Gifted Travel Network (GTN), a luxury host travel agency, has won a Gold award in Travel Weekly’s 2026 Magellan Awards for The Travel Business Unpacked podcast.

More and more businesses are relying on AI-generated assets for their business. I’m not saying they’re all bad – I remember the days before the term “AI slop” was thrown around and we were all pretty impressed by what ChatGPT could create with a little instruction. But whether they are done well or not, the reality is that they are all kind of the same.

When a new advisor launches their travel business to an established network in an affluent community, people tend to assume the business will build itself. But after seeing enough well-connected advisors stall out, I know better. Being part of a network opens the door to a pool of potential clients, but what happens next depends on whether you can show up as a professional from day one.

Luxury can mean many different things and can be very subjective. So many micro moments can impact someone’s experience by causing little zaps of friction, and sometimes they don’t even notice how much it affects them until that zap is removed and they realize how much easier it could have been.

I hear a version of the same doubt from advisors who come to this business later, after a full career somewhere else has already gone well: that all the operational skills in the world won't matter if they haven't yet built the nerve to actually sell it. While competence may get you started, it’s mindset that keeps you going.

Gifted Travel Network (GTN), a premier host agency for luxury travel advisors, today announced a significant expansion of its leadership team, adding experienced executives across sales, advisor success, development, and growth.

Being cautious and being stuck can look identical from the outside, but only one of them is productive. Jackie wasn't waiting to feel ready and working to overcome fear; she was doing the specific, unglamorous work of getting ready.

People ask me all the time what separates the advisors who make it from the ones who stall out. They are hoping for a silver bullet, not the disappointing, honest answer: it's just someone who did the unglamorous work for a long time before it paid off.

Whether you are the type to be charmed by wordplay or more likely to roll your eyes at these portmanteaus, the following words were all created to describe real trends happening in travel and are worth consideration.

So many advisors measure growth by how many new clients they can bring in. Growth doesn't always come from taking on more, but from staying small enough to consistently deliver incredible service to every client in your rolodex.

I just returned from a week at content creation bootcamp. And by that, I mean I spent a week aboard an AmaWaterways ship with a group of Gifted Travel Network advisors, where we explored and captured several beautiful destinations, then learned how to strategically post about the trip on social media to expand reach and attract new potential clients.

So many advisors think that doing everything themselves is the mark of thoroughness. If you want it done right, you must plan every detail, vet every hotel, and coordinate every transfer yourself, because who's going to care about your client's trip as much as you do? It's a reasonable instinct. Also, more often than not, it's a blind spot in your business.

We can't expect every client to be dazzled, or even appreciative, when their advisor jumps in and works their magic when a situation goes sideways. But regardless of how it's received, the reality is that there will always be things outside of our control, and the best any of us can do is move forward, find a solution, and focus on the bright side.

So many career-change stories start from necessity: a layoff, a health scare, a financial cliff that finally pushes someone to do the thing they'd always wanted. But we rarely get to see what a second career looks like when nobody is forcing the decision, when a person could genuinely keep doing exactly what they were already doing, or nothing at all, and chose to build something new anyway.

There's an assumption that success is supposed to feel like arrival, like proof solid enough that the fear will finally allow you to rest. It doesn't work that way. The fear doesn't wait for you to feel ready, and it doesn't disappear once you've proven yourself. By practicing emotional fitness, what will change is your relationship to fear.

During summer, it's likely that a huge chunk of your book of business is moving through the same cycle at once. While someone is boarding a plane right now, someone else is unpacking and deciding which of their 300 photos to post first. During this busy time, it's crucial that you strike while the suitcase is still open and don't miss this golden window of opportunity for several reasons.

Many travel entrepreneurs ignore the importance of the inner work, especially because of how hard it can be. What top producer Katie Crago's story makes clear is that the mindset work isn't separate from building the business, but is the foundation on which the business is built. For Katie, that work started before she had any momentum to lean on.

For the fourth consecutive year, Gifted Travel Network (GTN) has earned a spot on Travel Weekly’s 2026 Power List.

People become travel advisors because of passion. They love seeing the world and sharing it with others, they have an entrepreneurial drive, and they usually bring some specific mojo to it, everything from marketing brilliance to being a systems-and-spreadsheets wizard. But one thing that comes up consistently within our network is that most advisors didn't get into this because they love putting themselves out there.

Dialing in your business and optimizing your time can feel overwhelming, but most of us are closer to that than we think. The answers are already there in places like our client conversations and our calendars. We just have to be willing to act on what we find and stick to it.