Explore Innovation and Creativity in Travel With the Skift Ideas Podcast

Despite the wide-ranging impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on various sectors, the travel industry emerged as one of the hardest hit. 

However, travel is back, with the Skift Travel Health Index indicating that travel performance has surpassed April 2019 levels. 

Concurrently, the industry is experiencing a surge of innovation and creativity, driven by numerous organizations utilizing the experiences of the pandemic to evaluate, recalibrate, and adopt fresh outlooks towards travel.

As we continue on our mission to celebrate these groundbreaking creative projects and build the industry’s go-to resource for the campaigns, designs, and ideas taking the industry to the next level, we are excited to launch the next chapter: the Skift Ideas Podcast. 

Through the podcast – which will be hosted by industry thought leaders Rafat Ali and Colin Nagy – we will immerse listeners in discussions regarding the latest innovations within the industry, focusing on the key topics of design, marketing, sustainability, experience and so much more. 

In each episode, Rafat and Colin will be joined by travel visionaries, creatives, and pioneers who are steering the travel and hospitality industries into the future, inciting frank, inspiring and thought provoking conversations into current innovation and what exciting breakthroughs are set to come. 

This first episode looks at today’s state of creativity and innovation within the travel industry, and what ideas are already transforming the way we look at travel.

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Episode Notes

Rafat Ali: Hey folks, welcome to the Skift Ideas podcast, the first edition of our series that we’re starting here. I’m really excited for this bi weekly discussion on innovation, design, experience, creativity in the travel industry, and I’m delighted to do it with my co-host, Colin Nagy, who’s been a longtime columnist at Skift, writing about the experiences in the travel industry in different aspects.

We will talk to thinkers, craftspeople and operators in the travel industry and around the edges as well, which I think is very important. And this bi weekly discussion, the first one which we’re going to talk about, the state of creativity in travel is just me and Colin, and in the subsequent editions we will have guests along with it as well.

So let’s jump in.

Why are we starting this podcast? The Skift Ideas podcast is part of our franchise called Skift Ideas, which we announced last month. And the Ideas franchise is celebrating as the word sort of idea, says innovation, design, experience, creativity, automation and AI now coming into it as well. We started with Skift Idea Awards, which started a few years ago, which celebrate innovation and the companies and people in the travel industry along these lines.

And we’ve expanded our franchise this year in the meetings industry for the Skift Meetings Awards. About a month ago we launched this Skift Ideas Content Hub, which documents many of these innovations coming out of the travel industry, from airlines, from hotels, from tour operators, from designers, etc., in the travel industry. And the Skift Ideas Podcast is the next phase of expanding this Skift Ideas franchise.

So in this opening discussion, I wanted to discuss with Colin the state of creativity in travel, sort of a spectral overview, if you will, of where the travel industry is today. And one of the things that I said at the start of the year at our launch of our Skift Megatrends was that this is the most creative time to be in travel.

And why did I say that? It’s because we’re out of the clouds, the miasma of COVID and everything is possible in the travel industry today. The Travel industry, as all of you know, continues to boom while there’s economic uncertainty in other parts of the world. Yet there’s still constraints. There’s labor shortages, supply chain issues. Travel remains very, very expensive.

So this clash of constraints and possibilities is what I think makes it one of the most creative times to be in travel. Also, travel has become a lot more global, a lot more voices emerging from other parts of the world that are influencing travel in so many different ways. This is what Colin does best, is to highlight these.

So that’s how we’re going to have the discussion. Colin, I want to welcome you and wanted you to give your top level thoughts before we jump in.

Colin Nagy: Sure, and thank you so much. With creativity in travel, very, very broad topic. And I think what’s interesting is I agree with you. We’re back in full force. You know, people are booking you go to any airport around the world. It’s actually ram-packed. So the opportunities are there. But sometimes I find there’s there’s headwinds that are kind of preventing some of this creativity.

Sometimes it can be corporate inertia. Sometimes it can be kind of bureaucracy and fear. And what I’ve been doing as I’ve been writing the column for, you know, since 2016 is just really trying to find these pockets of people that are able to find a little bit of alpha by over indexing on something that delights customers, by rethinking some things in terms of their guest experience.

And I feel like with a lot of the tools that are coming online with technology, with having this super customer centric mindset, I think we’re poised for a boom in creativity, both when it comes to marketing and kind of experiences of brand, but also I think all the way down the kind of operational chain and stack of these companies.

