TravelJoy Founder: Why AI Won’t Replace Travel Advisors, It Will Make Them Essential

Last week, travel technology company TravelJoy launched its new Itinerary Copilot, an AI assistant built directly into the platform’s itinerary builder. 

The goal with this wave of AI for TravelJoy is to replace the need for manual work—the copying, pasting, data entry, and formatting—that so many advisors have to do to create a professional, presentable itinerary. It is designed to lift the little tasks off an advisor’s plate so that they’ll be able to bring their knowledge to the forefront.

“That’s been the goal of TravelJoy from the beginning,” TravelJoy founder Dayo Esho said, “to create something that moves an advisor’s workload from busywork to curation.”

As the industry continues its march into AI technology, TMR spoke to Esho, who founded TravelJoy in 2016 with Chris Kline, about the continuous trend towards automation, how advisors should think about AI in their business, and where the line is for when this kind of technology starts to take away from advisors, instead of enhancing them.

Is It AI Versus Advisors?

Talking about the industry’s use of AI in general, Esho said that TravelJoy’s research found that ChatGPT, probably the poster child for consumer AI inside and outside of travel, is the entry point for so many. Most advisors get their introduction to the technology there and are still using it for communications, for writing marketing, and for polishing emails, among other things.

Once they get that introduction, advisors are moving on to other tools, some more specialized, like Microsoft CoPilot or Google Gemini, which can integrate with their email and perform more specific tasks.

“That’s a good place for advisors to start—don’t try to move everything you’re doing into automation,” Esho advised. “Instead, start small; try it with your next email or your next client proposal.”

Despite being the tool that has probably helped advisors the most so far, ChatGPT is well on its way to being in direct competition with advisors. The platform is now able to book travel for users—just this month, ChatGPT’s parent company announced it was bringing in third-party apps to users, allowing them to use Expedia, for example, through the natural conversation it’s having on ChatGPT.

However, despite that, the fear that AI will take consumers away from the trade really isn’t there for Esho or for others in the industry.

The “dirty little secret” of the travel technology world, Esho revealed, is that all the people trying to build companies to get consumers to book direct using their technology are using travel advisors for their own travel. Those in the know understand the value of having an advisor be there for you and be accountable when things go wrong.

For advisors, the fear has to be not whether or not they get outsourced to ChatGPT or another LLM, but rather if they get supplanted by another advisor who is able to work better and more efficiently because of AI that they didn’t embrace.

“We like to say it’s not advisor versus AI, it’s going to be advisors who are empowered by AI versus those who aren’t,” Esho said. “I’m long the future of the advisor; I think we’re just getting started.”

By its nature, AI, whether its ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini, aggregates an average of information across the web and presents that to its user. Esho thinks that process, even with how easy it is, is just going to make an advisor’s job more valuable.

“As AI gets more and more prevalent on the web, it’s going to be a flood of content and noise. Travelers are going to crave that human judgment.”

Where’s the Line for AI?

I wanted to ask Esho, who was first introduced to the profession because his mother was an agency owner when he was growing up, for his thoughts on where the line for automation lies. For an industry that is all about human connection, there has to be a limit to automation, doesn’t there?

Even if it may be a ways away, at what point are you taking away the usefulness of an advisor and handing it to a computer or an LLM?

“You’re never really doing that with these tools,” Esho told me. Esho said that there are a couple of pretty famous, modern pop culture cases of how we should think about the technology.

One is the Iron Man suit, the AI assistant that helps Robert Downey Jr.’s character fight bad guys in those movies. The other is the vision presented in the Terminator movies. Advisors should think about AI as their Iron Man suit, and themselves as the suit’s conductor.

“The advisor is the hero; they are the ones using the suit,” he said.

That was the goal with TravelJoy since the beginning, he said, to find inefficiencies in an advisor’s workflow and make them efficient. AI is just another way to do that.

“My co-founder and I went out before we wrote any code, talked to advisors, and just watched them work. We knew we could have an immediate impact on all these things they were doing,” he said. “We just view AI as a way to pull our vision forward even faster.”