Greg Oates

City leaders in government, tourism, and economic development are collaborating more strategically to grow their leisure and business travel sectors in alignment with the interests of their local communities and industries.

Scotland's government and convention bureau want meeting planners, especially those in the U.S., to grasp that there's cutting-edge innovation in advanced industries taking place in the UK outside London.

Visit Seattle is positioning itself as a broker of innovation, versus a sales conduit for meeting space, by introducing meeting planners nationwide to some of the world's most advanced companies.

The Puerto Rico Convention Bureau is actively selling for 2018 meetings and conventions despite the fallout from Hurricane Maria, but with the rebuilding efforts, the island should reposition itself more as a hub of industry innovation rather than just a U.S. tropical paradise.

In 2017, SXSW, IMEX, BizBash and other event companies all rolled out new chatbot platforms, which leverage artificial intelligence to customize messaging. This is how we'll engage with all brands in the future.

Chatbots offer the first glimpse into a future where meeting and event planners can deliver mass personalization at scale using artificial intelligence.

In the luxury travel space, at a macro level, demand is growing for the accumulation of travel memories drawn from transformative moments that resonate deeply with the individual traveler’s ideal of personal fulfillment, and his or her best aspirational version of themselves.

Innovation in event technology today relates as much to how planners use the platforms that already exist, as compared to new advancements in the technology itself.

While spending on business travel is forecasted to grow significantly in the next five years in both developed and emerging markets, there has also never been so much uncertainty collectively around global political, social, and economic disruptions.

There's a growing conversation in the U.S. about how city governments and convention bureaus can better pool their resources to promote their local startup and research communities to convention organizers.