So while you still see people operating in bureaucratic and slow, lumbering ways like big companies, I think you do find we are going to have a bit of a renaissance, which I’m excited about.

Ali: So it’s interesting you say that because if you ask people who are traveling today, this is the general customer, not super travelers like you and me. They will say that it feels like the experience of travel is getting worse. Do you think, from an experience perspective, that’s true? It seems like it’s getting worse and better in many different ways.

Nagy: I think what’s happened is you have great companies, luxury hotels, airlines that are really pushing to create incredible guest experiences for their clients and their guests. On the other side of that, you have a labor force that has left the market during the pandemic. You have a lot of very talented hoteliers and other kinds of frontline team members that have left the industry completely.

So there is quite a tension between the ambition of some of these top tier brands, you know, Emirates, Four Seasons, etc., and making sure they have the amazing, talented people to deliver that. And this is the tension that I see over and over and over in the business, especially as a lot of hotels, a lot of airlines are really charging premium rates at this stage.

So it’s a recipe for disaster. And I feel like it’s one of the existential threats for the industry right now.

Ali: But there’s also this stratification happening in the West, where your experience just traveling the West and what you experience is traveling in other parts of the world. I mean, the labor shortage that we’re talking about here in the West, it’s very different, in fact, where you are Colin right now, Dubai or next door in Saudi Arabia or the further east you go.

So it feels like at least on the luxury and the strata, that there is some stratification depending on where you go.

Nagy: It’s a good point. I actually had lunch today and I had a great conversation with a gentleman that had just moved to Dubai from Cuba. And he outlined his entire sort of, you know, reason for moving here, moved his entire family. I was actually quite surprised, you know, the Cuban diaspora in the United States, in Miami, etc..

But to hear a Cuban accent in a restaurant in Dubai was actually quite interesting. And so, you know, in emerging markets or what you see is, Singapore is booming. And obviously they are dealing with a tension of lots of people wanting to come there, lots of labor market needing to come to kind of work in the hotels, work in all these all these places versus, you know, Native Singaporeans wanting jobs.

So there’s an inherent tension there. Dubai is just a boomtown, right now and you’re starting to see lots of nationalities come here to build, to build a career or build a new life. And oftentimes the stepping stone of that is in various elements of hospitality. And I thought it was quite interesting to see it’s not just the Filipino diaspora or some of the, you know, Bhutanese or kind of workers that you’d normally associate with coming here, you know, Cubans and lots of other people kind of traveling here as a hub.

So the boom is real and they’re not suffering from the labor shortages that other places are.

Ali: So let’s dig into four different pockets of creativity and innovation that I want to touch on today as an overview and to start with what Skift has covered very well for the last 11 years of its existence, which is technology and what that is enabling in terms of the experience and what that means to the creativity that it fosters from there.

So you wrote this column for us, I’m going to say two weeks ago on what hotel hospitality brands can immediately adopt or immediately start thinking about from all the innovations happening in AI. We’ve been covering AI in travel since really the launch of ChatGPT last year. So you brought a lot of threads together. What I loved about your column is you brought a lot of threads together and then tried to provide clarity in different bullet points or buckets, if you will.

So talk about why you thought that was important.

Nagy: I think it was important because we look at our LinkedIn, we look at our Twitter, we look at the sort of coffee chat at the office and everyone’s talking AI, ChatGPT. But what I was really trying to do with this is show to, you know, travel marketers and travel brands, some really tangible things that they need to be doing and thinking about.

Right. Just experimenting. So, for example, one of my pet peeves in hospitality is a lot of brands look the same. You know, there’s a lot of visual, visual homogeny when it comes to how brands look, their ads, etc.. Oftentimes you joke that if you cover up the logo on a travel ad, it could be three other three other things.

You can use things like Dali to moodboard and take and take your brand and the visuals in different directions. With the right human creative director and AI, you can play out different territories. Same goes for like your brand voice. You can use ChatGPT, you need to say, Hey, write this text in the voice of my 34 year old female creative class audience and really calibrate and push your brand voice.

You can sift through all of the reviews, that kind of sit on the Internet and actually go and find that insight. That’s like a needle in a haystack. And one of the most important things is a lot of these huge brands need better governance. And so there’s things like Brand Guard, which actually, you train it on your brand assets and it allows a team to understand making sure that that’s super consistent across the Web and across every piece of marketing.

One of the things I’m really interested in is how do you use AI to draw inspiration from your archives, right? Imagine ingesting the entire storied visual history of a brand like Raffles and have it create something new or evolve that based on a specific prompt. 

