Who Actually Represents the Advisor?
A growing number of advisors are looking for their host agency to do more than it traditionally has.
Guests at a dinner hosted by In The Know Experiences & Corinthia Rome at Roscioli in New York, part of an ongoing series by In The Know dubbed ‘After Hours’ — gatherings built around professional and cultural convening rather than the standard supplier exchange. Photo: Global Travel Collection
Ask most people outside the industry what a host agency does and guesses range somewhere between “booking engine” and “support center.” That’s been a fair answer for a long time. Commission splits, invoicing, errors-and-omissions, a stack of supplier logins, and you were in business. Nobody has been asking the harder, more interesting question: who is building this person’s career?
That question has gotten a lot louder recently. The whole industry has quietly rearranged itself around one fact: advisors are the brand now. Clients aren’t shopping a travel agency the way they might have a decade ago; they’re finding a person whose taste and judgment they trust, often through a friend’s recommendation or a string of well-curated Instagram posts. In a lot of ways, the advisor’s brand has left the agency’s name behind.
As an advisor-turned-executive at In The Know Experiences (part of Global Travel Collection), one of the most exciting parts of my role is the very opportunity of that advisor-meets-agency branding gap. At In The Know (ITKE for short), our approach builds on the foundation of the host-agency model with an approach of a talent or representation firm. It’s the kind of relationship a stylist or designer might have with the business behind them, where the point isn’t just shuffling the paperwork but actually building the name attached to it. In practice, that means we rely on our world-class back office at Global Travel Collection for operational excellence and focus heavily on things that are harder to measure but easier to feel: editorial storytelling around individual advisors, a community built on point-of-view rather than interchangeability, and supplier relationships chosen for fit rather than scale.
Where our philosophy gets real is in how the next wave of advisors actually gets trained in the first place at ITKE. This November, we’re launching Compass, a 26-week program built specifically for people making a second-career leap into luxury travel — professionals coming out of marketing, design, law, or finance with real world experience and credibility, but need a little guidance on what it means to apply it to the world of travel. This is not a crash course in reservation systems. The curriculum leans into the parts of the job that are actually hard to teach: how client relationships are built and kept, how to negotiate with luxury suppliers, how to find a niche worth being known for, and how to run an advisory practice like a real business rather than just a very glamorous hobby.
And this exists because of an unglamorous problem, after all: demand for luxury travel keeps climbing faster than the pool of advisors equipped to serve it well. Most training in this industry focuses heavily on process and organization, and rarely on client acquisition and brand building.
Strip everything else away and our bet is pretty simple: in a business this personal, the advisor’s own credibility is the product — and we’re invested in building that credibility, which is why we think advisors are going to want to be in business with us next. Whether “representation firm” becomes the industry’s new house style or stays a niche flex is genuinely TBD. But the appetite driving it — advisors who want to be developed, not just processed — isn’t going anywhere.
FROM THE SPONSOR
In The Know Experiences (ITKE) is part of Global Travel Collection: a taste-driven, future-focused agency built for lifestyle-minded advisors. We give entrepreneurial advisors who think in brands, not just bookings, a home to be represented and elevated — not just as advisors, but as talent and tastemakers. Our Compass program, launching in November, is a 26-week curriculum designed for second-career professionals ready to bring their existing expertise into luxury travel, backed by real mentorship, supplier relationships, and brand support from day one. Applications are open now at intheknowexperiences.com. If you’re a client-facing professional considering the leap — or a producing advisor who wants to follow our journey — find us on Instagram at @intheknowexperiences.
