How the Travel Agent Became Chic Again

Remember travel agents in the ’90s? You’d pull up to a brick-and-mortar storefront, rifle through some Disney World pamphlets, and they’d circle a bunch of options in yellow highlighter. Then the internet arrived with platforms like Google Flights and Expedia, and we all became our own agents, hunched over our laptops with 14 tabs open and the creeping sense that we’d forgotten something.

But now, the travel agent has returned, rebranded as the “travel advisor,” or sometimes as a “trip designer.” They’re found across Instagram, posting a never-ending stream of curated travel content, often with a caption insinuating that all of this could be yours. And just like that—the travel agent became chic again.

The nuance here is that luxury travel advisors are fewer agents than overall trip designers, fixers, negotiators, and, on occasion, miracle workers.

At Embark Beyond, a luxury travel and destination events company, advisor Avi Hagby learned that her client was assigned a “remote stand” on a commercial flight, which means taking a bus from the gate to the plane, which is not, Avi felt, how one begins a holiday. Hagby had three hours to fix it—and a few calls later, including one to an airport authority Avi counts as a friend, the plane, with 118 passengers aboard, was miraculously moved to a proper jet bridge.

And in the world of travel advisors, stories like that are far from uncommon. Another Embark Beyond client once hosted an anniversary party on a chartered 210-foot yacht, but didn’t want their 150 guests to have to remove their heels as yacht customs demand—so every deck was carpeted for a cool $80,000. A honeymooning bride had Dyson hair dryers waiting for her at six stops across Sri Lanka, Laos, and Kenya. When another bride chipped her tooth while boarding a jet to Paris, a cosmetic dentist was booked before her first lunch. When a sheikh was traveling the Seychelles and a storm had swept the sand from their favorite beach, an advisor helped barge in sand from neighboring islands to make it right.

Of course, not everyone needs a yacht recarpeted last minute, or an entire beach’s worth of sand shipped in. Sometimes we just need the perfect weekend getaway to go off without a hitch, or a flight booked with precision.

“Luxury travel really begins with how you get there,” said Tony Labbé, an advisor who specializes in air strategy. You can have the extraordinary hotel and incredible experiences lined up, he said, “but if the air is poorly constructed, it can affect the entire trip.”

That’s where the expertise of a travel advisor begins. Digital marketplaces have made the puzzle pieces of travel seem closer than ever, but the actual work of curating them together is where things get tricky. A cheap flight can suddenly require a six-hour layover, an airport transfer that eats half the day, or a connection that leaves no margin for the inevitable delay. The point of an advisor is not simply to find the pieces—it’s to understand how they work together.

“Anyone can book a Point A to Point B travel experience, but anything unique or tailored or different needs a human being to open doors,” said Misty Belles, vice president, global public relations for Virtuoso, the leading global luxury travel network. “Instagram is great for inspiration, but what you see online and what you see in person are not necessarily the same experience.”

The internet, Belles said, has become a hall of mirrors. That secret cove in Italy, or that lavender field in France that you keep seeing on your Instagram feed? Those creators have ensured their content doesn’t reflect the 5,000 tourists around them. That’s the problem with the internet’s outsize role in discovering travel—if something gets enough algorithm time, it inevitably becomes overcrowded, inelegant, passé.

Enter the travel advisor. They may know when to go, how to skip the crowds, which room to request, which restaurant is actually worth the hype, and how to experience a place the way it actually is rather than the way it looks on Instagram. More often than not, you don’t even pay them anything extra—they collect a commission from bookings made on your behalf, or sometimes charge planning fees for more complicated trips.

And forget the stereotype of the older agent highlighting those brochures and typing away on a system you’ll never see. Today’s advisors skew younger, will text you back, and travel constantly, so their opinions are firsthand.

“Travel advisors have almost become influencers in their own right, except they’ve got the bona fides to back it up,” said Belles. “They don’t just say, ‘Here are ten hotel options.’ They can say, ‘I was just there. Stay here, don’t stay there, here’s how to do it.’”

Take travel advisor Olivia Ferney. She is known as “travelwithlivii” on Instagram, where over 1.3 million followers tune in to watch her handle her wealthy clients’ sometimes outlandish demands, like one woman who complained that a hotel spa’s robes were too long for her husband.

In the internet age, as we’re constantly inundated with so much information, the resurgence of travel advisors proves that having a human touch is still invaluable. They can fill in the gaps where the internet still struggles, like knowing that the villa next door to the hotel spa isn’t the best choice for a client who values privacy, or that having a hotel’s general manager on speed dial can be the most efficient way to fast-track client requests.

“Nurturing and leverage true friendships across the globe among hoteliers, operators, restaurants, private jet and villa brokers, and private guide companies is the key to being ‘chic’ in the clients’ eyes,” said Bobby Zurs, founder of Travel Artistry, a Virtuoso agency. “And taking the time to understand our clients, inefficiently against all prevailing pressures, is also crucial to creating the best itineraries and building trust for the long term.”

Because here is what those 14 tabs on our laptops can’t tell us: discovering information is no longer the hard part. The hard part is having the lived experience to navigate it all like a true expert. Not everyone needs their yacht carpeted or a beach rebuilt, but most of us have stood at a hotel check-in desk wondering why we aren’t getting that room upgrade, or in an airport, frustrated with some sort of delay and wondering who to call.

The chic thing now is having the number of the person who can fix it.