Travelweek webinar shows advisors how to use Claude as a practical team member

The useful part

Advertise Contact Tech TORONTO — AI is moving well beyond the chatbot, and for travel advisors, that could mean fewer repetitive tasks, faster client work and more time to focus on selling travel. That was the message at Travelweek's "AI Unleashed with Claude" webinar on Sept. 23, hosted by Travelweek Publisher Devin Kinasz and featuring Shake Dewan, Chief AI Officer at AI Forward along with Juan Sebastian Sanchez Chica of ProColombia, who provided destination updates.

How it works

• Kinasz opened the session by urging advisors to view AI not as a threat, but as a tool that is rapidly changing how work gets done.
• "I'm going to teach you how Claude can essentially be like another team member," Kinasz said.
• While she described ChatGPT as a "Swiss Army knife" suited to research, brainstorming, comparisons and everyday tasks, Claude, she said, can act more like a "specialized scalpel" for deeper work.
• For advisors, that could include organizing client projects, building itineraries, developing presentations, creating marketing campaigns, drafting reports and working across documents, emails and other...
• Once a workflow is established, it can also be saved and reused, potentially eliminating the need to rebuild the same process each time.

What to take from it

It's because agents who learn this technology are going to be outperforming you," she said. He encouraged advisors to provide clear context, rely on official sources and ask the technology to flag information that still needs verification. "It's very easy to turn off your brain," he said, noting that even small factual or tonal errors can slip through if advisors are not paying attention.

Example or evidence

• START SMALL, THEN BUILD For advisors who feel overwhelmed by the speed of AI development, both Kinasz and Dewan offered similar advice: start experimenting.
• "You want to brief it, explain to it… build it and test it once," he said.
• Her advice to advisors was to move beyond simply asking AI questions and start looking at it as something closer to a digital colleague.
• Kinasz outlined how AI could review recent client emails, flag unanswered questions, identify payment deadlines or supplier follow-ups and prepare draft responses for an advisor to approve.

Details worth keeping

Travelweek's Claude webinar shows advisors what's possible. "We're going beyond just typing back and forth in a chat box." FROM CHATBOT TO WORKFLOW TOOL Kinasz positioned Claude as particularly useful for larger, more complex assignments involving long documents, multiple files and ongoing projects. "AI is moving much beyond the simple chat box and prompting," Kinasz said.

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