Most travel agents are best served by three kinds of AI tool: a travel platform with AI built in (Tern or Travefy) for itineraries and client records, your email provider's assistant (Gemini in Gmail or Copilot in Outlook) for correspondence, and a cited-research tool such as Perplexity for destination questions. One from each group is usually enough.
Below, tools are grouped by the three jobs in the title, with verified prices, what each is weak at, and three example setups for different sizes of agency. Prices are USD list prices as of September 2026 and change often; check each vendor's page before you buy. Whatever you choose, the itinerary still needs checking before it goes to a client, which is covered in what a travel agent must check in an AI itinerary.
Six tools for travel agents, and where each one falls short
| Tool | Main job | Price (list, USD) | Weakest at |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tern | Itineraries, CRM, inbox drafting, call notes | $49 per seat a month, or $35 billed quarterly or annually; AI usage limits apply | Heavy AI users may need the Tern Pro add-on |
| Travefy | Branded itineraries and proposals, CRM, AI import of bookings | Core $39 a month, Premium $59, billed annually | AI is focused on importing content rather than writing it |
| ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini | Drafting descriptions, emails, research summaries | About $20 a month for individual paid plans | No client records or supplier data; invents detail if unchecked |
| Gemini in Gmail / Copilot in Outlook | Summarising threads and drafting replies inside email | Gemini included in Google Workspace plans (Business Starter about $7 per user a month); Copilot Chat included in Microsoft 365 business plans | Only sees what's in your mailbox |
| Perplexity | Researching destinations with cited sources | Pro $20 a month | Sources can be out of date or unofficial; still needs checking |
| Otter | Recording and summarising client calls | Pro $8.33 per user a month billed annually ($16.99 monthly) | Needs clients' agreement to record |
Job 1: itineraries and proposals
Tern: AI across the whole client file
In short. Tern is an all-in-one platform for travel advisors: itineraries, CRM, email integration, scheduling, client forms and reports. Its AI, according to Tern's product page, drafts replies from your inbox using trip context, builds itineraries and proposals through a chat, and takes notes from client calls. Tern also states that it never trains public models on your business data. Travel trade press has reported that the AI can review an itinerary before sending and flag gaps, such as a day with no transfer.
Price. $49 per seat a month on monthly billing, or $35 billed quarterly or annually. AI tools (AI Assist and the AI Notetaker) come with included monthly usage; from 1 July 2026 usage limits apply, with a Tern Pro add-on for more. There's a free trial.
Best for. Advisors who want one system rather than a CRM plus an itinerary builder plus a chat assistant. The catch: the switching cost. Moving years of client history into any platform takes time, so trial it with live enquiries for two weeks before migrating everything.
In use. Here's an illustrative case. A client with a seven-night cruise booked emails: "Could we add a night in the port city before we sail, and is the transfer to the ship still included?" Because the trip sits in the client's Tern file, the inbox draft can work from the sailing date and the transfer already on the booking, and come back with something like: "Happy to add a pre-cruise night on 11 May. Your current transfer on the 12th runs from the airport, so we'd switch it to a pick-up from the hotel." A general assistant would need you to paste all of that in first. What you still check: whether the hotel has a room, what it costs, and whether the cruise line will change the pick-up point, none of which the draft can know. The time saved is in looking things up and typing, not in the decisions.
Watch the allowance. Because usage limits now apply, look at how much of the included AI allowance a normal week uses during your first month. An advisor who runs the AI Notetaker on every hour-long consultation will use it far faster than one who records only first calls, and that pattern, not the headline seat price, decides whether the Pro add-on is worth paying for.
Travefy: polished itineraries, with AI for the tedious import
In short. A long-established itinerary and proposal builder with CRM, forms, invoicing, commission tracking and a website builder. Its AI feature is content import: Travefy says you can import bookings in seconds and let the platform lay them out. It also lists more than 200 supplier integrations and a marketplace of templates from other users.
Price. Core $39 a month billed annually; Premium $59 a month billed annually, adding priority and phone support, premium onboarding and a custom domain. Each extra agency seat is $20 a month on Core or $39 on Premium. There's a 10-day free trial with no card required.
Best for. Agents whose clients expect a beautiful, branded document, and whose pain is retyping confirmations. The catch: writing help. For day-by-day descriptions you'll probably pair it with a general assistant.
