I am Joshua Bush. I have run Avenue Two Travel since 2012.
I write and speak about how supply, attention and access are allocated in luxury travel. I do it from inside an operating company rather than from outside one. Everything on this site comes out of that.
Joshua Bush / Chief Executive Officer, Avenue Two Travel
Avenue Two Travel is a luxury travel agency. It was founded in 1987 and turns forty in 2027. I joined in 2006, became chief executive in 2012, and we took the Avenue Two Travel name in 2014. We have more than a hundred advisors across the United States. The company is in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. I work from California.
I sit on the Forbes Travel Guide Standards Advisory Committee, the Abercrombie and Kent Travel Group advisory board and the AFAR Travel Advisory Council. I chaired Virtuoso’s Global Member Advisory Board until 2022.
I am a photographer and a climber. I have been to all seven continents. I have a weakness for national parks, and during the pandemic I drove an RV across most of the United States. I am certified by Virgin Galactic as an Accredited Space Agent.
Travel is a force for good. I have spent twenty years watching that be true and it has not worn off.
Most of the arguments about this industry are being had at the wrong altitude.
We have spent two years asking whether the machines are coming for us. It is the more comfortable question. The harder one is whether we have built something worth keeping.
Machines have already taken the part of this business that was tedious. They took it quickly and they are good at it. What they have not taken, and show no sign of taking, is the part that carries consequence.
That distinction is where nearly everything I write ends up. Not because technology is the subject, but because it keeps exposing what was actually being sold underneath.
I do not think this is settled. I am fairly sure about the direction and not at all sure about the timing, and I would rather say that plainly than pretend otherwise.
The Plan Is Free Now. The Promise Is Not.
Artificial intelligence is absorbing the middle of luxury travel planning faster than the industry is absorbing responsibility for the two ends. A model cannot qualify a traveler it has never met, and it cannot answer for a trip it recommended.
My argument is that advisory value is not moving downstream. It is splitting. The machine owns research, comparison and assembly, and it owns them well. The human owns qualification at the front and guarantee at the back.
Read the essayThe Power of the Luxury Travel Advisor in the Age of AI
Technology can organize information. Only advisors can turn information into inspiration.
ReadThe Avenue Alliance
A partner model built on values rather than volume, and what changes commercially when selection stops being purchasable.
ReadThe Avenue Approach
Qualification, workflow and proposal discipline treated as a professional standard rather than individual habit.
ReadTravelers are outsourcing effort. They are not outsourcing exposure.
I built the room I most wanted to speak in.
The Collective is our annual gathering of advisors, partners and suppliers. The first was in 2022 and the fifth ran this year at the Arizona Biltmore.
Almost everything on this site was said there first, in front of a room with every commercial reason to disagree with it. That is a useful filter. An argument that survives a hallway conversation with someone whose business it threatens is worth writing down. Most of them do not survive.
I speak, and I am direct about fit.
Keynotes, panels, fireside conversations and moderation, mostly for advisor networks, supplier commercial teams and industry leadership. Six subjects, all of them about method, performance and money.
If the question is outside what I actually know, or the honest answer is that you need someone else, I will say so early rather than late.