Rafat Ali

The war gave Saudi tourism the clarity it could not give itself: the durable market is domestic and regional, the leadership is Saudi, and the reset is real.

The largest purpose-driven travel flow on earth passes through the most commercially aspirational spaces on earth, and the dissonance is jarring if you stop long enough to watch who is actually walking past the glittering Hermes store...

The brands lining up to buy a piece of Freddy are going to fail; it shows how little America's pull depends on marketing, and how much it depends on the country getting out of its own way.

The smartest read of Chesky’s AI lab is that he learned the exact lesson of Meta’s metaverse: if you’re going to make a bet the market will punish, don’t make it where the market can see it.

Each Gulf hub airport converts sovereign wealth into a different theory of national relevance. Saudi Arabia is about to test whether aviation can convert something heavier — national ambition itself — into a destination economy.

One person connects the Amex GBT take-private, Airbnb’s board, a $10.75 billion travel loyalty startup, and Berkshire Hathaway’s governance committee.

Cendant existed for under nine years and left behind the financial architecture that almost all of modern travel still runs on.

Travel is the only major industry getting hit from both directions at once: AI search volumes are exploding without converting while total AI token bills internally are rising.

Travel companies have built a banking-like float system around consumer prepayments, without banking-like protections, and the scale is now too large to ignore.

With most potential buyers citing AI disruption risk and walking away, Long Lake's $6.3 billion acquisition of AmexGBT is the most contrarian bet in travel right now.