Brené Brown at Virtuoso Travel Week 2026: 5 Lessons on Trust, AI & Travel Advisors

Written by Kelly Chang, TripMatters

I think I was the only person in our group who did not know who she was but now I want to order her book.

Matthew Upchurch announced the opening keynote at the 38th annual Virtuoso Travel Week, and the room did something I have never seen a room of 4,800 travel professionals do.

Carl Fabruada, Sona Mehta, Marilyn Vincent, Adriana Castilla, Pamela Thornburgh and Casey Zilionis were all clearly in on something I was not.

The room had a name for what was happening in it

Earlier that evening, Jennifer Campbell, Virtuoso's Senior Vice President of Global Events, gave the room a phrase that sounds so pretty: collective effervescence.

The sociologist Émile Durkheim coined it more than a century ago. It describes the specific electricity you feel when you are part of something bigger than yourself. Not excitement exactly. Something closer to charge.

Anyone who has stood in a ballroom with 4,800 people from more than 100 countries, all of whom do the same strange and wonderful job you do, knows the feeling. Here are a few of the takeaways I remember:

Trust is a marble jar, and there is no shortcut

This kinda sounds weird at first. What does a marble jar have to do with trust? Is it fragile?

Brené describes trust not as a thing you establish once, but as a jar you fill one marble at a time. Every single interaction either adds a marble or takes one out. There is no shortcut to a full jar. There is no automation for it. There is only showing up, again and again, in the small moments that most brands have decided are too small to matter.

She called travel advisors the "vulnerability business." She said trust is the operating system underneath all luxury travel.

Sitting there, I thought about how much of our actual work at TripMatters is invisible from the outside. The confirmation someone double-checks at 9pm. The text on the morning of a flight. The advisor who remembers that a client's mother is traveling with them this time. None of that shows up on an invoice. All of it is marbles.

The thing I have watched our advisors do that I could never quite name

Here is where it clicked for me.

Travel is human, which is another way of saying travel breaks. Flights cancel. Rooms are not what the photos promised. Something falls through a crack that nobody could have predicted. And because travel is also deeply emotional, people do not experience those failures as logistics problems. They experience them as their vacation, their anniversary, their one week off this year, going wrong.

Travel advisors are better than almost anyone at fixing those situations. That is the job. But the instinct to go straight into fix mode is not always the right one.

Sometimes a client does not want you to solve it yet. Sometimes they want you to hear it first.

I have watched our advisors do this. They slow down. They let someone be frustrated. They repeat back what they heard before they start rebooking anything. It looks like nothing. It looks like a delay.

It is a marble.

Your value isn't what you think

The part of the keynote I did not expect to apply to me was about leadership, not travel.

Brené said that in thirty years working inside organizations, she has never seen senior leaders as frustrated as they are right now, or as ready to walk out the door. The problem is not effort and it is not intelligence. It is that a lot of capable people built an entire professional identity on having the answers, and the value of having the answers has quietly changed underneath them.

Her line: if you are a senior leader who believes your value is what you know, that is not your value anymore. Your value is your capacity to learn.

I sat with that one for a while, because it is not somebody else's problem. It is mine.

A great deal of what I do in marketing runs on knowing things. Which channel, which format, what worked last quarter, what the algorithm rewarded in June. That knowledge has a shorter shelf life every year. And I have caught myself defending a recommendation because I was the one who made it, not because it was still the right call.

A machine can produce answers faster than I can, at a scale I cannot match. What it cannot do is stay curious, or say out loud that it does not know something and go find out. That part is still mine to do, and it is the part I want to get better at.

Which, as Brené pointed out, is itself a trust-building behavior. When someone on your team comes to you and says they are below the line and need help, you do not trust them less. You trust them more. They cared about getting it right more than they cared about protecting their ego.

You cannot keep giving marbles from an empty jar

Brené's point to a room full of high performers (can we agree that all travel advisors are) was blunt. You cannot keep generating that kind of energy for the people you serve without protecting your own capacity to recover. Intensity has to be matched with rest.

Or, in the language of the rest of her talk: if you never refill, you run out of marbles to give.

That is not a travel industry lesson. That is a lesson for anyone whose work depends on being fully present for other people, which is most of us.

Luxury is a mindset, not a price point

Luxury is a mindset, not a price point. Trust gets built exactly the same way whether the booking is a two-week private itinerary or a long weekend someone saved for all year. It gets built in the moments nobody put on the itinerary, by people who still have enough energy left to notice them.

TripMatters is a VIRTUOSO travel agency in Tustin, California, and the seven of us who went to Travel Week this year came back with a lot of product knowledge and one idea that mattered more than all of it. You can meet the advisors behind that work on our Orange County travel agency page, or read more about how to choose a travel advisor if you are deciding who to trust with your next trip.

And if you have been putting off a conversation about a trip you keep meaning to take, start one with us. Our Tustin office serves Orange County travelers in person, and we work with clients nationwide by phone and Zoom.

I am going to go read Strong Ground now. Apparently I have some catching up to do.