SAN ANTONIO, Texas -- When TRAVELSAVERS and the Network of Entrepreneurs Selling Travel (NEST) surveyed their advisors in 2023, 24% said they weren't using AI and they didn't want to.

When advisors were asked the question last year, that percentage dropped to 7%.

"If we were all betting people, we would bet that's going even lower this fall when I ask them the same question," said Betsy Goldberg, senior corporate communications director of Travelsavers and NEST.

Goldberg was speaking during a press conference at Travel Market, held last month at the JW Marriott San Antonio Hill Country Resort & Spa. 

She offered several other statistics about AI from surveys of Travelsavers and NEST members. Unsurprisingly, the number of advisors using AI has shot up. In 2023, it stood at 22%, rising to 32% in 2024 and 59% in 2025. Also increasing is the number of advisors who believe AI is a great tool for advisors, from 16% in 2023 to 45% last year.

I'd bet those numbers will continue to rise.

Generative AI was introduced in 2022, and agentic AI in 2024, Goldberg said. While many agencies continue to use AI's generative subset, which can create content like text, photos and videos, forward-looking agencies are also looking to incorporate agentic AI -- which can plan, reason and take independent action with little oversight from humans. 

"AI can now help you set goals, plan actions, execute tasks. It can provide the ultimate in automation," Goldberg said.

It's still the early days in terms of how agentic AI will impact the industry, she said, but travel agencies are using the technology.

Advisors tell their AI stories

In a panel discussion, three agency owners shared how they're harnessing AI: Nikki Hendrix, president and CEO of Favorite Grampy Travels in Leesburg, Va.; Michelle Gammond, owner of Travel Potions in Alberta, Canada; and Sarah Bonsall, founder of Latitude 21 Travel in Independence, Ky.  

Bonsall said she's "addicted to AI." She's built out a number of AI "employees." There's a blog writer. She's also created a bookkeeper that connects to her QuickBooks and does her reconciliations for her accountant. She's created an automated follow-up sequence customized to each of her clients.

The employee dubbed "Sarah Brain" reads her email and calendar each day, forming a to-do list for her every morning, highlighting hot leads and supplier follow-ups. Bonsall has also created a "board of directors" with AI, with several different personas to offer her different perspectives. 

"When you're on an island as an agency owner and you need to bounce ideas off someone, I have five different executives that I've created," she said. "I'll tell them a marketing idea or something like that, and then they'll fight it out and tell me if I could do it or not."

Gammond said she's a newer adoptee of AI, using it in the past year or so to help establish her agency, from her brand to her logo and tagline.

"Everybody knows me from travel," she said. "Everybody also knows me as I own a pub."

She wanted to marry those two worlds. She did that using AI to design her website, which features little bottles of travel experiences on digital shelves. 

Gammond also uses AI as a sounding board for all things business.

Hendrix said Favorite Grampy Travels has built a lead-generating tool for its website using AI.

The agency is heavily focused on family travel and plans a lot of theme park vacations for clients. So, Hendrix said, her agency has created crowd calendars and a tool where people can plug in their child's height and see every attraction in Orlando they can ride.

Hendrix also uses AI to optimize her agency's website for answer engines to ensure Favorite Grampy shows up in generative AI searches. That is working extremely well: Impressions have reached nearly 2 million per month since the website optimization began in March. That's up from a monthly average of 179,000.

"It wasn't anything that was too hard to do, honestly," said Hendrix. "You talk to it like it's a human, like it's your friend. 'Hey, I want to show up in the search results. How do I do that?' And it tells you what to do. You just have to do it, though. That's the thing, a lot of people just won't do it."

AI is also employed at Favorite Grampy within advisor-facing tools to track pricing on packages booked for clients, and to send a daily email to advisors with the top 10 pieces of news based on their specialty.

She's also started to employ Muse, an agentic AI personal assistant recently released by Meta. Favorite Grampy runs some very large Facebook groups that produce millions of dollars in bookings. Because Muse was built into the world of Meta, it can analyze every single post in those groups, Hendrix said, and share the percentage that a post will turn into a booking. It can organize that information into a list to follow-up on. 

Muse also shares analyses on how to approach a potential client who has posted in one of those groups, then shares that lead in Facebook chats with Favorite Grampy advisors who can claim them on a first-come basis. At the same time, it's also tracking which advisor claimed the lead and how long it took, as well as following up on where the conversation is going, she said.

Hendrix said she has only been working with Muse for one week. She said some advisors might be hesitant to start using AI and recommended a simple first step: connect your email to an AI assistant. From there, it can do a number of things, like analyze an advisor's voice to use in future writing or check for missed leads.

"I think a lot of advisors are concerned that AI is going to replace them," Bonsall said. "It's impossible. It's literally impossible. AI's never been on the ship. They don't have the relationships with the suppliers that we have."

Hendrix offered one other piece of advice for advisors thinking about using AI: Ask the AI where it can best be used. A simple prompt of "What can you do for me?" could yield interesting results, she said.