Business Travel News

The upscale meetings, events, and incentive travel market is seeing a spike in demand for more immersive and experiential connectivity to improve networking and learning environments.

Airbnb’s entry into the tours and activities market certainly brings the sector to the fore. If Airbnb sticks with a strategy to curate its tours and activities, going with unique and off-the-beaten-path experiences, then that is still important for the sector given Airbnb’s scale, but self-limiting. Competition is certainly a healthy thing and all the players will have to up their games.

Venezuelan travel agencies have refocused their strategies to face the economic crisis. The shift has not been enough to boost the business, which shows no signs of recovery.

Sophistication and adoption of back-end technology on the supply side is getting to a point where the big players in online travel are taking the tours and activities segment seriously. It's an expanding growth opportunity for new and direct revenue streams across the entire traveler journey, beyond core transport and accommodations products.

Corporate travel is finally starting to learn lessons from the consumer travel space, mostly because business travelers have been trained by their leisure travel to expect robust booking tools and more control over their trips. The travel management companies that focus the most on improving their traveler-facing technology will win this battle, and improve their clients’ travel experience in the process.

These are the tourism trends we were talking about this week.

Travelers get free gift cards, and companies save money on their travel spend. Tweaking traveler behavior through incentives isn't new to the corporate travel space, but investors seem to have finally noticed its potential.

Mass personalization, artificial intelligence, and ubiquitous connectivity were three of the big megatrends at CES 2017 this month, which offer significant strategies for new innovation in the meetings and events industry.

Disney's international parks act as key consumer touch-points that drive brand awareness and cross-monetization of content in new markets. Macroeconomic issues in outbound mainland China tourism have impacted Hong Kong recently, but those pressures are abating and new park expansion projects should stabilize attendance trends.

Conference organizers are developing more multidisciplinary programming that pulls from both the business and creative industries, creating a new convergence of experiences that help brands plug into business events in more ways.