The Luxury of Trust

I’m a boomer. There, I said it.  

I also use AI in my work every day. I used it in researching this article, too. I’m simply trying to understand  where it can genuinely help me do my job better.  

But this is not an article about AI. 

I sell hotels. And a large part of my job is about understanding the people who influence where travellers stay:  travel advisors, agencies, host agencies and consortia.  

That world is changing quickly. Distribution is changing. New players and business models are emerging. Technology is changing how hotels are discovered and booked. And I can see it in something very practical:  the way business reaches our hotels is changing too.  

So I wanted to understand what was happening on the other side of my desk.  

Research tells me part of the story. The rest often comes from listening to people on the other side whom I  have learned to trust — including our US representation company, which gives me a perspective I don’t  always have from the hotel side.  

How is the advisor’s job changing? What is becoming more valuable, and what less? And, from my side, how,  where, when and why should I communicate with them? 

One thing that got me thinking was something I read from SmartFlyer. Erina Pindar, its COO and Managing  Partner, described advisors as “true editors of the travel experience” — curating highly personal journeys  through discernment, access, perspective, expertise and trusted relationships.  

That idea stayed with me.  

If information is everywhere, access is easier and choice almost endless, what exactly are we paying  someone to know — or to do — for us?  

Then AI made the question more interesting.  

If technology can increasingly search, compare, select and recommend too, perhaps curation alone is not the  answer.  

And that led me somewhere I hadn’t originally intended to go:  

trust. 

More answers, not necessarily more certainty  

Deloitte’s 2025 Holiday Travel Survey found that 24% of surveyed U.S. travellers expected to use generative AI  for trip planning, up from 8% in 2023. Among those planning to use it, 54% expected to use it to research  accommodation.  

AI is not just making information easier to find. It is getting better at filtering, comparing and recommending it  too.  

So the future of the travel advisor cannot rest on one comfortable assumption: humans curate and machines  don’t.  

Machines can curate. And they will get better at it. 

Technology also works both ways. The tools that make advisors better informed make their clients better  informed too. A recommendation can be checked against rates, reviews, social media, friends and,  increasingly, AI. 

Clients have always checked advice. Technology just makes it easier. When someone’s judgment keeps  proving reliable, we eventually stop checking everything. Perhaps that’s one of the luxuries of trust. 

When information is everywhere, knowing more is less distinctive. Knowing the client becomes more  valuable.  

Matthew Upchurch, founder and CEO of Virtuoso, describes the advisor as becoming “a specialist in you, the  client.” In a world of endless answers, he argues, the differentiator is increasingly knowing which questions to  ask.  

What do they actually like? What did they hate last time? Which hotel that looks perfect on paper would be  completely wrong for them?  

And sometimes: which hotel should they not book?  

BCG and Altagamma found that 65% of Very Important Clients trusted their Client Advisor’s  recommendations more than marketing or advertising material. Seventy percent said they would consider  following their advisor to another brand, given comparable product quality and aesthetics.  

AI need not weaken that relationship. It can make the person behind it more capable. Global Travel Collection  says its Atlas AI platform is projected to reclaim more than 1.5 million hours annually across its network of  more than 1,500 luxury travel advisors.  

Which raises a slightly uncomfortable question.  

Does AI make you a travel advisor?  

My social feeds increasingly seem to think so.  

I regularly get ads suggesting that AI can help people become travel advisors — including one recently promoting what looked, at first glance, like a “Claude certification for travel agents.”  

A closer look led to a third-party AI learning platform, not Anthropic.  

Nothing wrong with that. But it made me think about a distinction that matters.  

Resources are not expertise. A certificate may be evidence of expertise — depending on what it actually  certifies. But expertise alone is still not trust. 

AI will keep moving forward. It can already take travellers from search and recommendation to live rates and a  direct booking path. How quickly full execution follows is still an open question.  

Good. 

The case for a professional advisor should never depend on what AI cannot do today. 

It depends on what the advisor can do with the tools available — knowledge of the client, judgment, expertise,  access and the ability to deal with what happens when the plan stops being the plan.  

We all saw the value of a good advisor during Covid, when a cancelled flight or a broken itinerary could turn a  holiday into a nightmare.  

Who knows what to do? Who finds the alternative? Who takes responsibility?  

Trust is what we bring to a relationship. Our dowry, if you like. I told you I was a boomer.  

