LAS VEGAS – It’s all about personal connections at Virtuoso Travel Week, a 4,700-attendee event held each August in Las Vegas. From one-on-one meetings between consultants and suppliers to this year’s hotel showcase featuring preferred accommodations, the week offers plenty of networking opportunities.
And while personal contact between participants is the highlight of Virtuoso Travel Week, technology also plays a crucial role in the travel agency sector. And it continues to evolve.
As Matthew Upchurch, chairman and CEO of Virtuoso, has often said, technology can help advisors “automate the predictable so you can humanize the extraordinary.”
During a press conference, Upchurch outlined Virtuoso’s strategy for providing technology to member agencies: “It’s a mix of developing internal technologies and leveraging external vendors,” he said.
“Our vision of the technology, particularly because of the way Virtuoso is built, is that it’s completely impractical for Virtuoso to create a single workflow,” Upchurch said. “That’s never going to happen.”
The consortium is therefore focused on meeting members where they are. As an example, Upchurch pointed to Virtuoso’s digital experience for members. The consortium recently redesigned its member homepage. According to Helen McCabe-Young, senior vice president of marketing, the site is mobile-optimized and has an improved search function, which members had been requesting.
According to Upchurch, Virtuoso provides a solid digital foundation for members, but a number of agencies have built their own proprietary platforms. For them, Virtuoso focuses on integrating systems and providing the data and content they need.
Virtuoso works with third parties for some technology needs. With these, Upchurch says, “we actually want to create some competition.”
For example, when digital travel apps for travel advisors began to appear about a decade ago, some agency networks chose a single provider, while Virtuoso “selected three tools and gave members the choice,” Upchurch said.
“I have a very specific philosophy: When you give someone an option, they just focus on why they’re not going to do this, why they’re not going to do that,” he said. “When you give people an option, they spend time being aware of the differences, and it increases the chances that they’ll think positively about it and be able to use it differently.”
These travel management programs – Axus (owned by Travel Weekly parent company Northstar Travel Group), Travefy and Umapped – were part of Virtuoso’s incubator program, which brought startups together with Virtuoso members for testing. The incubator was the precursor to today’s Travel Tech Summit, which took place on August 10 during Virtuoso Travel Week.
It included high-level discussions on technology, a panel of agency owners on data and AI, and the Startup Showcase featuring 15 startups operating in the travel technology sector.
One of the topics covered was the seemingly ubiquitous technology of generative AI.
Upchurch encouraged travel advisors to start using generative AI tools now. One possible use case he offered: Use the tools to summarize itineraries or other documents with lots of detail.
According to Upchurch, AI is already integrated into a number of platforms that Virtuoso uses, but he also sees potential for the future.
“There is no shortage of projects,” he said. “One of my projects is essentially using AI to expand the collective intelligence of the network on a global basis.”
