There are four platforms that are genuinely relevant to travel advisors right now. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Microsoft Copilot. There are others, and there will be more, but these are the ones with the maturity, the capability and the practical accessibility that make them worth your time.
I am going to give you a plain-English read on each one. Not a technical comparison. A practical one.
ChatGPT, made by a company called OpenAI, is the one most people have heard of. It is the platform that brought generative AI into mainstream conversation and it remains the most widely used.
Its strengths are breadth and ecosystem. It handles an enormous range of tasks well: writing, research, summarisation, analysis, brainstorming. And because it has been around the longest, there is more community knowledge, more tutorials, and more third-party integrations built around it than any other platform.
The feature most relevant to travel advisors at the intermediate level is something called custom GPTs: essentially a version of ChatGPT that you configure for a specific purpose, like a dedicated tool for drafting proposals or researching destinations, without any technical knowledge required. We will cover those in the intermediate modules.
ChatGPT also has a Projects feature, which organises your conversations, files and custom instructions into dedicated workspaces built around a specific client, destination or task type. If you are working on a complex itinerary for a particular client, for example, a Project keeps everything related to that brief in one place: your files, your conversation history, your saved context. It is a meaningful step up from working in standalone conversations and it is worth knowing it exists from the outset, even if you are not ready to use it immediately. We will return to it in the intermediate modules alongside the Claude equivalent.
There is a free tier, and it is functional. But the paid tier, currently around twenty dollars a month, gives you access to significantly more capable models, longer context windows, and the full feature set including memory and custom GPTs. For professional use, the free tier is a starting point, not a destination.
My honest read: ChatGPT is the well-supported choice. If you want to be on the platform with the widest community and the most resources around it, this is it.
Claude, made by a company called Anthropic, is the platform I reach for most often when I’m creating some form of content or need a sophisticated output.
The reason is simple: the quality of the written output is, in my experience, consistently more natural, more nuanced, and less obviously AI-generated than most other platforms. For an industry where the language you use with clients is a material part of your professional value, that matters.
Claude also handles long documents exceptionally well. You can upload a lengthy supplier brief, a detailed client questionnaire, or a full itinerary and interrogate it directly, which we will cover in the research module.
The Projects feature, which we explore in depth at the intermediate level, allows you to build persistent workspaces with saved context and files, organised around a specific client, destination or task type. It is one of the most practically useful features available to advisors right now.
My honest read: if your primary use cases are client-facing writing, document analysis and building a structured AI practice over time, Claude is the platform I would recommend most strongly.
Gemini, made by Google, has one advantage that the others do not: it lives inside the Google ecosystem.
If your business runs on Gmail, Google Docs, Google Drive and Google Calendar, Gemini can work with those tools natively. It can reference your emails, summarise documents in your Drive, and assist you within the applications you already use daily rather than operating as a separate tool you switch to.
For advisors who are already fully embedded in Google Workspace, this integration is genuinely valuable. For advisors who are not, it is less of a differentiator.
My honest read: if Google Workspace is where your business lives, Gemini is the most frictionless choice. If it is not, the integration advantage disappears and the other platforms may serve you better.
Microsoft Copilot is the equivalent proposition for the Microsoft ecosystem: it lives inside Outlook, Word, Teams and PowerPoint.
For advisors operating within a larger agency or corporate travel environment on Microsoft 365, Copilot is worth exploring because it meets you where you already are. For independent advisors not primarily on Microsoft tools, it is less immediately relevant.
My honest read: if your business runs on Microsoft 365, Copilot deserves your attention. If it does not, it is probably not your starting point. It is a little clunky and not as effective as the other three tools.
