Virtuoso Kicks Off Travel Week With Sales Up 20.8% and an Eye on AI
Strong luxury demand, changing travel patterns, and new AI tools set the tone for Virtuoso’s 38th annual gathering in Las Vegas.
Photo: Laura Ratliff
Virtuoso kicked off its 38th annual Travel Week in Las Vegas on Sunday with thousands of luxury travel professionals gathered from around the world, a healthy set of sales numbers, and a recurring message from the stage: the industry may be moving rapidly into an AI-powered future, but its value still rests heavily on human relationships.
That idea ran throughout the opening session, beginning with Jennifer Campbell, Virtuoso’s senior vice president of global events, who characterized the annual gathering as something more enduring than a week of appointments.
“What we’ve built together over the last 38 years is more than an event. It’s a ritual,” Campbell said. “Every August, this community comes together. We reconnect with friends and colleagues from around the world. We welcome new members and partners to our community. We celebrate accomplishments, share ideas, and imagine what’s possible.”
This year’s Travel Week brings together attendees from 105 countries, with programming spread across Bellagio Resort & Casino, ARIA Resort & Casino, The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas, and Vdara Hotel & Spa. Virtuoso has also tweaked the format for 2026, including fully matched networking appointments and a streamlined schedule designed to leave more room for conversations and connections. New additions include Virtuoso Gives Back, a volunteer initiative in Las Vegas, and a Tech Marketplace, which debuted alongside the fifth annual Travel Tech Summit.
Those relationships are underpinning a business that, at least so far in 2026, appears remarkably resilient.
During his trends presentation, Virtuoso executive vice president David Kolner shared data showing projected network sales up 20.8% year over year, based on first-half results and projections for the full year. Preferred sales are outpacing non-preferred sales in every market. Hotels are leading by product type, up 24.5%, followed by cruise at 22.4%.
The upper reaches of the hotel market are performing particularly well. Bookings at hotels with average daily rates above $1,500 are growing 37%, twice as quickly as lower-priced bookings. “Increased sales is not just ADR,” Kolner told attendees. “It is also a total budget, especially for those premium clients.”
The timing of those bookings is changing, too. Virtuoso’s data showed fall sales up 69%, with festive sales up 56%. September has become especially notable: bookings for September travel nearly doubled between 2023 and 2025, and current pacing suggests September could outsell August this year. (Meanwhile, preferred bookings one to two years out are already up 50% compared with the same point last year, helped by multigenerational and celebration travel.)
Even climate concerns have yet to derail Europe’s performance. Virtuoso’s 2026 Impact Report found that 72% of members say climate is affecting clients’ travel plans, while 82% of partners are concerned about its impact on their businesses. Yet preferred hotel sales in Europe are up an average of 33% in the first half of the year.
Wellness is another bright spot. Virtuoso reported a 28% increase in bookings at wellness-segmented hotels, while its consumer research found that one in four global luxury travelers identifies health and wellness as a reason for taking a leisure trip.
The bigger question hovering over the session, however, was how AI will affect the business behind those numbers.
Virtuoso’s research found considerably more optimism than fear: around 35% of respondents identified AI as an opportunity for luxury travel in 2026, versus just 18% who considered it a threat. But the network’s members remain concerned about accuracy and reliability, as well as maintaining the right balance between technology and human expertise.
Kolner connected those concerns directly to the value of an advisor. “The idea of human connection and the way you do things actually has true value—emotional value,” he said.
Virtuoso chairman and CEO Matthew Upchurch later expanded on that idea while outlining the network’s own technology plans. He announced that Virtuoso has spent the past seven months developing a proprietary intelligence capability using AI models grounded in Virtuoso’s own data. The technology is being designed to work alongside existing platforms rather than replace them, with potential applications ranging from helping advisors identify highly specific hotel options to helping agency owners find training opportunities for individual advisors.
For Upchurch, the arrival of increasingly capable technology doesn’t diminish the role of advisors; it makes defining their particular value more important.
“This network scaled human connection to compete against other kinds of scale,” said Upchurch, reflecting on Virtuoso’s evolution from the early days of the PC revolution through today’s AI boom. “We made travel advising a truly respected, high earning profession. Our work accelatered experiences over possessions, and we made human advising stay meaningful even in the face of exponential technological change.”
It was an apt message for the start of a week built around thousands of in-person meetings. As Campbell put it earlier in the session, “Belonging doesn’t happen through an app. Or through artificial intelligence or through a screen. It happens when people come together.”