Ali: That’s fascinating. Somebody did this experiment where they put Tiffany in Maldives and everything in Maldives, it was just an experiment. Somebody posted on LinkedIn or maybe other social media as well. And the Tiffany color in different settings in Maldives was just a total fiction. But again, it unlocks creativity in your brain that probably you wouldn’t have been able to at least visualize easily on your own.

Nagy: I thought the Tiffany Maldives thing was real when I first saw it, because LVMH are such exceptional marketers and it was really fun to look at and fun to see. So that’s a great example. And then, you know, the other one that I find really interesting is, we’ve talked a lot at Skift about the Self-Directed Traveler, right?

And I do think that ChatGPT could be coming for some of the middlemen, you know, coming for some of the travel industry, the travel trade, the travel agents. I’ve long argued that these people do create a ton of value. So I’m not trying to come for that particular group. But I do think that when you look at the specificity of recommendations that come out of this stuff and when you have a few plugins that could allow you to book a flight or book a transfer off the back of it, it’s actually quite interesting.

So all in all, I think that there’s a lot of places where people can experiment.

Ali: One of the things that I’m excited about from a creative perspective is one what AI and the conversational part of it, which is where for me, the, the real innovation lies, which is we have trained ourselves to use software and internet or digital experiences in certain boxes, and we have to adhere to those boxes or norms to get the right results, to get the things that we want versus a conversation and being able to have an extended conversation, not just a single question, but speculative ways of asking and then going deeper into it, kind of like human conversation.

And so what conversational AI does to how the digital experiences change? Here, I’m talking travel booking, particularly the search box. I’ve said this for many, many years. Is that the tyranny of use, the word, the tyranny of the travel booking search box? And what I meant by that is a very cookie cutter way of searching, which leads to cookie cutter results back and results and overwhelm in terms of choices and very sort of grid based answers, if you will.

And for me, that’s the creative part of what it will unlock. I think we’re still very early. It may not just come from the travel industry, it may come from larger companies, certainly at the moment it’s coming from a company like ChatGPT. But again, it’s a very rudimentary interface today being is stretching that a little bit in how they’re changing that interface.

So as consumer behavior changes and gets well, it gets changed as a result of using these mainstream tools and then coming to travel. That’s what I’m very interested by in terms of what that unlocks on, on how people in travel will have to rethink the interface itself and how people query and interact. And the good part I think that is in travel’s favor is that they do have a lot of stories to tell, which means that in a conversational context, potentially, that also fits in.

The other part on AI is that it is existential to a lot of industries. It’s not existential to travel because that the actual experience of travel is it is a is a is a tangible human to human or human to physical things, interaction. And so travel as a concept won’t go away, however advanced I could become unless, like, I don’t know teleportation becomes a reality which by the way, I really want it to, but short of that is not existential to travel, existential threat to travel, which again, if there’s a lot more positives to think about in AI in travel than it is in, I don’t know, in some some of the knowledge worker industries like education, etc.. So for me, that’s interesting. I don’t know if you’ve any thoughts on that column.

Nagy: Yeah, I wrote a column basically talking about how the travel industry, the hotel industry needs to make a case for the next generation of hoteliers, right. And actually, you know, as I said, some of the people that work at Four Seasons, Mandarin, all these great brands, Peninsula, they train a certain type of great hotelier who turns into a great leader.

And what’s very interesting about that is these jobs are actually safe from the onslaught. If you’re a second or first year analyst at Goldman Sachs, you are not safe from this onslaught. So, you know, perhaps the romance of human interaction and service and providing that nurturing, thoughtful thing, you know, will become a new luxury and will become a new desired career path.

And I think what’s happened is these brands have really failed to make a great case to the really bright young people of like, why they would come back? But my argument is you get to deal with humans and then you also get to have a potentially global career and kind of move around the world interfacing with, you know, improvizational creative problems every day.

And so you make a great point. It’s like there’s some industries that are not going to be crushed by this the way some knowledge workers will.

Ali: Yeah, my goal for my two young kids, if AI disrupts everything, it is for them to open ice cream shops. And certainly that won’t go away. So clearly, clearly, there’s a future in travel and ice creams. 

