Forbes just coined a term every traveler should know: contingency concierge. Here’s why your travel advisor might be your most important safety net.
Forbes Highlights The Rise Of The Contingency Concierge
I was fortunate to be featured in Christopher Elliott’s latest piece in Forbes which explores a reality that has been building for years but finally has a name: the contingency concierge. The idea is simple. Your travel advisor is no longer just the person who books your hotels, flights, and cruises but. In 2026, the best advisors are functioning as real-time crisis managers, and the recent conflict in Iran brought that into sharp focus, though we hope it never comes to that. It’s not just Iran or crossing the Middle East on Emirates, Qatar, or Etihad but also the Caribbean during the lead-up to the Venezuela operations, or during the recent unrest in Mexico.
I was honored to contribute to the piece, and I want to expand on what I shared with Mr. Elliott because this topic hits close to home for me and for our team at Scott & Thomas Travel Personalized.
What I Told Forbes About Shadow Infrastructure
In the article, I talked about what I call shadow transportation infrastructure. That phrase might sound dramatic, but it describes something very real: a network of resources that simply does not exist on any consumer-facing booking platform.
Think about it this way. When a crisis breaks out and commercial flights are grounded, what options does a DIY traveler actually have? The average consumer, and I’d imagine many of our readers refresh Google Flights, hopefully read travel blogs and explore their options. Some call the airline and sit on hold for hours, some chat online (less painful but has always been longer in my experience), and some try the app with mixed results. Some panic-scroll Reddit threads hoping someone has a hack.
A well-connected advisor, on the other hand, can tap into private transfer services that operate with unmarked vehicles and vetted local drivers. These are not Ubers. These are established operators with deep regional knowledge who know which roads are open, which borders are passable, and which routes to avoid entirely. A connected advisor can access alternate accommodations that are not listed on Airbnb or Vrbo, including properties with security features typically reserved for diplomats and dignitaries. And when all commercial options dry up, we can arrange private aviation. It is expensive, yes, but sometimes it is the only way out.
This level of access and coordination is simply not available to someone booking through an app. That is not a sales pitch. It is a fact.
The Iran Conflict Changed the Conversation
Elliott’s piece highlights the recent US and Israeli strikes on Iran as a case study, and it is a good one. When that conflict escalated earlier this month, the ripple effects hit travelers across the entire Middle East almost instantly. Airspace restrictions shifted hour by hour. Itineraries through Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Doha became unreliable overnight. Travelers who had booked independently were stuck in hold queues and error messages, hoping for the best. Fortunately, we didn’t have affected clients in the area at the time of disruption and have avoided transiting the area since. We had a client scheduled for Dubai but we were able to get their trip refunded and cancelled.
The advisors quoted in the Forbes article tell a very different story. One advisor had clients rebooked to an entirely new destination within five days, with full hotel cancellations secured at no penalty. Another was coordinating with private aviation brokers and holding hotel options in multiple cities simultaneously. One advisor arranged a car from Abu Dhabi to Muscat within an hour of an airspace closure, complete with hotel and onward flights.
These are not hypothetical scenarios. This is what happened, and it is happening more frequently as global instability becomes a regular feature of travel planning rather than a rare exception.
Duty of Care Is Not a Buzzword
One of the strongest sections in the Forbes piece deals with duty of care, and I think it is worth emphasizing here. The phrase gets used loosely in our industry, but the advisors Elliott spoke with are practicing it at a level that goes far beyond checking in after a booking.
Jay Ellenby of Safe Harbors Travel Group put it perfectly when he suggested a litmus test for choosing an advisor: ask whether they provide 24/7/365 concierge support with proactive rebooking and traveler tracking. If the answer is not an immediate yes, you do not have a contingency plan. You have someone who can book.
That is the difference, and it is a massive one. At my agency, we use flight monitoring tools, maintain relationships with 24/7 partner services, and when appropriate, register clients in the State Department’s STEP program before departure. These are table stakes for any advisor who takes duty of care seriously.
