At ILTM Cannes in 2024, separate in-person interviews with Nuba's Managing Director Mario Del Duca and 360 Private Travel's Founder and CEO James Turner sparked a deceptively simple question: Should travel agencies build their own technology, or partner with third-party providers?
At the time, Del Duca was firmly in the "wait and see" camp, examining if buying was worth the tradeoff, and if so, whether agencies should let specialized travel tech partners do their thing and do it well.
Turner, on the other hand, was firmly convinced that building things in-house was the only way to go.
A year and a half later, the debate between these two schools of thought in luxury travel has only intensified.
Artificial intelligence has not only dramatically lowered the cost of software development, but has also accelerated it, according to an April 2026 McKinsey report. Those findings have been corroborated by leaders at travel tech firms like Tern and Safari Portal that report they can now build products faster than they can conceive them.
But the rift between agencies that favor partnerships and those that are investing in proprietary technology seems to be widening, as the latter maintain that software isn't just a support function but an important competitive advantage.
The questions that surround that debate are how that technology underpins control over assets, how it shapes financial planning and scalability, and how it influences recruiting and retention as the industry's modernization is driving full steam ahead.
Travel Tech Rationales, At a Glance
Few companies embody the build-first philosophy more than Little Emperors & Co.
"Data ownership matters, but the conversation shouldn't stop there," wrote Rebecca Masri, Founder of Little Emperors & Co. via email. "The real question is whether an advisor has the infrastructure to use that data to run and grow their business."
"What they need is a platform that does the heavy lifting: one that surfaces the right data, at the right time, in a way that drives decisions," she added.
Little Emperors has invested heavily in MyLER, its proprietary advisor platform, and Masri concedes that it can be a significant undertaking.
"Whilst AI makes building faster, you still need product thinking, engineering resources, ongoing maintenance, and strategic prioritisation," she wrote. "That is a full-time job…The advisor's time is the scarcest resource they have, and it should be spent on business development and genuine client engagement."
Masri proudly describes Little Emperors as "a tech company that operates in travel, not the other way around," reporting that ambitious advisors increasingly expect sophisticated infrastructure as part of their professional toolkit — an enabler or arguably an extension of how they want to shape their own businesses.
Fora Travel has arrived at a similar conclusion, albeit from a different angle.
Jake Peters, Fora Travel's co-founder and CPTO, argues that incentives are a key differentiator. In a widely discussed LinkedIn exchange, Peters also described Fora Travel as more of a tech company directly invested in advisor success as it builds Via, a new AI-powered/agentic assistant embedded directly into its platform.
"Sometimes specific solutions stitched together are better than a monolithic mess," he wrote on the LinkedIn thread. "We are working hard to ensure we do not end up that way, with an intense focus on quality, craft, [user experience], and collaborative building with our users."
"We know our advisors use Tern, Travify, etc., but as we have begun adding our own CRM and itinerary builder tools to our Advisor Portal (which already has hotel booking and commission tracking), advisors can manage more of their business entirely in our advisor portal," Peters explained in an email. "Now we're focused on adding the workflow tools they need over the next two quarters while continuing to advance Via, our AI agent, and our booking tools and supplier connectivity."
"Tern Travel is a software company that makes money from SaaS fees and is mostly not in the transaction flow," he elaborated on the LinkedIn thread.
"Our business models are fundamentally different," he added. "The travel figures Tern Travel claims credit for are misleading as this is not travel being transacted through its platform. We believe to be successful in travel you need to be in the transaction."
In response, Tern Travel CEO and co-founder David Shull commented on the same LinkedIn thread that the company had just "announced zero additional markup for all activities, tours, and transfers" booked through the platform, and that many Fora Travel advisors enjoyed Tern Travel's services.
Despite the tit for tat on social media, these are both tech companies serving travel advisors in their own ways, and they are competing more vehemently on this front. For example, on June 10 Tern Travel revealed its own agentic features, and in its spring webinar announced that it is now handling commission reconciliation.
Combined, Tern Travel and Fora Travel have raised nearly $100 million in venture funding — the former having raised $17 million across a seed round and a Series A, and the latter $73.5 million across rounds through a Series C. That has of course allowed them to heavily invest in their own technology, but most host agencies do not enjoy this same kind of financial runway.
It's estimated that more than 90 percent of travel agencies are small businesses, which is likely why many agency leaders remain firmly in the partnership camp — they have to.
At the same time, what happens when an agency's partners make technical or rate changes to their platforms?
Tern Travel's feature to import agency data via a Google Chrome extension is a brilliant move because it streamlines the ingest process, but what happens when an agency wants to go elsewhere?
Similarly, while it might have launched agentic features on June 10, Tern Travel has simultaneously introduced Tern Travel Pro, or paid tiers that are intended to support infrastructure and computing costs based on advisor use. But who decides how much "use" is worth paying for?
That is where the conversation is evolving beyond buy versus build. As AI tools become more capable, some agency owners are beginning to ask a different question: should they hire people, or purchase compute?
The rise of AI also raises new questions around privacy, pricing, and platform dependence. Tern CEO David Shull shared with Luxury Travel Advisor via email that the company's commercial agreement with Anthropic prohibits customer data from being used to train AI models, with ownership of inputs and outputs remaining with the agency.
