It’s easy to fill a WTM diary before you’ve even reached London. Supplier meetings, destination updates, a catch-up that turns into lunch. By the time you get a spare hour, there’s another appointment on the other side of the hall.

Put travel technology in the diary now. If you’re responsible for sales, service, marketing or running a travel business, it deserves some proper time.

WTM London takes place at Excel London from 3–5 November 2026. This year brings the launch of WTM Travel Tech as a co-located event, with a dedicated hall and its own entrance. The organiser’s June announcement makes AI and intelligent operations central to its plans. There’s a commercial reason to pay attention, even if you’ve never thought of yourself as a technology person.

The systems behind your business affect what happens to every opportunity you bring home from the show.

The conversation belongs to the whole business

A new supplier agreement is only useful once you can sell the product. Someone has to load the rates, apply the right terms and make it available to the people booking. A marketing idea needs an audience, a clear message and a route through to an enquiry or sale. When a customer asks a question, your team needs enough information to give a useful answer.

These are everyday commercial jobs. Technology sits inside all of them.

That’s why owners, sales managers, marketing teams and operations staff should spend time in the travel technology section. They know where the delays are. They know which tasks keep getting put off and which simple requests turn into half an hour of work. Those people can spot a useful improvement quickly, provided the demonstration shows how the product works in practice.

You might leave with a better way to handle one part of the business. That can be a very worthwhile result from an hour at WTM.

AI will be hard to miss

We expect AI to be one of the biggest conversations at this year’s show. The published conference programme already gives a good indication of why. It includes sessions called “Winning Travel Demand in the Age of AI” and “Where Will AI Create Economic Value in Travel?”, alongside discussion of AI in travel payments.

Those subjects cover finding customers, doing the work and getting paid. AI is moving into the places where travel businesses make or lose money. A conversation about writing faster social captions now sits alongside much bigger questions about how people discover holidays, how enquiries are handled and how systems act on information.

For a small or medium-sized travel company, the challenge is deciding which of those developments deserves attention first. There’s no shortage of software to try. Time to introduce it, train people and check the results is much harder to find.

WTM gives you a chance to see several approaches close together, ask awkward questions and compare the answers. Use that opportunity. A polished demonstration should lead to a clear explanation of the job the technology will do for your business.

Look closely at what happens after the answer

A chatbot can sound convincing while leaving the customer with nowhere useful to go. The detail matters: where its information comes from, whether it can search the products you actually sell and how a person takes over when the conversation needs judgement.

The same applies behind the scenes. If AI reads a supplier contract, you need a clear way to check what it has extracted before those rates go on sale. When it drafts marketing content, someone must still check the offer, the dates and the wording. A tool that creates more checking than it saves in preparation may be a poor fit for that particular job.

Ask providers to explain what is live today, what needs setting up and what is still being developed. Get them to show the handover between the AI and your team. Then discuss the total cost, including the connections, support and services your business would need.

Good value should be something you can explain to the person paying the bill. It might come from fewer systems, less repeated data entry or more consistent follow-up. The useful measure depends on the job you’re trying to improve.

What Travelgenix is doing with AI

At Travelgenix, we’re applying AI to several parts of running a travel business through the Luna range. It sits alongside our booking technology, supplier connections, quoting, direct contracting and mid-office tools. Our What We Do overview shows how broad that technology offering has become.

Here are four areas worth discussing with us at WTM.

Helping customers move from questions to travel searches

Luna Chat answers questions using a travel business’s approved knowledge and can search through that business’s own Travelify booking engine. That connection is important: the conversation can lead towards the products the business sells. When an adviser needs to take over, the conversation context can go with the handover. Customers get a route to further help, while the adviser can see what has already been discussed.

Keeping marketing work moving

Luna Marketing helps prepare social posts, emails and website articles in the business’s voice, with content going through approval before it is sent or published. For a team fitting marketing around sales and service, preparation is often where the work stalls. Having a draft ready to review gives someone a much more manageable next step. The business still decides whether the message is right.

Getting contracted product ready to sell

Luna Contracting includes AI-assisted reading of supplier contracts and rate sheets. Information can be reviewed before activation, then used to make direct product available through the connected selling channels. This is a practical application for operators working with their own contracted stock: reduce the work involved in turning a document into usable product, while keeping a checking step before it goes live.

Giving the team a clearer customer picture

Luna Work is in early access for Travelgenix clients. Its current offering includes inbox triage, draft replies, plain-English customer segments and a Customer 360 view. Further pipeline, journey and reporting capabilities are still marked as coming next. We’ll be clear about that distinction when discussing it. Anyone assessing an emerging product needs to know which parts they can use now.

Give yourself time to compare

Our advice is to leave space for a proper look around WTM Travel Tech. Watch a demonstration, talk through the work involved in getting started and ask how the technology would fit with the tools you already use. A useful answer should make the next step clearer.

There is room for ambition here, particularly for independent agents and tour operators who have assumed a broad technology platform would be beyond their budget. Seeing the products together gives you a better basis for comparing value than looking at a list of separate subscriptions.

Travelgenix will be at Stand S16-602, at Excel London from 3–5 November 2026. Come and meet the team, see the technology and talk about where it could help your business. If you’d like to arrange a meeting, message us with WTM and the day you’re attending.

Make that time in your diary before the rest of it fills up.