Using AI to Streamline Your Travel Advisor Workflow: Meet Sidekick from Fora
Artificial Intelligence is everywhere. And the travel industry is no exception. From helping with the initial stage of travel inspiration to the research of where to stay and what to do, AI has evolved into a powerful tool – and one that can be incredibly useful for the modern travel advisor.
Read on to learn how Fora’s platform is using AI, and how their tech team has built a custom AI tool – called Sidekick – for its network of advisors. We’ll also give you a few easy tips on how to utilize AI in your workflow as a travel advisor.
Meet Sidekick from Fora: A Tool to Make Incorporating AI into your Workflow Easy
Travel advisors need quick and easy access to accurate hotel and supplier information to best serve their clients. To make finding information easy, Fora has built an AI tool to help.
Meet Sidekick from Fora
Sidekick is a custom-trained GPT-4 chatbot that uses all of the information within Fora to provide Fora Advisors with up-to-date information to streamline the research and booking process. Sidekick currently has access to all of Fora’s proprietary information: Advisor training, 100+ destination trainings, 100+ supplier trainings, help center articles, preferred partnerships, hotel details, and tens of thousands of posts from our advisor community, and traveler reviews. .
Whether it’s seeking inspiration for a South Pacific honeymoon, details on how to sign up with one of Fora’s partners or looking for information like “what is an IATA number,” Sidekick makes it easy for our advisors to access the resources they need.
Fora Advisors can access Sidekick directly in Fora’s Advisor Portal, alongside the booking platform, their one-stop shop for researching and booking travel for clients.
Fora Advisor Elizabeth (Beth) Kaczka uses Sidekick as her go-to tool for finding information.
“This AI-powered marvel allows me to quickly search for everything I need…streamlining my workflow like never before,” she said. “It's like having a lightning-fast research assistant who’s always on the clock, enabling me to craft meticulously tailored itineraries that impress my clients.”
One of the benefits of becoming a Fora Advisor is the breadth of resources available to all advisors. Fora's Portal offers a vast training library, including recorded partner and destination updates as well as business and marketing lessons. Fora’s community app, Forum, allows advisors to ask and answer questions, as well as share personal and client feedback on specific properties and suppliers. To navigate this extensive information – resources that span tens of thousands of articles, posts and videos – Sidekick provides a quick solution that scans Fora’s content, returning categorized results for easy access. With a simple search, advisors can quickly find relevant answers, neatly organized and labeled by source, such as "Forum," "Partners," "Training" and "Advisor Guide."
Another AI feature on Fora’s booking platform
As a Fora Advisor, you get access to a custom advisor Portal, which includes Fora’s booking platform (as well as other tools such as Fora’s training library, client management tool and more). Fora’s booking platform is connected to a central hotel booking system (known as the global distribution system, or GDS). If you’ve ever read through content from the GDS – a database used across the travel industry – you know that hotel room and rate descriptions can look like they’re written in code, often including many abbreviations and partial wording. And while travel advisors can decipher these terms, it’s helpful to have a cleaner client-facing experience when sending a quote. This is where Fora’s other AI tools work their magic. With the click of a button, you can use AI to automatically reformat the copy into text that is formatted, copy edited and ready to send to a client.
“Before this function was available I would have to develop my own method of communicating the features of the booking,” Fora Advisor Rita Carton said. “AI allows the verbiage to be in language that a client can read and understand without all the abbreviations.”
Tips for using AI in trip planning
Here are some more ways you can transform the power of chatbots like Fora’s Sidekick, as well as ChatGPT or Gemini into your travel planning assistant.
Researching itineraries: Although AI can’t know your client better than you, it can be a great source of inspiration. A way to jumpstart your creative ideas is to ask an AI chatbot for ideas, then customize those suggestions. Think of it like an intern taking a first stab at a rough draft for you.
Predicting travel trends: Chatbots can also analyze data to report on upcoming hot spots in the travel industry. A question like “What travel trends are you seeing for European travel in 2025?” returns a list of observations, along with links to references where the information was found.
Summarizing site visit notes: One of the best parts of being a travel advisor is doing site visits, where a member of the hotel staff shows an advisor around the property. These visits offer advisors a glimpse into a hotel, which proves extremely valuable when offering first-hand intel to clients. Drop your notes on the hotel into an AI tool like ChatGPT to organize your thoughts for a client email. Or, Fora Advisors can take it a step further and create a first draft for a travel guide for their Fora Profile page.
Become a Fora Advisor today for access to Sidekick & AI tools
When new advisors join Fora, they immediately have access to Sidekick and Fora’s other tech-forward tools, enabling them to practice using the tools as they go through travel agent training. Fora also office AI Office Hours, interactive Zoom meetings where advisors can come and ask any questions about how to utilize AI in their workflow.
Fora’s modern approach to building technology is also rooted in creating a constant feedback loop with its network of advisors. Their dedicated tech team builds tools based on input from Fora Advisors, and they are consistently releasing new features as well as improving already-existing offerings.
“We will be enabling Sidekick to have more information and powers,” Fora Co-Founder and CPO/CTO Jake Peters said. “We have an aggressive AI roadmap of product features, including complex searching in the booking platform (e.g. “prices for any seven night stay at any 5-star preferred partner in Rome in July 2024”) and automatically being able to write draft VIP emails.”
Excited about AI, Sidekick and leveling up your travel advisor workflow? Apply to become a Fora Advisor and take your first steps toward a career in travel. Use code HAR to skip Fora’s waitlist on your application.
