Greg Oates

The biggest challenge for Airbnb is the idea that staying with a stranger is strange. So Airbnb is shining a brighter spotlight on its community of hosts worldwide to inject the brand perception with a more familial enthusiasm.

Airbnb is evolving into a global movement that transcends travel because it's crafting a universal ideology that promotes positive human values wherever it does business.

Just as Starwood itself identified earlier this year, some of the hotels in the Sheraton portfolio don't meet brand standards and some of them may end up losing their flags under Marriott's leadership.

Airbnb is evolving as a social network as much as a room sharing platform with services like its new Community Center page, which hosts and guests used right after the Paris attacks.

It's too early to tell how the Marriott/Starwood merger will impact individual brands, but it does give the new company stronger leverage in terms of online bookings and loyalty rewards.

Airbnb launched the "Business Travel Ready" program to help hosts better develop the guest experience for executive travelers.

Moxy Hotels' irreverent new YouTube series is not just designed for 30-year-old women with boyfriend and fashion issues, probably. This lastest offering from Marriott's Content Studio, which is a bit edgy in parts, shows just how much the brand has evolved in the last few years.

Tourism Montreal is sharing great meetings-specific digital content, which is inspiring other destinations like Palm Springs to do the same. In the hospitality sector, Hilton Hotels is the leader of meetings content with its Connect+ platform.

The city of the future is an international, interdisciplinary knowledge sharing machine.

We've been saying for years that content is how you engage Millennials, and that applies to meeting planners and attendees as well. Visit Greater Palm Springs especially focuses on attendees to compel them to advocate on behalf of the destination.