In use. Say a trip has a three-night hotel stay, a car hire and two tours, each confirmed by a supplier email. The AI content import is meant to turn those confirmations into itinerary items on the right days, with times and reference numbers, which is the retyping most agents dread. The error to look for is dates. Suppliers write 04/05/2027 day-first or month-first, and any importer, AI or not, can put a hotel in April when it belongs in May. Before the itinerary goes out, open each imported item next to its original confirmation and check the date, the time and the room or car type. That check takes a few minutes per trip; retyping the same confirmations took far longer.
A general assistant for the words
ChatGPT Plus, Claude Pro and Google AI Pro each cost about $20 a month and are excellent at turning your notes into readable day descriptions, adapting tone for a honeymoon versus a family trip, and condensing supplier fact sheets. They're the weakest link for facts: they'll describe a hotel pool that doesn't exist. Use them for words you then check, not for facts you then trust. The drafting workflow is set out in how independent agents use AI to draft itineraries faster.
A prompt that keeps it to your facts, with notes for one day of a trip:
Turn my notes into one day of a client itinerary. 90-120 words, warm but
plain, second person, British spelling. Use ONLY these facts; if something
isn't here, leave it out.
Clients: couple in their sixties, first visit, dislike early starts.
Day 4 notes: pick-up 9.30 from hotel; guided walk of the old town, 2.5 hours,
small group; lunch free; afternoon free, suggest the cable car (every 15 min,
about $18 return per person, last car up 5.30pm); dinner booked 7.30pm at the
hotel restaurant.The sort of result you'd get back (illustrative):
"A gentle start today: your guide meets you at the hotel at 9.30 for a two-and-a-half-hour walk through the old town in a small group. Lunch is yours to choose, and the afternoon is free. For the best view, take the cable car, which runs every 15 minutes (about $18 each, return); the last car up is at 5.30pm, and the rooftop terrace at the top is the perfect spot for a sunset drink. Dinner is booked for 7.30pm in your hotel's restaurant."
It's close, and it still needs two edits. The rooftop terrace wasn't in the notes, so either confirm it exists and is open that month or delete it. And "sunset drink" quietly assumes sunset falls before the last car down, which in some months it won't. Everything else can be ticked off against the notes. If you ask for the same day rewritten for a family with children of 7 and 10, the tone and pace change, but put the two versions side by side and make sure every time and price still matches.
Verdict for job 1: if you're paying for separate CRM and itinerary tools today, trial Tern and Travefy side by side with the same three live enquiries. If you're happy with your current system, add a $20 assistant and a good prompt instead.
Job 2: emails to clients and suppliers
Most of an agent's email is one of four things: a first reply to an enquiry, a follow-up on a quote, back-and-forth with suppliers, and pre-travel admin. AI helps most with long threads ("what did the lodge agree about the extra night?") and with the first draft of anything routine.
- Gemini in Gmail is included in Google Workspace business plans, even Business Starter at about $7 per user a month on an annual plan. It summarises threads and drafts replies in place. How to set it up for a busy inbox is covered in using Gemini in Gmail to clear your inbox faster.
Its best use is the long supplier thread. Open a 23-message chain with a lodge and ask: "What did the lodge agree about the extra night on 14 March, at what rate, and is it confirmed?" A plausible answer: "The lodge agreed to add a night on 14 March at $640 per person, full board with two game drives. Reservations confirmed on 3 February." Open the 3 February message before you tell the client anything. In this illustration it says the room is "held provisionally until Friday, pending deposit", which is not a confirmation. Summaries tend to drop exactly the qualifiers that matter in supplier email (provisional, on request, subject to), so follow up with "Quote the exact sentence where they confirm it". Either you get the line, or you find out there isn't one. - Copilot in Outlook. Copilot Chat is included at no extra cost on Microsoft 365 business plans; the fuller Microsoft 365 Copilot, which works across your mailbox and files, is $21 per user a month on annual billing (with a promotional $18 on annual plans until 31 December 2026). For a three-person agency that's $63 a month at the standard annual price, worth it only if the team spends real time digging through old threads and files.
The everyday job is the quote follow-up. A client has gone quiet six days after receiving a $7,800 proposal for a family fortnight, and you ask for a short, friendly nudge. The draft that comes back might read: "Hi [name], just checking the proposal for your August trip arrived safely. The villa is held until Thursday, and I'm happy to talk through any changes. As a thank-you for booking this week, I can offer 5% off." Delete the last sentence. You never offered a discount; assistants add sweeteners like it because they make a follow-up more persuasive. Add "no discounts, offers or deadlines I haven't given you" to the prompt, and check the hold date against the supplier's own email. - Tern's inbox drafting has an advantage over both: it can pull trip context from the client record, not just the email thread.
