This is the Trace Id: 1b0281846e8285ca021fc0bf3e337016
5/19/2025

Global Travel Collection to reclaim 1.5M advisor hours with Azure AI Foundry and Copilot Studio

Global Travel Collection advisors typically use 10 or more resources to plan and book customized travel experiences for their clients. The friction from manual navigation of travel data meant advisors spent six to eight hours on each itinerary.

Global Travel Collection used Microsoft Azure AI Foundry and Copilot Studio to design and deploy an AI-powered travel information system for its network of corporate and luxury travel advisors.

The Atlas solution that Global Travel Collection created is saving its nearly 2,000 independent travel advisors a total of more than 1.5 million hours annually on client booking activities.

Global Travel Collection

Global Travel Collection (GTC*) is a network of elite travel advisors focused on creating unique experiences for their corporate and high-net-worth clients. Whether handling the travel plans for a corporate meeting or creating the itinerary for a European luxury vacation, details are everything and, unfortunately, everywhere. In fact, to book the kind of complex trips that GTC advisors handle, they might access 10 or more airline, hotel, entertainment, and corporate travel information resources.

Planning and booking highly personalized trips often took six to eight hours—time spent navigating fragmented systems, not adding value. Although clients never saw that work, GTC advisors felt the inefficiencies daily. “When I came to Global Travel Collection, I noticed a serious disconnect across the systems our advisors use. It was clear we needed to unify the data behind a single interface,” says Casey Soto, who serves as Senior Director of Product Management at Global Travel Collection and Artificial Intelligence Center of Excellence Leader at Internova, GTC’s parent company. 

Casey Soto, Senior Director of Product Management, Global Travel Collection

“When I came to Global Travel Collection, I noticed a serious disconnect across the systems our advisors use. It was clear we needed to unify the data behind a single interface.”

Casey Soto, Senior Director of Product Management, Global Travel Collection

Mapping out the solution

Determined to simplify advisor access to the mountains of data that GTC advisors rely on, Soto set out to design and deploy Atlas, a secure, scalable, and compliant AI-powered platform purpose-built to help luxury travel advisors accelerate trip planning without removing the human touch.

As Soto considered how his team might simplify access to information for GTC’s network of elite travel agents focused on corporate and luxury travel, he was certain that AI was the right technology for the job. “GenAI looked like the easiest way to combine all these data sources, pulling everything into one spot to give advisors the ability to search all of it,” he says.

At the same time, Soto recognized a broader shift in user expectations: advisors were increasingly accustomed to natural language search in their everyday lives. To meet those expectations—and move beyond rigid keyword-based systems—his team needed to create an AI-powered platform that could understand conversational queries and return actionable, context-rich results. “To allow advisors to access information in the way they’d become accustomed, we had to create that system,” Soto adds. 

He knew that solving this challenge meant more than adding AI. It meant delivering a modern, governed architecture that could scale across the entire Internova portfolio. Together with Microsoft, Soto and his team began work on developing Atlas to give advisors fast access to accurate, high-quality travel information.

A plan for rapid innovation

Soto selected Microsoft Azure AI Foundry for its simplicity, advanced security, and flexibility to scale AI innovation quickly. The team began building Atlas with Copilot Studio, capitalizing on its rapid prototyping capabilities and graphical interface. As development progressed, they incorporated Azure AI Foundry to deepen interoperability, provide centralized governance, and orchestrate back-end workflows—including prompt flow, Azure AI Search, and Azure OpenAI in Azure AI Foundry Models. Atlas also uses Azure Blob Storage to more securely host travel content, enabling efficient retrieval through AI Search. “Azure AI Foundry was key to orchestrating the AI Search flow and ensuring our data was properly indexed,” Soto explains.

Together, Azure AI Foundry and Copilot Studio gave GTC a full-stack generative AI architecture. Copilot Studio delivered a low-code interface for advisor interaction, while Azure AI Foundry enabled highly secure model orchestration, data indexing, and scalable deployment across services.

Streamlining the development process

Soto’s team used Azure AI Foundry as the experimentation platform to rapidly test and refine Atlas. The management center in Azure AI Foundry allows for centralized governance, version control, and more secure deployment of the generative AI stack, helping the team scale confidently and reduce development friction. Azure AI Foundry orchestrates the retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipeline behind Atlas. Using Azure AI Search, the platform retrieves relevant content from SharePoint and travel data sources, while Azure OpenAI generates grounded responses in real time. This approach gives advisors access to context-rich answers without manual lookup.

