Kanchi Jain

The WLT Leadership Exchanges bring one idea to many cities: a room of around 150 women leading travel, everyone at the director level or above.

Distribution is up for grabs, AI is in the core systems, capital has gotten careful, and loyalty is being redefined. Skift Global Forum is where travel decides what to do about it.

Concerts, festivals, sports and cultural moments are changing where and how the world travels, and the shift is proving durable. Most operators still treat it as a calendar event. The Skift Live Tourism Summit, presented by Live Nation, is the room where they learn to build around it.

For more than a decade, Skift Global Forum has been the room where travel's most consequential decisions take shape. The 2026 edition arrives at a moment when the industry can least afford to form those decisions anywhere else.

The senior planner's job in 2026 looks nothing like the 2019 version. Costs are surging while budgets stay flat. Planning windows have collapsed to under three months. The workforce is thinner than it's been in a decade. The job changed; the playbook didn't.

Trip.com Group's Edison Chen has spent over a decade turning culture, events, and AI into travel demand. As a Skift IDEA Awards judge, he is looking for ideas that move beyond static bookings toward experiences travelers want to participate in, and that land deeply in a market rather than simply reaching it.

Skift Transatlantic Summit returns for its second edition this October in Dublin, convening senior travel leaders to examine how geopolitics, shifting demand, and AI are reshaping the world's most valuable travel corridor.

IHG Hotel & Resorts' Jolie Fleming has led technology transformation across a vast spectrum of industries, and her conclusion is consistent: the technology itself is rarely the hardest part.

Boutiq’s Rena Pacheco-Theard has managed short-term rentals operations on all levels and has lived the margin pressures. As a Skift IDEA Awards judge, she explores ideas that take in the whole picture.

Every senior woman in travel is carrying the same open questions into a volatile year. Women Leading Travel Forum is where those questions get pressure-tested by peers deciding the same things. Few seats left.