Skift Take
Conferences and events like Skift Forum Europe in April and SXSW in Austin this month distill the converging trends in society, politics, and high-growth industries.
The Future of Meetings & Events
The inaugural Skift Forum Europe kicks off on April 4 in London's Docklands district with a full day of travel industry disruptors discussing the social, political, and economic factors driving their technology and marketing strategy decisions. The various industry thought leaders range from InterContinental Hotels CEO Richard Solomons to London & Partners acting CEO Andrew Cooke.
According to Skift founder Rafat Ali in his post this week, "The Forum isn’t a just a line of business for us. It is the distillation of everything we work for."
Meanwhile in Austin, the annual South by Southwest Conference (SXSW) is swarming the city — the entire city — with an estimated 80,000-plus registered attendees. More than 25,000 of those are using Airbnb this week in Austin, which has 35,000 hotel rooms. We paid $100 per night for an apartment near South Congress, booked one week ahead. For the first time around we also used the RideAustin ride-sharing app, which replaced Uber and Lyft last year when those two apps were booted out of town.
On Saturday, the volume of traffic downtown grew so big that it crashed a few of the city's proprietary ride-sharing apps for an
