commitment to providing comprehensive education for travel professionals Read the rest of this entry »

New York, NY. “We’re in the renaissance of the travel advisor in the distribution channel, driven by the general public,” Travel Leaders Group president John Lovell told a group of trade reporters last week.

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.