AI or Nay-I?

There’s a question worth asking about how travel gets sold today: what happens when the thing recommending your vacation isn’t a person?

Here’s the uncomfortable part.

The screen is not neutral

When you search for a hotel, a flight, or a tour, you’re looking at an interface someone designed — and they didn’t design it to help you decide well. They designed it to get you to decide now.

That’s the ranked results that put a property at the top because of a commission arrangement, not because it’s right for you. The pre-checked box. The “3 people are looking at this room.” The countdown timer. The review score averaged from strangers whose trip had nothing in common with yours. Individually these feel like small nudges. Together, they’re built to distort your ability to make an informed choice.

Now add AI to that stack. Ask a chatbot to plan a week in Lisbon and it will produce a confident, well-written itinerary in fifteen seconds. What it won’t produce is any way to know where those recommendations came from, whether the model has ever been corrected about the restaurant that closed last spring, or whose interests it’s actually serving. Confidence is not the same thing as trustworthiness. A polished answer and a reliable answer look identical on a screen.

What we actually sell

For a long time, travel advisors sold access. They had the reservation systems and the fare rules and the phone numbers, and travelers didn’t.

That era is over, and honestly…good that it is! Information is everywhere now. But abundant information that’s been shaped by someone else’s incentives isn’t the same as good information — and that’s where Huckleberry Travel comes in.

Our value proposition is simple: we’ve been there, and we don’t have a hidden agenda.

If you’re paying attention to our social media “stories” this week, you know that we’ve just spent a few days touring hotel properties in Paris where our clients will be visiting in the coming months. And on the heels of that, it’s off to Provence to familiarize ourselves with how Viking does river cruises, and what makes it different from the other river cruise companies in our portfolio. We know what we’re selling, and we know why it might be good, but just not for you.

None of that is in a training dataset. It lives with the people who went and found out.

We’re careful with AI, on purpose

Plainly put: plenty of travel advisors have quietly started running client itineraries through AI and passing along the output. It’s fast, it reads well, and most clients never know.

We don’t do that. Not because the technology is bad — it’s genuinely useful for some things — but because the moment a client receives an itinerary they could have generated themselves, the advisor has stopped being worth their time. You don’t come to us for a document. You come to us for judgment, for accountability, and for a human being who is on your side of the transaction.

That last part matters most. When a marketplace recommends a hotel, there’s no way to know why. When we recommend one, you can ask — and you’ll get a real answer, from someone who will hear about it from you if we got it wrong.

The takeaway

Use the tools. Read the reviews. Let the algorithm show what’s out there. Then bring it to us, and we’ll tell you what’s actually true.

In a marketplace engineered to influence what travelers decide, having someone in your corner whose information is neutral and first-hand isn’t a nostalgic luxury. It’s the most valuable thing we can offer — and it’s the reason we’re not going to automate it away.