Verdict for job 2: start with the assistant included in your email plan, since it costs nothing extra. Only add another tool if you need replies that draw on client and trip records, which is what a travel platform adds.
Job 3: destination research
Research is where AI can save hours and cause the worst mistakes, because a confident wrong answer about a ferry schedule or an entry rule looks exactly like a right one.
- Perplexity (Pro, $20 a month) answers with numbered citations, so you can click through to the source. It's quicker than a search engine for questions like "which islands have direct ferries from the mainland port in April?", and the citations show you whether the answer came from the ferry operator or a travel forum. For how it compares with ChatGPT for this, see Perplexity vs ChatGPT for business research.
The citations are the point, so use them. Ask "Which ferries run between the mainland port and the two islands in the first week of April 2027, and how long is the crossing?" and an illustrative answer might say that two operators run daily sailings "from 1 April", taking about an hour and three-quarters, citing [1] and [2]. Click both. In this illustration, [1] is the operator's page but shows last year's timetable, and [2] is a forum thread from three years ago. The operator's current timetable shows the daily service starting on 15 April, with three sailings a week before that, which moves day 2 of the itinerary. The rule that falls out: for anything a client will rely on, find the page of the company that sells the ticket, and ignore the rest. - Deep research modes in ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude produce longer reports on a destination in a few minutes. Useful for a first briefing on somewhere you haven't sold before; too long and too unevenly sourced to paste into a client document. Say you're asked for a walking holiday in a region you've never sold. A deep research report will give you the seasons, the main transport links and the kinds of accommodation in a few minutes, which is a good starting brief. The claims to distrust are the recent ones: a "new boutique hotel opening in spring" taken from a press release, or a rail line described as reopened when the operator's page still shows engineering works. Read the report for the questions to ask your suppliers, not for answers to give the client.
- Official sources, not AI, for entry rules. Passport, visa and health requirements should come from government sources and the IATA Travel Centre, which is based on the Timatic database airlines use. No AI tool on this list should be your source for these.
Verdict for job 3: Perplexity if you research new destinations weekly; otherwise the research mode in whichever general assistant you picked for job 1. Either way, click through to the source for anything that goes into a client document.
The supporting cast
- Call notes. Otter Pro ($8.33 per user a month billed annually, or $16.99 monthly) records and summarises client consultations, so preferences mentioned in passing ("she hates early starts") make it into the file. Ask clients' permission before recording. Tern's AI Notetaker and some email suites do similar jobs; AI meeting note-takers compared sets out the options.
A line that makes asking easy: "Do you mind if I record this so I don't miss anything? The notes go into your file." Then check the summary against the transcript before it goes anywhere. Take a made-up summary of a 40-minute consultation: "Budget around $12,000 for two. Prefers aisle seats. One beach week and one touring week. Dislikes early starts. Anniversary on 18 June." In the transcript, the aisle seat is her partner's preference, not hers, and the budget was "twelve thousand, maybe a bit more for the right hotel", which changes how you pitch the hotel. Correct the summary before it goes into the client record, because that record is what your next AI draft will read. - Automation. Zapier (Professional from $19.99 a month billed annually, $29.99 monthly, for 750 tasks) connects a website enquiry form to a draft reply in Gmail, so nothing sits unanswered overnight.
A typical enquiry Zap has three steps: the trigger (a new submission on your website form), an AI by Zapier step that drafts a reply from the form answers and your standard wording, and a Gmail step that saves the reply as a draft for you to check and send. Triggers don't count as tasks. The Gmail step counts as one, and the AI step as 1, 3 or 5 depending on the model tier you pick. At 60 enquiries a month, that's between 120 and 360 tasks, inside Professional's 750. The Free plan can't run it, because it allows only two-step Zaps and doesn't include AI steps. Keep the send button human: a draft that says "your dates are available" before anyone has checked is worse than a reply an hour later.
