Published on
06/10/2026
Agentic AI
Travel Agency Growth
Productivity
Travel Tech
It's 7 pm. Your colleagues have gone home, the phones are quiet, and you're still at your desk. The proposal for the Peeters family (three weeks in Costa Rica, two connecting flights, a rental car and that boutique lodge they loved) should have gone out yesterday. Then this afternoon they asked to swap the second week for the Caribbean coast. So you're checking availability again, re-pricing, rebuilding the document. Meanwhile, two other files are waiting for a reply and a supplier still hasn't confirmed.
Tomorrow morning there will be three new requests waiting in your inbox. Business is good. And that is exactly the problem.
I talked about this with Pieter Weymans when he interviewed me a few weeks ago. I showed him a lot of what we build at Cumbaya: features, workflows, live examples. But what stuck with him most wasn't any of that. It was one simple graph.
Pieter wrote about it in his Travel360 Benelux column, AI doorbreekt de oudste groeibarrière van de reisagent. He put words to something every agency owner knows, and that is exactly why we started Cumbaya.
Agencies have been digitising for decades. Booking engines, CRMs, itinerary builders: all useful, and all designed to help one person execute one task a bit faster.
But faster tasks don't change the equation. The agent still has to carry the whole chain: interpret the request, search options, compare, build the proposal, adjust it when the client changes their mind, re-price, update the documents, follow up.
Pieter describes the shift well: agentic AI doesn't just speed up a single task. It can support, or partly or fully take over, a complete sequence of tasks. That is a fundamentally different thing.
This is what we see every day at Cumbaya. When a client asks to add two nights or swap a destination, the agentic workspace handles the chain: it rebooks, updates hotel options, recalculates pricing and margins, and keeps the itinerary, the client view and the invoice in sync.
The travel expert doesn't disappear from that process. Their role changes. Instead of executing every step, they steer, check and decide. They bring the taste, the local knowledge and the relationship. The AI brings the capacity.
That is what Pieter calls virtual extra capacity: a team of five that can handle the workload that used to require six or seven people.
This is the part that matters most, and I want to be clear about it. The promise of AI in our industry is not about replacing travel agents. Personal advice, human judgement and trust are exactly what make agencies valuable, and they are the reason travellers keep coming back.
The promise is that your revenue no longer has to grow in lockstep with your headcount. That the jump from €1 million to €1.15 million becomes an opportunity again, not a burden. That your existing team gets room to do more of the work only they can do.
Or, in the words Pieter chose to end his piece with:
Not fewer people. More output per person.
That graph I showed him? That's what it looks like.
Curious what virtual extra capacity could look like for your team? Book a demo and start scaling your expertise now.
Read Pieter Weymans' original column on Travel360 Benelux.
What this means for your agency?
If you recognise that in-between zone, ask yourself:
How many proposals or changes could you handle if each one took minutes instead of hours?
How much of your team's week goes to executing steps rather than advising clients?
What would your next €150,000 in turnover look like if it didn't require a new hire first?
That is the conversation we love having with agencies.
AUTHOR
Julie Hermans
Hi! It's Julie, co-founder and CCO at Cumbaya. I love diving into the latest trends in the travel-tech world. I share these insights with the hope that they spark new ideas and help you navigate an industry that's rapidly changing.
Essential Questions and Takeaways
What is the oldest growth barrier for travel agencies?
Why is growing from €1 million to €1.15 million a problem?
How is agentic AI different from traditional travel software?
Will AI replace travel agents?