UK holidaymakers now use AI for holiday inspiration!
One in twelve, and it is double the figure from the year before, according to ABTA Holiday Habits 2025-26 research. Among 25 to 34 year olds it is closer to one in five. Among the over-55s it is under three percent.
Read that as a small number if you like. The more interesting figure is the next one.
Forty-three percent of UK adults say they would be confident, to some degree, letting an AI tool plan their holiday, and 38 percent would let it do the booking. The behaviour is still early. The willingness is not.
So the clients walking into your enquiries today are already asking an assistant to compare Croatia with Cyprus in May, build a ten-day Japan itinerary, or work out whether a cruise or a resort suits a family of five. Next year there will be more of them.
Who This Is For
This is written for independent travel agents, homeworkers and small agency owners selling package holidays, tailor-made trips, cruise and long-haul.
You are likely working from home or from a small high street shop, handling everything from first enquiry to final documents yourself. Your pipeline comes from referrals, repeat clients, local reputation and social media, and you have spent years building product knowledge that genuinely beats a search engine.
What you do not have is a marketing department, a development budget, or spare hours in the evening to rebuild your lead generation. You want technology that earns its keep inside your existing working week.
The Client Who Arrives With the Itinerary Already Written
The complaint we hear most often from agents is short.
“They turn up with a ChatGPT itinerary and want me to price it up.”
The enquiry has stopped being a conversation about what the client actually wants and become a quoting exercise against a plan somebody else produced. Agents describe feeling reduced to a booking clerk, expected to match an unrealistic online price on an itinerary that ignores flight timings, transfer logistics and seasonality.
You then spend an hour unpicking it, unpaid, before the real advice can start.
The research habit has changed permanently. The commission does not have to follow it out of the door.
That is what a branded planning tool is for. It puts you inside the first conversation rather than outside it, so the shortlist is built from your product and the enquiry lands in your inbox instead of somebody else’s. There is more on handling the client who arrives mid-research: learn more.
If you would rather be in that first conversation than cleaning up after it, book a 15-minute demo of the Go There Travel AI Travel Planner and see how it handles your own client enquiries.
What an AI Travel Planner for Travel Agents Actually Does
It is a branded planning tool that sits on your own website and social channels, asks your clients the questions you would ask, and returns holiday ideas you can actually book.
The difference from a general assistant is twofold. It cannot invent a hotel that does not exist or a route that does not fly, because it works from live trade product rather than scraped text. And the output lands with you, not with a direct booking site.
That second point is where the money is. A public assistant hands your client a plan and no way to book it, so they drift to whoever appears first in search. The Go There Travel planner sends the enquiry to your inbox with budget, dates, party composition and preferences already captured, so you open the conversation already knowing what they want. Learn more
Your expertise then does the thing AI cannot: judgement. The right airline, the right room category, the right protection.
Where AI Actually Sits in the Buying Journey
The useful question is not whether travellers use AI. It is where in the journey they use it.
ABTA research puts internet searches (48 percent) and recommendations from friends and family (41 percent) well ahead of AI as sources of holiday inspiration, with brochures still used by a quarter of holidaymakers. AI is not replacing those. It is being added at the top of the funnel, at the inspiration and shortlisting stage, which is exactly the stage agents have historically struggled to influence. The full Holiday Habits 2025-26 report is worth half an hour of your time.
Two consequences follow for your agency.
Expectations now arrive pre-formed, which makes early influence far more valuable than late persuasion. And confidence drops sharply at the point of payment, because an AI assistant offers no ATOL protection, no financial failure cover and nobody to ring when a flight is cancelled.
That gap, between AI-generated enthusiasm and AI-free reassurance, is where agents win. It is also why 43 percent saying they would trust AI to plan is not the threat it first looks like. Trusting a tool to suggest is not the same as trusting it to take the money.
Step by Step: Putting an AI Planner to Work in Your Agency
- Audit where your enquiries currently start. Check your last twenty enquiries and note how many arrived with a destination, itinerary or price already decided. That number is your exposure to AI-led research.
- Put a planning tool on your own front door. Add your branded planner to your website, your link in bio and your Facebook page, so clients who are still exploring have somewhere to explore with you.