Three example setups
These are illustrative combinations with approximate monthly costs at list prices, excluding any host agency fees.
| Agency | Setup | About per month | Why this mix |
|---|---|---|---|
| Solo homeworker, 10-15 trips a month | Tern (annual), Google Workspace Business Starter, one $20 assistant | $62 | One system holds clients and itineraries; Gmail's AI handles supplier threads; the assistant writes descriptions |
| Three-person agency with an existing CRM | Travefy Core plus two extra seats, Workspace Business Starter for three, one Perplexity Pro subscription for whoever does the research | About $120 | Keeps the CRM they know; Travefy for branded documents; research findings shared through notes, not a shared login |
| Specialist tour designer, few but complex trips | Claude Pro or ChatGPT Plus, Perplexity Pro, Otter Pro billed annually | About $48 | Long, bespoke itineraries built from research and client calls; existing document templates are fine |
To judge the solo setup, do the sum in hours rather than dollars. If it saves 20 minutes on each of 12 trips a month, from the first reply to the final itinerary, that's four hours back for $62. Whether four hours is worth $62 depends on what you'd do with them, but it's a question you can answer, which "is AI worth it?" isn't. Time your first five trips on the new setup against your usual way before deciding.
For a fuller view of what AI costs an agency against the time it saves, see what AI costs a small travel agency and what it saves.
What to test in a free trial
Feature lists all look similar. Use the trial period to run the same three tests on each tool:
- A real enquiry, start to finish. Take last week's most typical enquiry and produce the reply, the draft itinerary and the proposal. Time it against how you'd normally do it.
- A trip you know inside out. Ask the tool to build it and count the errors. This shows you how much checking its output will need on trips you know less well.
- Getting your data out. Export your test clients and itineraries. If you can't get a usable file out in the trial, you'll struggle to leave later.
Keep score as you go. An illustrative sheet after a week with two tools, called A and B here:
Tool A Tool B
Test 1: enquiry to 55 min 40 min
proposal (usual: 1h40)
Test 2: errors on a 3 (one shut 7 (two invented
trip you know restaurant, hotels, wrong
two transfers) ferry days...)
Test 3: export CSV of clients, PDF itineraries
itineraries only
as PDFTool B felt quicker, but its seven errors send most of the saved 15 minutes back into checking, and a PDF-only export fails test 3 outright. Tool A wins, even though the demo of B was more impressive. Pick the tool that saves the most time on test 1 without failing test 3. Test 2 tells you how long your checking routine needs to be, whichever you choose.
Travel agent AI tool questions
Do I need a travel-specific platform, or is ChatGPT enough?
ChatGPT or Claude alone can draft itinerary text and emails well, but they don't hold your clients, bookings, supplier content or branded documents. If you already juggle a CRM, a document template and a spreadsheet of bookings, a travel platform such as Tern or Travefy replaces several tools and puts AI where the data is. If you send a handful of itineraries a month, a general assistant plus a good template may be enough.
Is it safe to put client details into AI tools?
Use business plans or travel platforms that state they don't train on your data, and share only what the task needs. Passport numbers, dates of birth and card details don't belong in a general chat assistant. Tern says it never uses advisors' business data to train public models; for any other tool, check the privacy terms and the model-training setting before adding client information.
Will AI tools replace my host agency's or consortium's systems?
Usually not. Host agencies and consortia provide supplier relationships, commission processing and booking tools that AI assistants don't. AI tools sit alongside them, handling drafting, research and email. Before buying a platform, check which of your host's tools it connects to, and whether you'd be paying twice for the same CRM features.
Further reads
- How a One-Person Travel Agency Can Reply to Enquiries Instantly — Put these tools to work on fast enquiry replies.
- How Small Tour Operators Use AI for Bookings and Itineraries — The tour operator's version of the same workflow.
- How to Check Sources and Citations in AI Research — How to check the sources AI research tools cite.
- Is It Safe to Put Customer Data Into ChatGPT? — What client data is safe to share with an assistant.
- AI Vendor Lock-In: How to Keep Your Data and Prompts Portable — Keep your client data portable if you switch platforms.
- Copilot in Outlook: How to Triage Email and Draft Replies Faster — If your email runs on Outlook rather than Gmail.
- AI Tools and AI Development: The Complete 2026 Guide — the AI hub, including every tutorial in the AI-for-business series.
Sources: Tern pricing and AI pages; Travefy pricing and agent solution pages; OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Perplexity plan pages; Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace pricing pages; Otter.ai pricing; IATA Travel Centre, all checked September 2026.