In terms of design innovations that you are excited about. I know you’ve talked about El Cosmico and the 3D printing there. So what’s your sense of the design innovations in a world where, one of the things that we’ve been covering at Skift quite a bit for, for the last year. I wrote an essay called The Great Merging where how we live, work, travel and socialize have sort of merged into each other in COVID and post-COVID continues to be at least for the set that has disposable income to travel, meaning a set that has more creative jobs are more knowledge based jobs.

And what that means in how travel products are created, designed, marketed and examples of this length of stays at either hotels and particularly with short term rentals and that part of the world. The length of stays continues to be high quite a bit and so in that great merging world what are the design innovations that you’re excited about?

I know you’ve talked quite a bit about El Cosmico, I think with 3D printing, etc.. So what’s your sense of design itself?

Nagy: Yeah, I think what I’m intrigued by in the hospitality world is, you know, new models, new ways of constructing and new approaches for people to visit. Right. And I think what I find inspiring just to back up, Liz Lambert is partnered with Bjarke Ingels and an Austin based company called Icon. An icon does 3D printing and they do 3D printing of dwellings.

And so they are building, they are evolving a property that Liz had for a long time called El Cosmico, which is in West Texas, in Marfa. And they’re making these very sort of like mega futuristic looking, incredible dwellings that are 3D printed. And number one, it looks very futuristic. Number two, it allows for design elements like, you know, skylights where you can see the stars every night.

But there’s an environmental factor that, you know, you don’t have to drive in a bunch of trucks and concrete and materials and disturb a bunch of land. And also the cost to construct and a lot of the benefits from that. So I caught up with Liz on the phone a couple days ago, and she said that Icon actually has a contract with NASA to do moon dwellings.

And it’s very funny because when you see what they’re making in Marfa, it actually looks like something that could be on the moon. And it’s so far out of the playbook of anything that we’ve seen with glamping any kind of, you know, interesting architecture design. It’s so far out there and things like that I get very excited by it because it’s a completely paradigm shifting thing.

Ali: One of the things, I guess, and I don’t know if this is if you will draw a straight line from here to the general awareness of outdoors that came in because of COVID. Like, Oh, you mean we can live more outdoors in sort of our Western world, if you will, outside of the bubble of our houses and offices and screens.

And so that awareness came. That certainly was very present in travel during the summer of 2020, the summer 2021, the summer of 2022, even. And do you think that theme continues of like, merging and outdoors, which then obviously has implications on the footprint on climate? You could argue that you know, there are ways to lessen footprint on climate if you integrate outdoor more compared to not integrating as more.

So I wonder what your thoughts on that are.

Nagy: I’m really inspired by these types of dwellings because it creates an unbelievable guest experience, number one. Right? So Four Seasons just did a tented camp. I believe it’s in Costa Rica and they’re selling it for a tremendous amount of money per night. You can’t get in, it’s completely booked out, because you have that proximity to nature. You hear the hiss of, you know, you hear the hiss of the jungle, you hear the birds.

It’s absolutely wonderful. And you know, all of this goes back to early days, safari tents. Right?You’re in a canvas bush tech tent in the middle of, you know, in the middle of Tanzania. But you feel like a human being. You’re on, you’re protected, but you’re on the Serengeti. And I do think that’s the number one thing, is the guest experience is really, really interesting.

And you feel hyper connected to the world that we live in, as humans, as opposed to just kind of isolated and sequestered from cities. And obviously the desire for these experiences has gone up exponentially after COVID. And then to your point, you know, there are environmental implications because these are much more light touch things as they sit on the terrain, as they sit on the earth.

They don’t require bulldozers. They don’t require huge, huge lifts to bring in. So there’s a benefit to that. And also the economic benefit to, you know, hospitality companies is they don’t cost that much to construct. And everyone wants to spend a whole bunch of money to stay in them, which is incredible business. And you see things like Under Canvas, which started out with more rudimentary tents and now just opened up a new thing called the Loom, which is spectacular.

And it’s out in Moab, drivable to all the great, you know, Zion National Park and a lot of those places. And they’ve positioned it as a very high end experience is, you know, $700 a night and people are paying it and there’s so much demand for this property. So I think you’re exactly right. There’s something very special about this space, and I’m very interested to see how it continues to evolve.

3D printing, it will be a big thing. And then I think you’ll start seeing blends of 3D printing and also kind of like more futuristic approaches to form with tents and things like that.

Ali: And then in the Western world, which is a lot more built up, or at least in the cities around cities where things are a lot more built up. A phrase that has been used obviously for a while is adaptive reuse and blending the sort of the old with the new. And are you seeing more examples of this coming in, for instance, hotels or dwellings in general of adaptive reuse?

