The new way to sell plane tickets (humor, grey hair, and guts)

“The outbound fare includes the unaccompanied-minor service. Do you think he’ll need it?”

A father asked me that this morning over WhatsApp. It’s an add-on the airline charges for, and I get a commission on it. The short answer would have been “yes, book it, better safe than sorry.” Sale closed, father reassured, everyone happy.

I told him something else. That’s where we’re going.

I’m 72 years old and I’ve spent 42 of them selling travel. This morning a lifelong client writes to me: his son, 17, is off to spend a school year in the United States. And not just anywhere — he’s landed a host family in Sandy, Utah. The kid doesn’t know it yet, but he’s hit the jackpot: he’ll be living half an hour from Alta, Brighton, Solitude and Snowbird, four of the best ski mountains on the planet. I’ve been putting my own ski groups up there for years. The father asks me for flights: out in August, open return in May. The visa came through yesterday. They’re in a hurry.

A routine job. What happened next is what I want to tell you about, because that one conversation holds everything artificial intelligence now does faster for me — and everything it still can’t do in my place.

The first thing I did was not send him flights. It was send him three links: my guide to the Ikon ski pass, my new ski-travel website, and this blog. With this line: “my rejuvenation blog — I’ve gone from being 72 to 42 by rewiring my brain.”

The father’s reply: “Blimey, you never stop.”

Business schools will call that content marketing, or something worse. I call it proving you’re still alive. A client who bought trips from you ten years ago needs to know the man on the other end of the WhatsApp hasn’t been stuck in 2015. Three links, ten seconds, and the frame of the conversation is no longer “a pensioner hunting me some flights” but “this fellow never stops.” Then we talk fares.

Then came the part where the old-school salesman would have started sweating. The father, poking around on his own, finds a fare on the airline’s own website that’s better than the one my system gives me — Amadeus, the booking engine we agencies use.

Forty-two years behind a counter have taught me exactly what to say in that moment:

“That fare doesn’t even come up for me… and it looks great. Go ahead and book it, it sometimes throws up surprises.”

Yes, you read that right. I told my own client to buy the ticket from the competition. With one veteran’s postscript: “they often dangle the sweet price in front of you and then, as you go through the steps, the surcharges start creeping in. Check whether the taxes are included, because the taxes are serious money.”

Why give away a sale? Because I’m not giving it away. A client you tell “buy it there, it’s better” is a client who brings you the next twenty years of travel. A ticket commission is today’s money; trust is the whole shop. No algorithm taught me that. Racking my brains behind a counter, back before the internet existed, taught me that.

Then the father raised the real objection: the good itinerary forced the kid into a long overnight leg and a full day of layover. “Not bad, but he’d spend a night in an airport and an extra day.”

And here the grandfather in me came right out:

“Nonsense — a night on the plane… that’s how you toughen up and learn.”

“And spending a day in Boston, the most old-world, dignified city in the USA, is a treat.”

“Plus he gets to practice his Mormon English while he’s at it. Mind you — he might come back teetotal from Utah.”

(A note for the reader outside the joke: Utah is the heartland of the Mormon church, and by local custom and law, alcohol there is famously hard to come by. Hence the crack about the boy returning a teetotaler.)

The father dismantled my joke with surgical precision: “I doubt it — he’s landed a pretty Democrat family, and they’re not Mormon.” Touché. Good clients can volley one back too.

Look at what happened there, because it’s the whole technique: the same itinerary, same times, went from “a night in an airport” to a 17-year-old’s first real adventure. I didn’t change the flight. I changed the story. And a story, when it’s true — because Boston IS a treat, and because flying solo at that age DOES toughen you up — isn’t manipulation: it’s experience put at the service of someone who hasn’t got any yet.

And then came the question from the top. The unaccompanied-minor service. The add-on. My commission.

I answered with my own résumé at 17:

“At 17 I was organizing ski trips to the Alps. I ran a party train to Sierra Nevada. I escorted Rostropovich to Israel. And I set part of my house on fire playing with model planes — with a bright idea about strapping one of those spark-throwing gadgets to a flying plane…”

All true, by the way. The plane-with-a-sparkler included. It took my mother years to see the funny side.

And the closer: “with the father he’s got, he needs no help whatsoever. Chip off the old block.”

Reply: “Ha ha ha.” And the sale on rails.

I took out of his basket a service he’d have paid for without blinking. I flattered him, gave the kid wings, and laughed at myself along the way. That’s selling with guts: not cheek — judgment. Cheek is charging out of fear for something nobody needs. Judgment is knowing when a kid needs a flight attendant to hold his hand, and when what he needs is the exact opposite: to be left to figure it out in Boston.

And where’s the artificial intelligence in all this? Doing its bit, which is no small thing. The Ikon Pass guide I sent him, I built with the machine. The ski website too. I compare quotes faster than ever. AI has handed me back the speed of my 42-year-old self — that’s why this blog is called what it’s called.

But look at what the machine cannot supply: it never escorted Rostropovich to Israel, never torched half a house with a toy plane, hasn’t spent 42 years learning to tell the kid who needs help from the kid who needs a clear runway, and doesn’t risk its commission telling a client “buy it from the airline, it’s cheaper there.” The machine drafts; the life story closes the deal.

That’s the new way to sell plane tickets. Which is the old way. Only now it runs over WhatsApp, with AI riding shotgun — and the jokes fully intact.

Chip off the old block. In this too.

What did you think?