Rafat Ali

The companies that originate trips do not need to call themselves travel companies to capture travel's economics, and Ari Emanuel is demonstrating it across three of them.

Skift Meetings is moving from covering the meetings industry to serving its decisions with intelligence — new leadership, same editorial standard, bigger ambition.

Travel’s AI investment is concentrated in office work while its demographic labor crisis is concentrated on the front line; the jobs aging fastest remain stubbornly physical.

Each side has what the other lacks: Ennismore, the hotel credibility, brand standards, and F&B depth; Airbnb, the demand, backed by homes revenue no other platform earns.

Haaland mania is real. It will not move Norwegian tourism, and the visitors it might send are the ones Norway is already pricing out.

Uber owns the transaction, and Google Maps owns the moment before it, and in the first half of 2026, both started using AI to cross into the other's territory. Travel distribution sits directly in the path.

The travel industry has owners for issuance, verification, and conversion. The missing layer is readiness, and the traveler owns the failure.

Durable travel tech is forged by hard operating conditions, not venture capital and conference circuits, and Turkey is the proof.

Three models are emerging for how tourism boards serve their operators with AI, and it is a lot more hands-on than past tech cycles.

Trip.com’s financials are the clearest single document in travel for understanding what “China risk” actually looks like when it shows up in a balance sheet.