Nagy: With this one? I would say a great example is the Standby Hotel in Tbilisi, in Georgia, which I think you’re a fan of as well. You know, just incredible regeneration of really bombed out old factories, that now feels like this very futuristic, otherworldly place that doesn’t really feel like anything. It almost feels like something out of a sci-fi movie.

So I love the creative sort of reuse. And I also am very interested in like other materials. There are people that are now doing skyscrapers and hotels and buildings out of wood. You know, there’s like new forms of wood, there’s new forms of making buildings that are actually super safe and super structured, but they’re made in these very, very eco friendly materials.

The other thing that I would point out is you walk down Orchard Road in Singapore and you see hotels and things that used to be large building structures that are now completely covered with plants and vegetation. They’re visually quite stunning. And they also have benefits to the heating, cooling, all these elements of how buildings run efficiently and effectively, but they also create this very kind of futuristic, utopian interface with the landscape that I also feel is very soothing and interesting.

Ali: I want to dig a little bit deeper and it’s interesting where there’s a lot of if you read media, at least in the Western world, it feels like the narrative is that the cities are falling apart, like American cities are falling apart, crime, homelessness, etc. And while that’s true in pockets of cities, if you are in a city like New York, where I live, the narrative of like homelessness and crime, etc. is there.

But we live in neighborhoods and in neighborhoods, in many neighborhoods in many different ways. Things are so vibrant. If you are in New York City, minus the haze that’s been there for the last few days, and it looks like it’s much better today as we’re recording, it’s such a, I guess, dichotomous world today in New York City where there’s, I read a story this morning, the rents are the highest I’ve ever been, which I don’t know how they continue to to climb, but they continue to climb.

If you are in, for instance, Bryant Park, which is surrounded by all these office towers, those office towers are likely not empty, but they’re likely sort of semi empty. This is true. Commercial real estate continues to have a lot of vacancy across different cities. But on the street level today, New York is so vibrant. This is obviously the start of summer as well. So there’s that, too. The restaurants are full no matter what the prices are. Tourists are coming. Times Square is a zoo. As a New Yorker, I don’t, we try not to go through Times Square, but last couple of days to meet some folks or doing some things. You go to Times Square, it’s booming.

So this dichotomy between the street level activity in a city like New York City versus the commercial real estate and etc., I don’t know if you have any thoughts on that, but it’s just living here as a person versus I wonder how tourists look at this when they come to New York.

Nagy: Yeah, this is also just such a seductive time to be in New York City. Everything is back, especially, you know, in May, where the weather’s like, somewhat tolerable before it gets too hot. You can’t get a reservation even at like 5 p.m. or 9 p.m.. And I think you’re going to see. Number one, I think you’re going to see more companies doing this sort of RTO, RTO is a return to office.

I think that unfortunately I think some of the remote things, at least with the big tech companies, with JPMorgan, etc.. So that’s going to be kind of putting people back in offices. And then I think you’re going to start seeing to your early point some reuse, regenerative sort of things. It’s very hard to convert some of these things into residential, which residential is direly needed.

But this is like a huge existential question when it comes to not just cities like New York, but just any urban city in the world. And then to your rent point, I noticed that rents in Singapore are up higher than they’ve ever been, and they dwarf the rent increase from New York and Dubai, which is crazy to me.

So, you know, anyone that wrote off cities, particularly global hub cities during COVID was dead wrong.

Ali: One of the other things that I’m very excited about that we write in Skift a lot is the new and this will unlock sort of new ways of looking at travel and new ways of presenting travel to the travelers is just a new crop of travelers. That’s not the best phrase to use, but the new generation of travelers that are coming into the world.

We’ve been writing quite a bit about the rise of India as the big global force to come already emerging, but the big global force to come in the coming years, it will become the largest outbound force in travel, much like how Chinese tourists became a global force ten, 15 years ago, particularly when we’re just starting Skift in 2012.

That became a global force, that forced travel brands to think about what they present on all spectrum of travel brands from sort of the lower end of the market to the even to the luxury end of the market. And then what it would mean for a swath of Indian travelers around the world and how travel brands will have to adapt.

And so for me and, you know, long term from other parts of the world, whether it’s Africa or Latin America or other parts of the world that haven’t historically traveled over the world with as free movement as Westerners have been able to. So for me that unlocks another level of or at least hope is that it unlocks another level of creativity in the world.

