Nonetheless, by leveraging human assets such as the empathy and understanding we have for clients – something the traditional travel industry has in abundance – we might not only survive but thrive in future.

Clearly, huge disruption is coming to the travel industry – that much is obvious. Changes in the way we interact with the world are having a profound effect, although the full impact of this technological explosion will take decades to filter through. In the past 10 years, clients have learnt to rely on services such as review sites, search engines and OTAs. This has transformed how we plan travel.

And it goes further. The way we mediate everything via smartphones has changed the nature of the experiences we seek. We have seen the strange phenomenon of people travelling primarily to take a picture to post on social media – the picture has become the point of travel. Even those resistant to the siren call of social media are letting algorithms – our fingerprint on the internet – try to dictate what they should do next.

There are unpredictable effects of our reliance on algorithms. Sites and tours popular on review sites can be changed for the worse in super-quick time. There is a sense of superficial grazing, a bucket-list, tick-box approach, and a feeling that just like streamed music is somehow less engaging than those old LPs, the travel experience today is not quite satisfying the consumer. You hear the phrase “experience” everywhere. It’s not that the desire for experience in travel is new, but that meaningful experiences are becoming harder to come by, and are therefore a scarcer commodity.

Airbnb has set the pace in thought leadership that responds to these changes, although its approach has limitations. In common with many tech firms, it treats travel as a technical problem for users that can be solved with the right input. The output it seeks is to make the traveller feel like a local. Someone wrote recently that they felt the only authentic state of being as a traveller was as an outsider. I agree, and believe stepping away from our everyday is why we travel for fun. In other words, we travel to feel more human.

There is opportunity here if only we can grasp it. Travel agents understand clients on a personal level; tour operators understand how people make the magic happen in-destination. They work with providers on the ground to provide meaningful encounters, not prettily packaged but cookie-cutter experiences that can be sliced and diced and sold online. As long as we recognise the opportunities and focus on the value we add that an algorithm cannot (at least for the time being), we can make the travel industry remain a human concern.

Sam Clark is managing director of Experience Travel Group, Aito member