100 Advisors Are Trying Out Travel Leaders' AI Assistant

By Travel Destination 12 Feb, 2024 Post a Comment

NEW YORK -- About 100 Travel Leaders Network advisors have signed on to try TobyAI, a generative AI engine that can help with things like crafting itineraries and writing correspondence.

Stephen McGillivray, Travel Leaders Group's chief marketing officer, hopes that number increases to 1,000. He and other executives spoke this week during a media briefing at the Ritz-Carlton New York, Nomad.

The tool can help advisors work more efficiently, he said. As such, TLN has rolled it out to select advisors at no cost for the first year (they will receive preferential pricing if they renew). He encourages them to use it and see if it helps their business.

Advisor feedback thus far has been positive.

McGillivray shared a quote from advisor Debbie Sebastian, who called TobyAI "my new best friend." She uses it for research, itineraries and correspondence.

"This frees up advisors to focus on building rapport with clients, understanding their unique preferences and providing thoughtful recommendations," Sebastian said. "Overall, AI enables advisors to spend more quality time with clients and access resources to create custom travel experiences."

The TravelLeaders.com website experienced another record year in 2023, McGillivray said. It delivered 250,000 leads that resulted in 63,000 bookings, $381 million in sales and $46 million in commissions.

The website has grown as a lead-generation tool as consumers have increasingly turned to advisors, McGillivray said, and the site's SEO strength has made it a leading search result over the years.

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Cory Voss, TLN's chief information officer, said the high search ranking is organic because of the original content agents post on their Agent Profiler pages.

Voss also said TLN is developing a CRM-agnostic API. This will give members the opportunity to use whichever CRM (customer relationship management) tool they want and still take full advantage of TLN's offerings that depend on integration.

Today, TLN offers connections to ClientBase and AgentMate. Considering the number of CRM solutions that exist now, Voss said TLN wanted to offer more flexibility to members.

Roger Block, president of TLN, said part of the impetus has been the onboarding of larger agencies. They often come to TLN with their own CRMs developed in-house. The new solution will connect with those CRMs, as well.