ON LOCATION: Shop Talk in Vegas With Virtuoso’s Karen Hardie

TravelPulse Canada sat down with Karen Hardie, General Manager, Canada, for Virtuoso, to discuss what the network’s latest data reveals about affluent Canadian travellers.

One of the more surprising findings is that the decline in Canadian travel to the United States hasn’t necessarily extended to the luxury end of the market.

Hardie said that when Virtuoso looks specifically at higher-income Canadian travellers, both intent to visit the U.S. and actual travel have increased year over year.

Six months ago, she said, the picture was considerably more divided.

“In the middle, and perhaps the lower end of the income spectrum, travel is definitely down,” Hardie said of earlier findings. “But when you look at the luxury traveller, they’re still continuing to travel.”

More recently, Virtuoso’s data suggests the middle of the market is also beginning to return, although Hardie said it has not yet fully returned to what might previously have been considered normal.

Virtuoso is seeing increased Canadian interest in South America, Mexico and the Caribbean, as well as Asia, particularly Japan. Hardie also pointed to renewed interest in China and India.

“They haven’t stopped travelling,” she said. “They’ve just perhaps, if they’re not going south, pivoted to other destinations.”

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Hardie noted that airline network decisions can offer another indication of where demand is heading, with carriers adding capacity and routes in response to changing traveller patterns.

Within the U.S., Florida and California remain particularly important destinations for affluent Canadian travellers, with Hawaii also performing strongly.

Time Is Driving Multigen Travel

Boomers remain a powerful force in luxury travel, but Hardie says one of the clearest trends among affluent Canadians is the continued rise of multigenerational trips, with families increasingly prioritizing the time they have together.

“I think people really missed travelling and being together,” Hardie said. “What we've seen even this year with all of the disruption is this sense of, again in the affluent categories, people have more money than time, and so they want to make sure that they take advantage of the time that they have to spend with both friends travelling and family.”

For advisors, that means the value of a trip is increasingly measured by more than where clients go or what they spend. For affluent families, travel has become a way to protect something they can't buy more of: time together.

And with Boomers continuing to have both the means and opportunity to travel, they're often the ones bringing children and grandchildren along for the experience.

Higher Prices Are Changing The Conversation

Affluent doesn’t mean indifferent to price.

Hardie said Virtuoso members are hearing concerns particularly around the rising cost of business-class airfare. But rather than simply looking for the lowest price, affluent travellers are questioning whether the experience represents good value.

“It’s not that price is not an issue — it is — but for them, it’s about value,” she said.

A traveller accustomed to paying $8,000 for a business-class ticket, for example, may hesitate when that same journey suddenly costs $10,000 or $11,000. Instead of abandoning travel altogether, the conversation with the advisor becomes: where else can they go where the experience and airfare deliver better value?

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In some cases, clients are also postponing one trip and choosing another in the meantime.

That willingness to pivot is also appearing when travellers feel uneasy about a destination. Rather than cancelling travel altogether, Hardie said some clients are moving a planned trip into 2027 or 2028 and choosing somewhere else for now.

A Win For Luxury Travel Within Canada

Canada itself is benefiting from some of that redistribution.

Hardie said broader statistics show an increase in domestic travel, while Virtuoso members report that some affluent clients are now willing to spend more on experiences within Canada than they previously were.

“They have the money to spend,” she said. If clients were prepared to spend a certain amount travelling to the U.S., they may now consider investing a similar amount of money and travel time “in their own backyard.”

“That’s a win for Canada,” Hardie said.

Cruise also continues to be a significant driver of Canadian luxury travel, with Hardie pointing specifically to growth in river and expedition cruising. Soft adventure and nature-based travel are also resonating with Canadians.

Underlying those trends is a definition of luxury that isn’t necessarily about extravagance.

Virtuoso’s Canadian data suggests travellers place significant value on experiences over things, Hardie said, and are less focused on having the flashiest suite or most indulgent option than on experiences that feel meaningful and immersive.

“That’s where they’re going to invest their time and their money,” she said.

AI Won’t Replace The Advisor — But It Will Change The Job

Not surprisingly, artificial intelligence has been a major conversation throughout 2026 Virtuoso Travel Week.

Hardie sees considerable opportunity for advisors to use AI to become more efficient, particularly when it comes to research, emails and itinerary development.

“For a travel advisor, time is money,” she said. “Anytime you can implement an efficiency that helps you get to the information that you need faster, that’s a win.”

But she doesn’t see AI replacing professional advice.

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Instead, Hardie expects travel to follow a path similar to professions such as medicine and law: consumers will increasingly use AI to conduct preliminary research before turning to a professional to validate what they’ve found.

Clients may arrive better informed and armed with more questions, but they’ll still need expertise to determine whether what an AI tool has suggested actually makes sense.

AI may not diminish the advisor's role so much as change the starting point of the conversation, leaving the advisor to assess whether those recommendations actually make sense for that particular traveller and to ask the questions an algorithm may not.

Sustainable Global Stewardship

Beyond technology, another conversation matters deeply to Hardie: Virtuoso's expansion of its sustainability work into what it now calls global stewardship.

Hardie said conversations at Virtuoso Travel Week have focused on what that evolution means for advisors personally, for their businesses and for the travellers they influence.

“I think that's been the other really interesting conversation this week — what is the path to take people from whatever their current state, interest or understanding of sustainability is, and how or if that's relevant to their travel, to really understand this concept of how their behaviour influences global stewardship, or economies that they visit, and the people that they visit,” she said.

For Hardie, the opportunity is particularly significant in the luxury sector, where travellers' choices can have an outsized impact on destinations and local communities.

“I'm so excited because I think the luxury travel sector has perhaps the best opportunity to really make a positive impact,” she said.

Invest in Human Connection

Technology is among the dominant advisor conversations at Virtuoso Travel Week, extending beyond AI to CRM, back-office systems and how legacy technology platforms can better integrate.

But another conversation taking place in Las Vegas is decidedly human.

With so many advisors now working remotely, Hardie said the industry has lost some of the informal learning that once happened simply by sitting alongside experienced colleagues.

Hardie knows that experience firsthand. Before joining Virtuoso’s corporate ranks, she worked as a frontline travel advisor in her family’s Virtuoso agency in Australia.

“I’d never been a travel advisor, but there were three other people who’d been travel advisors for 10 or 15 years, and I learned how to be one because I sat next to them,” she said. “That doesn’t happen the same way, often, these days.”

It makes gatherings such as Virtuoso Travel Week particularly valuable; not only for the scheduled appointments but for conversations between advisors, partners and peers.

And Hardie believes the most successful advisors increasingly combine two very different skill sets.

On one side is the empathetic, creative professional who can sit with a client and understand their “hopes and dreams.” On the other is the meticulous, detail-oriented person required to execute a complex trip.

The advisors thriving today, she said, have both capabilities but increasingly focus their own energy on the part technology can’t easily replicate: the relationship.

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They invest in “that human connection,” Hardie said, learning what’s most important to the client and helping translate it into the right trip, while administrative or operational support can handle more of the detail-oriented work.

As the 2026 Virtuoso Travel Week winds down, that may be one of the clearest messages for Canadian advisors to take home from Las Vegas: travellers may be changing where they go, what they’re willing to pay and how they research a trip, but expertise and the human connection behind it remain very much in demand.

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