While that's reassuring, some advisors are keeping a close eye on how workflow economics evolve.
"They have done a great job at thinking about how to do AI and your agency. I'm now wondering if I should let my [virtual assistant] go. Because this solves a lot of my issues," commented Megan Mack, founder of Heirloom Adventures in a WhatsApp discussion during the Tern webinar.
At the same time, Mack questioned how AI usage will ultimately be priced, noting that she had already exceeded 200 percent of her monthly Tern usage allocation during testing — as determined by Tern Travel.
As AI becomes increasingly part of core agency infrastructure, the direction of the partnership debate seems to be moving from whether agencies should use it, to how much compute they're willing to pay for.
A Case for Ownership
Katie Robertson, Director of Technology at 360 Private Travel, arrived at a very different conclusion.
When Robertson and founder James Turner evaluated the market several years ago, they found that none of the available platforms adequately supported the business model they wanted to build.
"We looked around and there was nothing there," Robertson said in a video interview. "You have to make a decision at the time."
The result was Juno, 360 Private Travel's proprietary platform.
For Robertson, the rationale goes beyond software features or user interfaces. The decision ultimately comes down to control.
"We are in charge of our own destiny," she said. "If you go with off-the-shelf technology, there'll be things that technology maybe cannot do, or can't do at the moment that you want to drive an opportunity. It's an advantage being able to say, 'You know what? We want to do that and we can do that because we can build our technology to support it.'"
That flexibility became particularly important as 360 expanded beyond the traditional host agency model and has responded to global trade winds. The company operates a membership club alongside its advisor business and wanted deeper integration between customer acquisition, advisor workflows, content, data, and payments.
"We needed a system to do that," Robertson explained. "By having everything within our own ecosystem, we are in control of our own data and that means we've got more insight."
Yet Robertson frames the debate more carefully than a simple decision between builders and buyers.
In fact, she repeatedly praised third-party platforms such as Tern Travel and acknowledged that many agencies will continue to rely on outside technology partners.
Where she sees the biggest change is in the economics of development itself.
"There are so many tools out there," she said. "You don't have to know how to code now to build software, but you do have to be smart. You do have to know where you're going and what you want to do."
For agencies willing to invest the time and resources, Robertson believes custom technology can create meaningful differentiation. For others, purchasing more proven solutions may remain the more practical path.
In other words, while AI has made software development much more affordable, any builds must be deliberate and intentional.
"If you want to be distinctive, to stand out, to be nimble and agile, doing your own is a way to achieve that," she said. "If you want to be safe and just tick the boxes, go with something else."
The Hybrid Model
As for Nuba, one of Latin America's largest luxury travel agencies, things are not so binary, and building things on your own comes with a few caveats. The agency has increasingly adopted what Del Duca describes as a hybrid approach.
While the company spent years building its own middle- and back-office systems, that experience ultimately reinforced the challenges of developing everything internally.
"Although implementation was ultimately successful, it was expensive and time consuming," Del Duca said. "That was the reason why I was hesitant when it came to advisor-facing booking tools."
Instead, Nuba has partnered with TravelWits, spending more than a year configuring the platform for the Latin American market while simultaneously building targeted proprietary tools around it.
For Del Duca, the future is less about building everything or buying everything and more about identifying where custom development creates a genuine competitive advantage.
"We would never be able to compete with companies employing dozens of engineers," he conceded.
Instead, he believes agencies can effectively pool resources by partnering with specialized technology providers to more selectively build the capabilities that matter most to their businesses.
TravelWits co-founder Arman Bimatov sees the trend more as a new layer of professional leverage.
"It's the travel advisor with AI that replaces the travel advisor without AI," he said in a video interview.
For Bimatov, the future belongs to agencies that combine human expertise with increasingly specialized technology stacks. Rather than building every tool in-house, he believes the larger opportunity lies in optimization.
"The solution space gets 100 times or 1,000 times larger," said Bimatov. "If you're just looking at flights, that's one thing. Once you start looking at flights, hotels, cars, insurance, and complete itineraries together, the number of possible combinations grows exponentially."
The real prize in travel AI, then, may be helping advisors navigate increasingly complex decision trees rather than generating content.
The Motion of Modernization
The debate may have started as a choice between buying and building, but the interviews, social media posts, email, WhatsApp correspondence, and YouTube livestreams suggest a more nuanced reality.
The most successful agencies are instead asking a bigger question: What direction are we going, and how does that determine which capabilities are strategic enough to own, and which are better left to specialists?
Fundamentally, sentiments about technology seem to be converging around decision making and better workflow design. That is a theme that repeatedly came up during a panel featuring Courtnie Nichols on HAR*Wired, a livestream on YouTube put on by Host Agency Reviews.
In 2026, the answers appear to depend less on company size than on an agency's ambitions and business model.
After all, technology is inherently neutral. An agency's direction must be deliberately designed before its engine is either built, bought, or assembled from carefully chosen parts.
Jacques Ledbetter is a Luxury Travel Advisor contributor and founder of The Luxe Ledger newsletter.
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