Sitting down with Karryon founder Matt Leedham at Virtuoso’s recent ANZ Forum in Auckland, the luxury travel network’s Senior Vice President, Global Markets, says the latest generation of luxury advisors will look less like technicians and more like the influencers already reshaping the game.
Michael Londregan now looks after nine markets for Virtuoso. While that’s quite the schedule to stay on top of across time zones alone (does he even sleep?), the insights that emerge from his wide-angle lens are both sizeable and consistent.
His message to the industry: There isn’t one future for luxury travel. There are fifty.
As such, when Virtuoso’s 2026 Australia and New Zealand Forum closed at Park Hyatt Auckland at the end of March, the lingering talk wasn’t just about navigating travel’s latest uncertainty moment (the war with Iran), but of who’s going to be selling luxury for the next decade, what AI does and does not change, and why every market is heading somewhere different.
A month on, with the Forum circuit since rolling through Bali, Seoul, and the countdown on for Virtuoso Travel Week in Las Vegas in August, the optimism is holding, and those threads still ring true.
Influencers, not processors
Londregan started his travel career in 1990 at Thomas Cook. In more recent times, he’s watched the travel advisor profile shift from technician to content creator and influencer. Today, he says, the approach for new talent needs to be considered very differently.
“When I started in travel at Thomas Cook, it was a technical role. You had to learn the codes and acronyms; none of it was intuitive,” he tells me. “But today, the technology is going to make it easier and easier for advisors.”
“At Thomas Cook, I would have said, ‘Which one is detail-oriented? Which one likes process? Londregan says. “Now I’d say, ‘Tell me which one actually posts the most on Instagram. She’s an influencer. She’s got a client base. All she has to do now is say, Hi, I’m now a luxury travel advisor.'”
“It’s going from being away from work to that is work,” he says.
That’s the theory. So, where do you find this new breed of luxury travel advisor?
In his leadership session at the Forum, Londregan spoke about one particular Virtuoso advisor in Hong Kong, Polly Ho from Lux Travel, who has an innovative strategy for sourcing new talent.
Ho’s method? Hiring by going shopping.
“Every second weekend I go into Prada, Louis Vuitton, Bulgari, and I go shopping,” Londregan said, recounting Ho’s routine. “If I get fantastic service from someone when I’m there, I give them a card and say, you should work in travel.”
Ho’s strategy makes complete sense when framed in that way. Given that service excellence is demanded by luxury brands, why should serving luxury travel clients be any different? That same thought applies to high-end hotels and even upscale restaurants, says Londregan.
“The bigger point here is that you need a strategy for a pipeline,” he says. “The smaller point is the practical examples.”
50 futures, not one
Modernisation isn’t one road, Londregan says. The trap is acting like it is.
“There are 50 futures here. They’re not all going to the same place. They’re all going to their own future,” he says. “It’s worth talking to each other, but it’s almost not worth copying each other. It literally won’t work.”
As a US-headquartered network, Virtuoso’s modernisation isn’t Americanisation. Across his nine markets, Londregan says it plays out differently every time.
Croatia is one example. Young, entrepreneurial advisors of influence there sell almost exclusively at the luxury end, with travellers who mirror them. In other markets, the client base is still boomer-heavy, and the advisor profile follows.
“It’s so much easier to trust someone who mirrors you and your experience,” says Londregan.
Australia and New Zealand, in his view, were “a little bit complacent, but not because we were complacent people, because the conditions allowed it.” COVID forced the reset. ICs. Work from home. More CRM. Less bait-and-switch.
“What we’ve really seen in Australia is everyone’s chasing a focus instead of chasing the middle,” Londregan says.
“The astute advisors have figured out the best way to go fishing is not just to go fishing, but to say, ‘I’m going for tuna. I’ve got the fish finder, the right bait, the right line, the right hook, and the right strategy.'”
Translation: pick the species. Skill up. The agencies that have pulled away post-COVID are the ones that can name their client niche without thinking.
A great pilot, with great instruments
On AI, the analogy was aviation.
“If I said to you, ‘Matt, we’ve now got a plane that doesn’t require any pilots, it’s all AI, feel really comfortable, there’ll be no one up the front.’ Would you get on?” he said.
“But equally, if I said, ‘We’ve got a great pilot, but he has no instrumentation. No gauges, no altimeter, but he’s a great pilot.’ Would you get on? No. And I’m not getting on that plane either. What we really want is a great pilot with great technology.”
“Tools are only good if you know what you’re trying to build,” Londregan says.
“Start with your business first, not AI first.”
He uses AI on himself, too. Running messages and sense checks through it to see “what could be misconstrued.”
“I honestly feel it’s making me a better version of myself, not replacing me,” says Londregan.
“The only people that should really be worried are the people that believe they’re already perfect.”
KARRYON UNPACKS: Londregan’s 50-futures framing challenges a luxury trade that defaults to a single global playbook. If the next generation of advisors looks more like influencers than processors, the hiring brief, training model and tech stack are all due for a rebuild. The question is whether Australia and New Zealand operators move on it now, or wait for the next reset to force their hand.
