How Travel Advisors Can Turn Global Uncertainty Into Business Growth
Arnie Weissman thinks a complicated world is the best thing that has ever happened to travel advisors.
Photo: Courtesy of Ensemble
There’s a particular kind of cognitive dissonance that travel advisors have been living with for the past year. War overseas has reshaped fuel markets. Extreme weather events are disrupting itineraries mid-booking. Cartel violence has made formerly reliable destinations periodically untouchable. By any reasonable measure, the environment should feel hostile.
Arnie Weissman doesn’t see it that way.
“The more complex and complicated the world is, the more your value drives,” said Weissman, newly titled Explorer at Large for North Star Travel Media after 25 years as editor in chief of Travel Weekly, speaking at the Ensemble Horizons conference yesterday alongside Ensemble president Michael Johnson. Weissman was presenting findings from the Phocuswright and Travel Weekly Agency Study 2025, and his read on the data was deliberately counterintuitive: advisors who look at today’s headlines and feel anxious are misreading their own moment. “It’s easy to get like, ‘oh my God, what’s going on?’ But in terms of a pure pragmatic industrial look—this is why you’re important to your clients.”
The data backs him up. According to the study, 69% of advisors ranked increased travel costs among their top five most impactful business factors in the last 12 months, with U.S. economic conditions (50%) and internet-based competition (39%) close behind. Those are tough headwinds for sure. But Weissman’s point is that headwinds are, by definition, a tailwind for the advisor who knows how to fly through them.
Clients booking complex, high-stakes itineraries in an uncertain world don’t want an algorithm. They want a human being who has been to the Silk Road, knows the ground operator in Patagonia, and answers the phone at 11 p.m. when their Doha connection falls apart.
The K-shaped economy reinforces this. Wealthier clients have continued spending through inflation and geopolitical noise—and that’s precisely the segment most luxury advisors are built to serve. Travel, as research has repeatedly shown, is among the last discretionary categories to get cut in a downturn. Among clients at the upper end, it often doesn’t get cut at all.
What clients actually pay for
The most clarifying slide of the session had nothing to do with market conditions. It was a simple question: why do clients book with an advisor? Personal relationship and loyalty came in first at 40%, followed by customer service at 29% and destination or product expertise at 27%. Best price? Two percent.
Weissman then noted that only 48% of advisors in the study actually charge service fees. The other 52% are, in effect, giving away the thing their clients just said they’d pay for. “Your clients are telling you that your expertise is worth something,” he said. “Don’t be afraid to assert that value.”
Adventure travel’s $188 billion identity crisis
The second half of the session shifted to a topic that, on the surface, might seem like a detour for luxury sellers: adventure travel. It isn’t. The Adventure Travel Trade Association data that Weissman presented reframes the category in ways that directly matter to advisors selling high-end experiential product.
The headline number was $188 billion, which is the market value of North American travelers who describe themselves as open to adventure ($160 billion in the U.S., $28 billion in Canada). That figure represents 64% of the international outbound market. But the category has become that large because the definition has quietly expanded to include almost everyone.
The ATTA breaks the market into four profiles, and the breakdown is useful because it maps so cleanly onto existing luxury client types. Adventure Intensives (ages 26 to 45, full-time employed, middle- to upper-middle-income) are looking for active trips with depth and purpose, anchored in comfort and value, and with a pragmatic orientation toward sustainability. These are not trust-fund adrenaline seekers; they’re professionals who want to do something that matters and sleep reasonably well afterward.
Then there are Nature Enthusiasts: clients drawn to iconic national parks, African safaris, and serious birding, with an educational underpinning to everything they book. Heritage and Culture Travelers skew older; they’re retired or near-retired, experienced, with the time and income to go deep rather than wide. They’ve done Paris, but now they want a canal barge through Burgundy, or to do the Silk Road and Machu Picchu on the shoulder season, away from the crowds. And finally, Wellness-Seekers: these are pre-retirees motivated by self-improvement who want space to slow down rather than pack in the sights.
What connects all four profiles, Weissman noted, is a consistent emphasis on values alignment. Travelers across every adventure segment want to know that the people they’re traveling with and spending their money with reflect something about who they are. For advisors, that’s a qualification tool and an opportunity to build relationships.
Meanwhile, Johnson described, with some weariness, a recent experience attempting to sleep at a 45-degree angle in a mountain tent, feet going cold against the canvas walls. The lesson wasn’t to avoid selling adventure, but rather to qualify the client first. “Where are they on the spectrum? Are they more creature of comfort underneath, or a hardcore adventure enthusiast?” he asked.
The Ensemble community skews heavily toward the high end, Johnson explained, with a breakdown of roughly 40% cruise, 40% tour, and the remaining 20% spread across air, hotel, and other categories, which means there’s room to move more clients up the experiential ladder without pushing them past their limits, as long as you ask the right questions.
A note on AI
The session also touched briefly on generative AI. In 2024, 41% of advisors reported awareness or use of AI tools. In 2025, that number is 59%, a nearly 50% jump in a single year.
“It’s moved very quickly from being an overwhelming competitive threat or the fear of the unknown to: how do I leverage this tool and automate some of the administration so I can focus on what makes me special,” Johnson said.
The administration piece is the key. Reconciling commissions, generating marketing copy, drafting itinerary proposals—these are all tasks that eat hours that could be spent with clients. If AI handles the back office, the advisor’s relationship and expertise, which the data shows are responsible for 96% of client loyalty, become even more central.
Weissman, for his part, sees the complexity of this moment as a long-term structural argument for the advisor’s role. “You know what you’re getting,” he said. It turns out, in a world where nothing is certain, that’s worth quite a lot.