AI Cannot Replace Relationships
The Forbes article includes a section titled “Humans 1, AI 0,” and though I deploy AI (Claude is a favorite at the moment) for many areas of my business, I could not agree more. One advisor in the piece asked a pointed question: when was the last time AI knew a local driver who could get you out of harm’s way? Another arranged motorbike riders on the spot when a mudslide blocked a trail to Machu Picchu. A third coordinated an ambulance in Cusco after a client broke an arm, following a three-hour canoe ride to the airport. I applaud their efforts but we would likely just call in a helicopter and work with insurance to cover the costs.
But an algorithm is doing that. No chatbot has those contacts. AI can aggregate data and suggest options, but it cannot pick up the phone at 4 a.m. and call someone it trusts in a city that is falling apart. That is a human skill, built on years of relationships and experience.
Conclusion
The Forbes piece ends with a quote I love: “Safety isn’t expensive. It’s priceless.” That about sums it up. The world is not getting simpler. Airspace closures, regional conflicts, and natural disasters are not going away. If anything, the last few years have taught us that disruption is the new normal. Disaster is not guaranteed, but because if it happens, you want someone in your corner who already has a plan. It might be the best insurance policy you never knew you needed.
What do you think?
It’s an interesting article, and it’s cool you were mentioned, but it seems to be directed at wealthy travelers who don’t really know what they’re doing. In reality, nobody in DOH, DXB, or AUH was in real trouble. Frustratingly delayed, for sure, but calling it a war zone is a little dramatic. Securing hotels there, in Saudi, or in MCT wasn’t a problem, nor was overland transport.
Had the focus of the story been getting people out of Tehran (or perhaps Kiev when Russia invaded) might match the level of fear that’s being mongered. But registering for STEP because you’re in Barbados and flights to the US are cancelled for 2 days doesn’t really seem like much of a contingency, or a crisis.
Arranging a posh taxi in Abu Dhabi for a 5-hour drive doesn’t take any special skills and I can’t imagine hotels in Oman being booked out when people couldn’t even fly into the country. Cuzco also happens to be a super touristy place. Despite neither being in the travel agency business nor having ever visited Peru, I bet I know someone who knows someone who can sort me out with whatever I need in a place like that.
You have links with the Caucasus where the tourist infrastructure is markedly less developed, those contacts are almost certainly more valuable than the examples cited in that article.
I’m still not convinced that any ‘travel advisor’ could’ve gotten me out of the sticky situation in which I found myself on a Sunday afternoon when traffic police in provincial Mozambique decided to ask me for a vehicle document that didn’t even exist, something that I had no way of properly checking until Monday morning (I did have local contacts but they couldn’t get to the bottom of it). They’d have probably avoided the risk in the first place by having told me to hire a chauffeur-driven SUV (‘for your own safety’) instead of the perfectly adequate VW Polo I got from Europcar.
Excellent contribution, Matt!
It’s becoming a more uncertain world. While advisors, insurance, and talent can make the difference, some of this is out of everyone’s hands, and recovery can be challenging, if not impossible.
I still feel like I got lucky narrowly avoiding the ME madness this past month, but if I was a few days off, I’d’ve been stuck. Reading the stories of those who had to take an expensive bus ride across the desert to Muscat or Riyadh sure doesn’t sound ‘fun’… it’s affecting future travel planning (like, maybe QR, EK, etc. just isn’t worth it for a while).
The real concern: if East Asia heats up, it’s all over. At that point, we all should just home for a while.
Influential phrase → “Safety isn’t expensive, it’s priceless.” – Jerry Smith –
We must never, ever forget that we are now forced to survive on a planet that is increasingly old, abused, overpopulated, and rife with inequality and discontent. No one should place too much reliance on possible good luck and/or unfounded optimism when embarking on any journey.
Forbes highlights the rapidly changing times. Some traveling will require more reassuring assistance than in before but recognizing the growing instability I suspect there will another level of travel security showing up that will involve world privatized companies to specialize in areas of erupting conflict.
Anyway I enjoyed reading this Kyle and your participation.
Reads of AI slop
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