Why Travel Industry Needs Conversations Like Skift Global Forum More Than Ever
Skift Take
For more than a decade, Skift Global Forum has been the room where travel's most consequential decisions take shape. The 2026 edition arrives at a moment when the industry can least afford to form those decisions anywhere else.
Skift Global Forum has become the clearest barometer the industry has of itself, and the industry has a habit of doing what this room decides. When the first Forum convened in 2014, travel was still absorbing the upheaval that booking platforms, the smartphone, and Airbnb had set off, and 250 people gathered to ask where it was all heading. Twelve years on, that room has grown to nearly 1,000 of travel’s most senior leaders, and the questions on the table have only gotten harder.
The Stakes Have Changed
AI is rewriting distribution and booking software from the ground up. Loyalty structures that have held for over 20 years are under severe pressure. Post-pandemic demand has matured and fractured in ways the industry is still mapping. At Skift Global Forum, we will unpack the big questions facing travel today:
- When the customer never lands on your page, who owns the relationship?
- As costs rise, should operators seek growth first or rebuild their models?
- How do you plan ahead when geopolitics and disruption keep redrawing the map?
- What does it take to build consumer trust today?
- Who do you build for first as growth moves to new markets and younger travelers?
- Where does human service still matter, and where do you let it go?
- What frameworks help travel leaders focus on the decisions that matter most?
These are trends only until someone has to act on them. Then they become calls that leaders make this cycle, under what Skift Global Forum 2026 is framing as Travel’s Great Recalibration. That is why the 2026 Forum is being built to host those calls rather than only discuss them: a room that has stopped being a calendar of topics and started functioning as a system for working through the decisions behind them. The judgment gets formed out in the open, by the people with the seniority and experience to make it.
The People Who Actually Decide
The seniority of the room is the point:
- Ariane Gorin, CEO, Expedia
- Bret Taylor, Co-Founder, Sierra, and Chairman of the Board, OpenAI
- Christopher Nassetta, President and CEO, Hilton
- Corneel Koster, CEO, Virgin Atlantic
- Geoff Ballotti, President and CEO, Wyndham Hotels & Resorts
- Glenn Fogel, CEO and President, Booking Holdings
- Ho Ren Yung – Deputy CEO, Banyan Group
- Sébastien Bazin, Group Chairman & CEO, Accor
- and many more.
These are the operators making the calls, the founders building what comes next, and the investors backing both. They set the direction the rest of the industry follows. That kind of access holds up in person in a way a webinar or a recap can only summarize.
Why People Keep Coming Back
The returning-attendee rate has nearly tripled since 2022. Companies like Google, Expedia, and Accor send teams, not individuals, year after year. They come back because the decisions worked through here get worked through nowhere else. For three days, the people who set travel’s direction are in one place and reachable. The seniority in the room, the candor of the exchange, and the concentration of people with authority to act are what keep them returning, and what make missing it costly.
Need to make the case to your team?
Join Us at Skift Global Forum
This year’s Skift Global Forum runs September 22-24 at the North Javits Center in New York City.