In development, Copilot Studio acted as the interface where AI solutions developed in Azure AI Foundry were tied into user-friendly applications, dashboards, and workflows. In day-to-day operation, Atlas runs on a GTC-built interface fueled by Copilot Studio on the back end. Copilot Studio handles intent recognition and manages back-end workflows, including calls to Azure App Service. Hosting the custom orchestration logic that connects AI Search and Azure OpenAI, App Service powers the administrative portal used to manage advisor tools, content, and system workflows. 

By building on a fully managed platform as a service (PaaS), GTC reduced the time and resources needed for infrastructure management, allowing the team to focus on developing new AI capabilities. App Service also helps ensure global scalability, high availability, and enterprise-grade security without additional overhead. Atlas uses Azure Cosmos DB to store advisor interaction history and session context. In doing so, it lays the groundwork for future personalization, knowledge graph development, and more intelligent advisor–client interactions over time.

Building with Azure AI Foundry in Copilot Studio, GTC was able to take Atlas from idea to inception quickly and safely, with built-in governance, enterprise-grade security, and compliance that let the company embrace AI with confidence. Mark Munley, SVP and CIO at Global Travel Collection, amplified the value of the safety and security that Azure delivers, explaining, “Security is paramount to us as a company dealing with traveler information globally and having to worry about GDPR and other regulations and security protocols, like PCI compliance. We know that Microsoft’s whole ecosystem is set up for protection, and the fact that we could do all this within our Azure tenant was very important.”

Mark Munley, SVP and CIO, Global Travel Collection

“Security is paramount to us as a company dealing with traveler information globally and having to worry about GDPR and other regulations and security protocols, like PCI compliance. We know that Microsoft’s whole ecosystem is set up for protection, and the fact that we could do all this within our Azure tenant was very important.”

Mark Munley, SVP and CIO, Global Travel Collection

Munley adds that choosing Microsoft was not only about compliance, but also about clarity and continuity. “We didn’t feel driven by the technology—we had a clear need, and the Microsoft tools we already had in place made it easy to deliver,” he says. “With so much of our data already in OneDrive, SharePoint, and our tenant, it just made intuitive sense to build Atlas in Copilot Studio powered by Azure AI Foundry.”

Faster access to better information

Atlas is built for high-value, context-rich interactions, such as surfacing policies, vendor details, and booking logic in seconds. Copilot Studio powers the back-end orchestration, enabling a seamless, guided experience that advisors rely on to plan complex travel. By replacing manual searches with a single natural-language query, Atlas solves one of the travel industry’s most persistent challenges: inefficient, disconnected data access.

Longtime Global Travel Collection advisor David Waldes estimates that Atlas saves him 10 to 15 minutes per query. “Atlas spiders out through our systems and gives me a solid answer in seconds—what used to take me 10 to 15 minutes,” he says. “For something as simple as ‘What are the best hotels in Zurich,’ I’m instantly seeing six options, past client feedback, and booking context, without having to dig.” 

David Waldes, Advisor, Global Travel Collection

“Atlas spiders out through our systems and gives me a solid answer in seconds—what used to take me 10 to 15 minutes.”

David Waldes, Advisor, Global Travel Collection

Maintaining momentum

With Atlas reducing planning time by an average of three hours per trip, GTC’s 1,700 advisors, with most booking 300-plus trips per year, are projected to reclaim over 1.5 million hours annually. Vendors are also taking note, with airlines and hotel brands exploring opportunities to feature their services within Atlas—a potential new revenue stream for GTC.

As usage grows, GTC plans to expand Atlas across Internova’s full network of 150,000 advisors. Built with Copilot Studio and Azure AI Foundry services, the platform is designed to scale securely, serving as a blueprint for future generative AI applications across the business.

Discover more about Global Travel Collection on FacebookInstagram, and LinkedIn.

*GTC is Internova Travel Group’s high-touch luxury travel agency, represents the most sophisticated community of travel advisors worldwide, serving clients in the luxury leisure, corporate, and entertainment sectors. GTC combines the buying power of a global organization with the personalized touch of a boutique agency, providing advisors with the resources, support, and supplier access needed to thrive in the high-end travel market.

Take the next step

Fuel innovation with Microsoft

Talk to an expert about custom solutions

Let us help you create customized solutions and achieve your unique business goals.

Drive results with proven solutions

Achieve more with the products and solutions that helped our customers reach their goals.

Follow Microsoft