Business Travel News

St. Louis is fortunate to have one of the more advanced startup communities of any third tier city in America, and it's leveraging that aggressively through the Murmuration Festival to reposition itself as a forward thinking destination for meetings and events.

Egencia wants to take a more global approach to growing its market share in corporate travel. It'll be interesting to see how it measures up with competitors that have already attained scale on a global level.

Humans still have a future in travel, but we need to get increasingly specialized and savvy about how we connect with the smartphone-enabled consumer. We must look to the in-roads between high tech and high touch and how these two factors work together to create truly unique travel experiences.

Event planners and brand marketers want to collaborate to design better event programming and experiential marketing content, but there are significant challenges for organizations to make that marriage work.

Guam presents an interesting option for Asia-Pacific conferences because it's a tropical island with mature tourism infrastructure and decent airlift, but there's a lot of work to do to show American meeting planners and attendees that the long flight is worth it. It's easy to say you want to be Hawaii, and another to actually be it.

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

The modern traveler may face more threats than in the past, but the outlook for global travel remains bright as travelers prove to be more resilient and aware than ever before.

Thomas Cook’s disastrous merger with The Co-operative Group in 2011 gave it more than 1,200 retail shops at a time when the public was switching to online sales. Gradually it has been trying to reduce this number while at the same time improving those deemed to be in key locations.

Event planners and marketers need to combine forces more aggressively to co-create large meetings and conferences, because the next generation of interdisciplinary event design and experiential marketing is far too complex for planners to navigate on their own anymore.

The future of travel is the future of corporate travel — just on a bit of a time delay.