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For anyone under 30, here’s how it worked. You walked into a little storefront with a poster of a Caribbean island in the window and sat across the desk from someone with a phone wedged on one shoulder, typing into a green screen. It took an hour, maybe more, to square away all of the details, calling all of the airlines and hotels to get availability and secure the reservations. A week or so later, your paper airline tickets showed up in the mail in a little envelope, and you guarded them with your life, because if you lost them, that was the end of that trip. Here’s a little clip from My Big Fat Greek Wedding of what travel agents looked like “back in the day.”

Then the internet came along, and we all became our own travel agents. Storefronts with posters became smoothie shops. We spent nights with six browser tabs open, comparing fares and clearing our cookies because somebody swore the price went up if you looked twice.

Over time, the travel sites got smart, quite literally. They learned what we liked, guessed when fares would drop and nudged us toward the hotel we’d probably book anyway. That’s AI, and it’s been helping us plan trips for years.

But for all of its smarts, it never booked the trip. It made suggestions. You still did the work.

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