Where Travel and Life Intersect

Do You Still Need a Travel Advisor?

AI can help plan almost any trip now. Here’s when a human still matters.

A friend and Nomadic Spirit reader sent me a question a few weeks ago.

“We haven’t used a travel agent recently, but lots of our friends do. Are we missing something?”

He and his wife are experienced travelers. They know how to research a destination, choose a hotel, and plan a trip. And now they have an AI research assistant available to help day and night. So why hire a person to do it?

I asked two travel advisors: one who runs a Chicago luxury travel agency founded in 1945, and one who works independently. Here is what they told me about when an advisor is worth it, and what to ask before you hire one.

What are you paying for?

An agent used to be worth hiring for information: which hotels were reliable, how to connect complicated flights, which tour operator to call. Much of that is now a search away. What a great advisor offers today is different. She may have stayed at the hotel and know which rooms are quieter. She may know the guide in Lisbon who is terrific with history but wrong for teenagers. She has relationships with people who can help when something goes wrong.

And, over time, she may know you.

AI can learn that you prefer small hotels, walkable neighborhoods, and restaurants without tasting menus. A person who has planned six trips for you may know something different: when to ignore those preferences. “I know that’s what you usually like, but trust me on this one” may be a surprisingly durable business model.

Shawn Kirschenman, an independent advisor who runs Travel Conductors, put it this way: “There’s a big difference between seeing a hotel has a 4.8 rating from a bunch of people you don’t know online and knowing how it feels to wake up there.”

The advisors have AI, too

A 2025 Travel Weekly industry survey found that 59 percent of advisors had used generative AI tools, up from 41 percent the year before. The comparison now is you with AI against an advisor with AI, plus years of experience, supplier relationships, and people on the ground.

In a survey this spring of Americans who use AI, commissioned by ALG Vacations, which sells trips through advisors, Baby Boomers asked whom they would trust with final vacation decisions chose an advisor over AI, 59 percent to 15.

Kirschenman said he uses AI every day, mostly for work clients never see, like summarizing correspondence and checking that every piece of a trip lines up before departure. He’s much more careful about letting it become “the final authority” on recommendations. “Information is becoming almost free,” he said, “which makes judgment and taste even more valuable.”

When does an advisor make the trip better?

If I’m spending six days in Paris, I enjoy figuring it out. Research is part of the trip, and I don’t want someone else deciding where I should eat or what I should do Tuesday afternoon.

But make the trip a safari in Botswana, three generations going to Japan, a Galápagos expedition, or a complicated month across several countries, and the calculation changes. At that point the useful question is simply whether an advisor can make this trip better.

Tim Krenzien, president of Paul Klein Travel, was more candid about this than I expected from someone who plans high-end trips for a living. For everyday travel, he said, AI and some hands-on research of your own “can provide a perfectly good outcome,” and an advisor may not add much.

He thinks an advisor earns a place at the upper end: better rooms, breakfast included at top hotels, airport transfers arranged through the hotel, and private guides instead of a seat on a group tour. His clients “travel as a lifestyle,” he said. They expect a certain standard every time, and they aren’t looking to take chances on a hotel or a guide nobody has vetted.

Kirschenman would draw the line a little differently. Some of his best clients arrive with their own research. “A client might bring me ten ideas. Maybe three are fantastic, two are in the wrong place, one looks much better online than it does in person, and four simply don’t fit the rhythm of the trip.”

If you’re looking for one, the questions have changed too. Where have you traveled yourself, and what do you specialize in? How do you get paid? Will you work with someone who wants to stay involved in the planning, and what happens when something goes wrong? I’d add one more: how do you use AI?

My friend wanted to know whether he and his wife were missing something. On most of their trips, probably not. On a safari, or a month across several countries, they might be.

The advisors worth paying for will be the ones who know you well enough to occasionally tell you you’re wrong.

by Paul M. Rand, founder and editor of Nomadic Spirit

Destinations worth traveling to and understanding once you arrive

Puebla, Mexico

Calling it the next Oaxaca undersells this city

If you have traveled Mexico beyond the beaches, you probably know the places on either side of Puebla better than Puebla itself. It is the day tour that has you back in Mexico City by dinner, and it is the city the road to Oaxaca runs through.

Puebla is worth not only a much longer visit but a trip in itself. Some recent travel guides have started calling it the next Oaxaca. UNESCO listed the old center in 1987, and what it singled out was the decoration: 2,619 cataloged buildings across 391 blocks, many of them faced in brick, tile and white stucco relief. The things worth seeing are close together, and some of the best hotels are inside restored colonial houses.

The stall in La Acocota

Michelin sent inspectors to Puebla for the first time this year. Fourteen places made the 2026 guide, eight of them Bib Gourmands, the category for good food at a fair price. One of the eight is a stall inside the Mercado La Acocota, where María de la Luz Pérez Rocha and her husband, Rodrigo Conde Serrano, have been making cemitas for more than 37 years. A cemita is a sesame roll split and filled with milanesa, shredded quesillo, avocado, and pápalo (like cilantro), and it is what the city eats for lunch.

Mole poblano and chiles en nogada are the famous dishes. Everyday foods include cemitas, chalupas, and molotes. Tacos árabes originated with Middle Eastern immigrants who arrived in the early twentieth century, bringing the vertical spit, which locals adapted and later used to make tacos al pastor.

The mark on the base

The famous Talavera ceramic covers domes and house fronts throughout the center. The clay comes from the valley, and potters make the pieces using techniques dating to the colonial period. The denominación de origen, the same sort of protection that limits what may be called Champagne or tequila, recognizes six colors, all ground from minerals: blue, yellow, green, orange, black, and a pale violet. A certified piece is left unglazed on the base, where the workshop’s mark, the painter’s initials, and the city are inscribed. It is always interesting to turn a piece over.

Only eight workshops hold the certification. Uriarte, certified and in business since 1824, runs tours most days.

Across from the cathedral, the Biblioteca Palafoxiana turned 380 this month. It holds more than 45,000 volumes on the carved wooden shelving lining the room. Work on the Capilla del Rosario, inside the Templo de Santo Domingo, began in 1650 and finished in 1690, with gilded stucco covering the walls and vaults, and it was called the eighth wonder of the New World.

The hill at Cholula

Cholula, ten minutes west and now effectively a suburb, is centuries older than Puebla. Its Great Pyramid holds 4.45 million cubic meters, nearly twice the volume of the Great Pyramid of Giza. Earth and grass have made the site look like a hill with a church on top. On a clear morning, Popocatépetl can be seen behind it, 45 kilometers away. The volcano erupted again in December 1994, after about fifty years of quiet, and has remained active ever since.

A few minutes away is the church that makes the trip worth taking. Local artisans did the interior at Santa María Tonantzintla, working across generations, and they filled it with angels with dark skin, cherubs wearing feathers in their hair, ears of corn, papayas, and chiles worked into the plaster.

Buses from Mexico City run throughout the day and take about two hours, and Puebla has its own airport half an hour from the center, with nonstop flights from Houston, Los Angeles, and Newark, and Chicago added on December 1.