An advisor puts a client, a reputation and part of their business in the hands of the hotel. Losing a long standing client can have a very real financial cost. That’s one reason I would rather be clear about what we  can deliver than promise something we cannot.  

But the hotel takes a risk too. We rely on the advisor to know the client, understand what they are  selling, communicate accurately and set expectations we can actually meet.

Get that wrong and the hotel can inherit a disappointed guest, operational problems and lost business —  sometimes before the guest has even walked through the door.  

Sometimes I get frustrated when an advisor misses information we have provided. But then I have to ask myself: did we make what really mattered impossible to miss? Or did we bury it inside beautiful copy that  created harmony rather than clarity?  

The same test applies to the hotel  

The hotel has inherited someone else’s promise. 

I often put it more simply:  

Sales can make the promise. Operations has to keep it. 

I make promises for a living. But very often someone at Front Office, Reservations, Housekeeping or F&B is  the person who actually keeps them.  

The guest doesn’t care about our organizational chart.  

There is just the hotel’s promise. 

This is where trust stops being theoretical. It is tested in accuracy, recognition, consistency, communication,  problem solving — and ultimately execution.  

For an independent hotel, this matters even more  

A famous hotel brand starts with something an independent may not have: familiarity.  The guest may never have stayed at that particular property, but the name itself can provide reassurance.  Now imagine the client saying:  

I don’t know this hotel. But I trust the person recommending it. 

The brand hasn’t become irrelevant. The advisor hasn’t replaced it.  

But trust in one relationship has reduced some of the uncertainty in another. That may be enough for an unfamiliar independent hotel to enter a consideration set it might otherwise never have reached.  

I think of it as borrowed trust.  

And the trust really is only borrowed.  

The advisor can get the hotel through the door. Only the hotel can earn the second stay. 

If the hotel delivers, some of that trust may begin to attach to the hotel itself. If it doesn’t, the damage can  travel back to the advisor who made the recommendation.  

That’s why I’ve never thought of the relationship between luxury hotels and advisors as simply another  distribution channel.  

Yes, there is business flowing through it.  

But there is also reputation. 

Everything is changing. Maybe not everything.  

And then, one day in May 2026, I read that Alexandre Chemla, 78, founder of ALTOUR and a veteran of the  travel industry, had been appointed Strategic Officer by NousTravel — a young host agency combining  technology with a people-led model.  

And I thought: what the hey! Why?

In an industry supposedly being reinvented by technology, why would one of its newest players turn to  someone with decades of experience to help shape what comes next?  

I have a few thoughts about that.  

But perhaps that’s for the next article.  

For now, it left me with a simpler question:  

Are we sure everything is changing? 

Look a little closer, and the values behind all of this seem remarkably familiar.  

More than two thousand years ago, Aristotle wrote about three qualities behind credibility: practical wisdom,  character and goodwill towards others.  

Today I might add consistency, responsibility and, in our business, the ability to do what we promised. 

And as an Italian, that can only make me think of The Leopard — Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel,  turned into Luchino Visconti’s 1963 film with Burt Lancaster, Claudia Cardinale and Alain Delon.  

Tancredi famously says:  

“Se vogliamo che tutto rimanga come è, bisogna che tutto cambi.” 

If we want everything to remain as it is, everything must change. 

Different story. Same paradox.  

Everything changes. What makes someone worthy of our trust, perhaps, not so much.

Sources  

• SmartFlyer — Condé Nast Traveler Top Travel Specialists 2026 

• McKinsey — Updating perceptions about today’s luxury traveler (Matthew Upchurch / Virtuoso) • Deloitte — 2025 Holiday Travel Survey 

• BCG & Altagamma — True-Luxury Global Consumer Insight 2024 

• Global Travel Collection / Internova — Atlas AI 

• Lighthouse — Make your hotel bookable via ChatGPT 

• Tixu — AI learning platform 

• Anthropic — AI Fluency 

• NousTravel — Official website 

• Travel Weekly — NousTravel appoints Alexandre Chemla as Strategic Officer 

• Aristotle — Rhetoric, Book II, Chapter 1 (Perseus Digital Library) 

• Treccani — Gattopardismo 

• Festival de Cannes — Il Gattopardo 

Note: Alexandre Chemla’s age (78) remains to be independently verified against a sufficiently authoritative  biographical source before publication.