Disney Cutting Business Travel and Meetings-Related Travel After Belt Tightening

The World Travel Awards, often dubbed as the “Oscars of the Travel Industry,” are gearing up to celebrate another year of excellence in global travel and hospitality. On August 26th, 2023, the picturesque island of St. Lucia will host this prestigious event, bringing together leaders and innovators from across the travel sector to honor the very best in the industry.

No, you weren’t just imagining your social media timelines full of all your friends posting from Istanbul and Turkey this summer. It happened to be true.

Oyo, in preparation for its upcoming IPO in 2023, is doing a major reorg of its organizational structure and cost base. It has announced it is letting go of 600 employees out of a total of about 3700, mostly in its product and tech teams. From the company:

Tahiti, part of the French Polynesia and its 120 sister islands is proposing to limit the number of tourists it takes to about one tourist per inhabitant, according to a new sustainability focused “slow-tourism” five year plan, reports Radio New Zealand.

The Walt Disney Company on Sunday announced that Bob Iger is returning to lead Disney as CEO, effective immediately. Iger succeeds Bob Chapek, who, the company said, has stepped down from his position.

Ten years ago this week, on November 9, 2012, the Priceline Group (today’s Booking Holdings) announced a deal to acquire Kayak, the Connecticut-based metasearch engine, which had been a public company for less than four months.

Josh D’Amaro, Disney Parks, Experiences and Products Chairman, could become the next CEO of The Walt Disney Company.

Something shifted this weekend, the zeitgeist on the real possibilities of artificial intelligence (AI) became excitingly, palpably and perhaps scarily real these past few days, with the launch of the first large-scale, general purpose chatbot using OpenAI‘s GPT3 AI engine.

Something shifted in the last two weeks on the zeitgeist about the use of artificial intelligence in our daily personal and professional lives.

Hertz has been a remarkable turnaround story of the pandemic, during which it went into a massive bankruptcy, came out of it under an investor group led by Knighthead Capital and Certares, and then went public a year ago.

Dubai will play an outsized role in the United Arab Emirates aim to attract 40 million visitors annually by 2031, so what can it do to improve its tourism industry? Four panelists — Dubai Airports CEO Paul Griffiths, Kerzner International CEO Philippe Zuber, Emirates Airline Chief Commercial Officer Adnan Kazim, and Dubai Corporation for Tourism and Commerce Marketing CEO Issam Kazim — discussed at the recent Skift Global Forum East in Dubai what local tourism officials need to do to continue to attract visitors.

It gets harder and harder with each year to put a label on the kinds of travel that Skifters love the most. We hired a bunch of new people last year and, as you will see, that has meant we are dreaming much bigger.