Nagy: I couldn’t agree more. And what you saw for a long time is some travel markets were hugely overlooked, reliant on U.S. travelers. A lot of them were overly reliant on Chinese travelers. And I think it’s actually very exciting that there’s going to be these new segments that have different needs, that have different products that they want to interface with, different price points from the ultra luxury to the more the more entry level and building for this huge market is hugely interesting.

I also think the other thing I wanted to touch about quickly is as more and more places create remote visa programs that aren’t terrible and they’re actually fairly smooth, this is going to allow people, particularly people that need visas to travel. And for those of us that hold a U.S. or UK passport, we can move around fairly unencumbered.

But my friends that have Indian passports, my friends that have South African passports, it’s a little harder. And I love the notion of some of these remote visa programs where people can go and stay and work for a month, perhaps being untethered and do it completely above board and do it in a way that’s additive to a local economy.

So there’s seismic changes coming to outbound travel to, you know, the remote visas and the sort of nomad travel evolutions to the quote unquote digital nomad. And I think it’s going to set ourselves up for a lot of cross-pollination, a lot of interesting business opportunities, both for existing brands to calibrate their offering and also a wave of startups that are also leveraging a little bit of the AI plus these new cultural shifts and tensions.

So I think that it’s very exciting.

Ali: Yeah. So let’s wrap it up here because I think we’re leaving it in a, in a hopeful place, which is I think the whole idea of the Ideas podcast, which is the creativity as an underpinning for the hopefulness in the end and what comes out of what the creative promise of travel is.

And while again, the headlines and some of the political winds are towards more ultra nationalism, if you will, all around the world, the world continues to move in many different ways, unfortunately, some involuntary, but also a lot of voluntary movement, globalization is well and alive. I interviewed my friend Parag Khanna, who wrote this book, Move, who lives in Singapore and is very, very bullish on that part of the world as well.

His book move, which came out two years ago, was very much about what climate change will unleash in terms of places that will be livable and habitable and in the years and decades to come. And what countries who are labor stressed and this is true for a lot of western even eastern countries, China, Japan, etc., long term, what they would have to do to compete for talent and all of these has direct implications in the travel industry, which is why we’re so excited to cover all of this.

So thank you, Colin. This was a fascinating opening conversation. This gives you a sense of the threads that we’ll unpack or peel, whatever the analogy you want to use over the coming, coming weeks and coming episodes. We will have a guest along with us in the future episodes. But again, the idea is to do it twice a month or at least bi weekly, and we will immerse ourselves with discussions with travel visionaries, creatives and pioneers who are steering the travel and hospitality industries into the future.

We’ll try and, and go deep into these discussions with them and hopefully in many ways will elevate the conversation in the travel industry, which is what we want to do, Colin particularly the very sophisticated traveler. And I think you will see that come out in various ways as we as we talk to him and our guests sort of thing.

Okay. So that’s where we’ll end today. Much more to come on this exciting new chapter.

Nagy: Thank you so much.

Ali: Thank you, Colin. And a few things that I want to mention before we wrap up the episode is beyond this Skift Ideas podcast. Some of the things that we’re doing around not just the Ideas franchise, but also Skift as well. This is the tenth year for Skift Global Forum. The most prestigious, the most desirable, the most creative conference in the global travel industry that’s taking place in New York on September 26 to 28 with the theme of ‘Connection in the age of AI’.

And what that means is human to human connection and the increasing importance of this in an age of AI that is unfolding in front of our eyes, the human to machine connection and the machine to machine connection which I know many people are fearful of. We’ll have all of those discussions on stage with the big CEOs and the creative folks in the travel industry in New York City.

The tickets are selling really, really well. And there’s a good chance, even though we have a giant venue, that we will be jam packed and potentially sell out. So please go to live.skift.com to buy your tickets, reserve your place. 

Also, I want to mention the Skift Idea Awards, which is part of our Ideas franchise, which are the most coveted Achievement for Excellence in design, creativity and innovation.

The submissions are ongoing. They end on June 20th. A lot of people have entered from different parts of the travel industry. We will have a link to that to the Skift IDEA awards page from in the show notes as well. So please go and enter those and continue to tune into the Skift Ideas Content Hub, in which we continue to highlight different innovations in the travel industry coming out on a daily basis.

And so I think it’s a very rich archive of ideas and hopefully inspiration for you in the coming weeks and months and years. 

That’s it. Hope you enjoyed this and will join us in the next episode.