- Set your own qualifying questions. Decide what you need to know before quoting, including realistic budget, flexibility on dates, airport preference and must-haves, then let the planner collect it.
- Respond with judgement, not a reprint. Open every reply by endorsing or correcting one thing in the plan, then explain why. This is the moment you move from supplier to adviser.
- Attach the protection story to every quote. Spell out ABTA and ATOL cover, supplier failure protection and your own out-of-hours contact. No AI assistant can offer any of it.
- Review conversion monthly. Track planner enquiries against total enquiries and against booking value, then adjust the questions you ask at stage three.
What to Watch Out For
- Treating the planner as a replacement for you. It generates and qualifies interest. It does not close, reassure or rebook a disrupted flight.
- Quoting the AI itinerary line by line. If the plan is wrong, say so with reasons. Pricing up a bad idea accurately still loses the booking.
- Letting leads sit overnight. Clients who research with AI expect fast answers, and a 24-hour reply window feels slow to them.
- Hiding the tool in your website footer. If it is not visible on the page people actually land on, it will not generate enquiries.
- Dropping your own discovery questions entirely. Use the captured detail as a starting point, then probe for the things clients never type into a form.
Quick Checklist
- Count how many of your recent enquiries mentioned AI, ChatGPT or a pre-written itinerary.
- Add your branded planner to your homepage, social bio and email signature this week.
- Write three qualifying questions you want captured before any quote leaves your desk.
- Draft a short, reusable paragraph explaining ATOL and ABTA protection in plain English.
- Set a personal standard for responding to planner enquiries, ideally within four working hours.
- Save one example of an AI itinerary you corrected, and use it as a social post.
- Diarise a monthly ten-minute review of planner enquiries, conversions and average booking value.
- Book a demo before your next peak booking period rather than during it.
FAQ:
Will AI replace travel agents?
No, but it is already replacing the early research conversation that agents used to own. AI assistants are good at generating ideas and poor at supplying financial protection, supplier relationships, live availability and accountability when something goes wrong. ABTA research found 43 percent of UK adults would be confident letting AI plan a holiday, but a smaller 38 percent would let it book one, and that gap is the agent’s territory. The agents at risk are those who only ever competed on information.
How many people actually use AI to plan holidays?
In the UK, 8 percent of holidaymakers used AI for holiday inspiration in the year to summer 2025, double the 4 percent recorded the year before, according to ABTA Holiday Habits research with 2,001 UK adults. Usage is heavily skewed by age: close to one in five among 25 to 34 year olds and under 3 percent among the over-55s. Internet searches and personal recommendations are still far more common.
How do travel agents compete with ChatGPT holiday research?
By being present before the client finishes researching, and by offering what a chatbot cannot. Put your own planning tool where clients find you, so the shortlist is built with your product and your enquiry form. Then lead with ATOL and ABTA cover, honest trade-offs on flight times and resorts, and a named human contact.
What is the difference between a general AI assistant and a trade planning tool?
A general assistant draws on public text and can suggest hotels, routes or prices that are out of date or do not exist, and it cannot take a booking. A trade planner works from live, bookable product and routes the enquiry to you with the client’s details attached. One creates a plan and loses the client. The other creates a lead.
Is it worth a small independent agency investing in AI tools?
Usually yes, because the cost is low relative to a single mid-range booking. The practical test is whether the tool reduces your unpaid research hours and increases qualified enquiries. If it does both within a season, it pays for itself. Ask for a demo using a real enquiry from your own pipeline rather than a staged example.
Your clients are not waiting for you to decide about this.
One in twelve already starts with AI, that number doubled in a year, and the generation booking the most holidays is adopting it fastest. The only live question is whose product, whose branding and whose enquiry form sits inside that first conversation.
Leave it open and you inherit itineraries you did not shape, at prices you cannot match. Claim it and clients arrive pre-qualified, with your name on the plan and your expertise doing the work it should be doing.
Fifteen minutes is all it takes to see the planner handle one of your own client briefs. Grab a slot in the Go There Travel demo diary and bring a live enquiry with you.