Every few years, someone writes the obituary for the travel agent. Online booking would kill the profession in the 2000s. Mobile apps would finish the job in the 2010s. Now it is AI’s turn to be cast as the final blow.
A recent study from Skift, a leading voice in global travel research, tells a different story, and it comes with a number that undercuts the obituary better than any counterargument I could construct myself.
What actually happened to the profession
US travel agency employment did collapse, and the collapse was real. It peaked in 1999 and fell hard through the 2000s as the industry restructured for the online era. That part of the story everyone already knows.
What almost nobody mentions is what happened after the collapse: employment has been steady for more than a decade. Not growing dramatically, but not continuing to erode either. The profession found a floor and has been standing on it, largely unnoticed, while three successive waves of disruptive technology were each supposed to be the one that finally finished the job.
A quarter of all travel is still booked through a traditional agent today. That share concentrates heavily in the trips that are hardest to plan alone: 63% of cruise travelers used an advisor in the past twelve months, and the channel as a whole has found its footing in complex, high-value trips where trust and expertise matter more than price comparison.
The capital is voting too
If the labor data is the quiet signal, the capital markets just sent a loud one.
Fora, an AI-powered travel agency, raised 60 million dollars in July at a valuation above 1 billion, on the back of 2.3 billion dollars in sales over five years and a network of more than 15,000 advisors. Read that sentence slowly, because the detail that matters is easy to skip past. Investors did not put a billion-dollar valuation on an app that removes the advisor. They put it on a company that gave the advisor better tools.
This is not an isolated data point. It is consistent with everything else in this year’s research: AI is not eliminating the human layer of this industry, it is capitalizing it.
Why the obituary keeps being wrong
I think the recurring mistake is treating “booking a trip” as a single task that technology either automates or does not. It is not one task. It is dozens of different tasks bundled together, and they have wildly different tolerances for automation.
Booking a known flight on a known date is close to a commodity transaction, and software has handled it well for two decades. Planning a multi-stop honeymoon, a large group incentive trip, or a cruise itinerary with dozens of interdependent decisions is a different kind of task entirely, one where the cost of a mistake is high and the value of judgment is correspondingly high. Every wave of travel technology has automated more of the first category. None of them has meaningfully touched the second, because the second category was never really about information retrieval. It was about judgment under complexity, which is precisely the thing AI tools are best at augmenting and worst at replacing outright.
The agents who survived, and the ones now raising capital, are not the ones who resisted technology. They are the ones who let technology take the commodity work off their plate so they could spend more time on the part only a person does well.
What this means beyond travel agencies specifically
I write about this industry, but I think the pattern generalizes, and it is worth stating plainly because I see the same mistake made about corporate travel management, about customer service, about any profession built on judgment applied to complexity.
The mistake is assuming that because AI can now do part of a job, it will eventually do all of it. What the travel agent data actually shows is a job splitting into two parts: a commodity part that keeps getting automated further, and a judgment part that keeps getting more valuable as the commodity part shrinks. The total number of tasks a person handles may fall. The value of the tasks that remain rises to compensate, sometimes more than compensate, which is exactly what a billion-dollar valuation on a company built around advisors, not instead of them, is telling you.
The obituary that never runs
I do not think this means the travel agent profession is safe from further change. It clearly is not. The mix of what an agent does today will look different again in five years, the way it looked different five years ago from what it was in 1999.
But safe from further change and headed for extinction are not the same prediction, and the data keeps confirming the first one while commentators keep writing the second. A profession that found a floor after its worst technological disruption, and is now attracting billion-dollar valuations for versions of itself equipped with the newest disruptive technology, is not a profession on its way out. It is a profession that has already answered the question everyone keeps asking it.
About me
I am an entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience at the intersection of tourism and technology. I am co-founder and Chief Business Officer of VOLL, the largest mobile-first corporate travel and expense management platform in Latin America, and a recognized reference in the development of the corporate travel industry.
A Marketing specialist from Fundação Dom Cabral, I serve on the Tourism Council of FecomércioSP and on the Executive Council of the Latin American Association of Corporate Events and Travel Management (Alagev). A frequent traveler and close observer of human behavior in motion, I write and speak about innovation, digital transformation, entrepreneurial leadership, and the future of corporate travel.