Rafat Ali

NYC still has the thing every other city wants, and no other city can buy: strangers worth talking to, singing with, eating with, arguing with, and falling in love next to.

The merchant model is the most important thing happening at Booking Holdings. It is also the thing that lets it avoid proving whether Connected Trip actually works.

Nassetta calls it a C, Capuano says the K is bending. I call it wishful typography.

The great AI upskilling of the travel workforce has begun, but even among the industry’s largest companies, the gap between who is preparing their employees for AI and who is just cutting with it is widening fast.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Call it the WhatsApp travel economy: like the messages, the travelers are invisible to everyone outside the conversation.

The math suggests Uber will subsidize hotel booking at a net loss for a subscription fee. Expedia's B2B business growing five times faster than its consumer business tells you who this deal is really for.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

The destinations that will win the next decade are the ones that understand culture is their upstream product, not their marketing asset.

Every airline on earth is redesigning the front of the plane. The demographic math behind those seats is shifting faster than the capex cycle.

A quiet power shift is underway in global travel and most of the industry hasn’t caught up. The next decade is being shaped not in the West, but along a new corridor linking the Gulf, India, and Southeast Asia.

Every ambitious project deserves a second draft. The war just cleared the desk for Saudi to write one.