Brené Brown’s Message to Luxury Travel: Don’t Let AI Replace What Makes Us Human
At Virtuoso Travel Week, Brown made the case for trust, emotional intelligence, and human connection in an increasingly AI-powered industry.
Photo: Courtesy of Brené Brown
When Brené Brown last took the stage at Virtuoso Travel Week 15 years ago, she spoke about vulnerability and connection at a moment when the travel industry was grappling with a different wave of technological change. On Sunday, she returned to Las Vegas with a message that felt particularly suited to 2026: technology may be changing at breakneck speed, but the skills that matter most are becoming more human, not less.
Brown, the researcher and bestselling author whose work centers around courage, vulnerability, and leadership, delivered the keynote at the opening session of the 38th annual Virtuoso Travel Week. Her remarks followed a session in which artificial intelligence had already surfaced repeatedly, including Virtuoso chairman and CEO Matthew Upchurch’s announcement that the network is developing its own proprietary AI capability.
But Brown’s focus wasn’t on learning to use the latest technology. Instead, she zeroed in on what leaders (and, by extension, travel advisors) will need when technology and other forces make certainty increasingly difficult to come by.
“This is the first time in my 30-year career working in organizations that the C-suite is the most frustrated and the most interested in exiting,” Brown said, describing what she is seeing in her work with senior executives. The problem, she added, is partly rooted in a longstanding idea of leadership that equates value with having answers. “When you look at a senior leader that says, ‘My value is what I know,’ that is not your value anymore.”
Brown’s alternative is what she calls “Strong Ground,” a leadership framework built around developing a stable core of self-awareness, emotional regulation, values, and connection while operating in an unstable environment.
That has obvious implications for travel. Advisors are frequently working with clients at moments of heightened emotion, whether that’s during the process of planning a once-in-a-lifetime trip, navigating a disruption, or trying to satisfy several generations of a family at once.
Brown argued that understanding what sits beneath a client’s request is one of the distinctly human capabilities that matters in those moments. “Trust is the operating system under all luxury travel,” she told the audience.
For Brown, trust is accumulated through behavior over time, rather than created through one grand gesture. She described it using a “marble jar” metaphor, in which each interaction either adds to or subtracts from the trust established in a relationship.
One behavior that can increase trust, perhaps counterintuitively, is admitting when you need help. “You care more about winning than protecting your ego,” Brown said of a person willing to acknowledge that they are out of their depth and ask a question rather than bluff their way through it.
That ability to tolerate uncertainty is becoming more important as leaders contend with rapidly changing technology, markets, and geopolitics. Brown cautioned against responding to fear by becoming overly certain, resistant to change, perfectionistic, or cynical.
“Skepticism is healthy. Cynicism is armor,” she said, describing cynicism as a form of self-protection. “If you’re not afraid, you are not paying attention.”
Travel advisors, she argued, sit in an unusually intimate position within that environment because travel itself contains uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure. Clients don’t simply hand over dates, budgets, and destination preferences; they bring expectations, family dynamics, anxieties, and sometimes enormous emotional weight to a trip.
Brown spoke from personal experience: she is herself a Virtuoso client and opened her keynote by thanking her advisor, Houston-based Christina Buaas, while sharing photographs from family trips, including a Christmas-market journey to Germany with her daughter shortly before Brown’s mother died.
“Those pictures are not photos. Those pictures are my life,” Brown said. “They’re my family. They’re my time. They’re how I choose to be together. And y’all make that possible.”
Later, she connected that experience directly to advisors’ work.
“If you don’t think you’re in the vulnerability business, then you’re certainly not my advisor,” Brown added—which also may explain why her message fit so closely with Virtuoso’s own discussion of AI. The network is investing in technology that can make finding information and completing routine tasks faster, while its leadership has simultaneously argued that human value becomes even more important in the face of complicated decisions.
Brown’s keynote offered a practical version of that argument. Advisors don’t need to compete with technology on speed or information retrieval. Their advantage lies in abilities that are harder to automate: reading the emotion underneath a request, earning trust, showing empathy, navigating uncertainty and knowing when a client needs someone to slow the situation down.
And Brown closed by reminding the room that providing that level of human service requires advisors to protect some of their own capacity, too.
“You cannot serve people and bring them collective effervescence one ounce more than you serve yourself,” she said, encouraging attendees to pair periods of intense focus with deliberate recovery.
For an industry currently trying to determine which pieces of the travel-planning process AI can handle, Brown’s keynote offered another question worth considering: Which parts should remain deeply human?
