Introducing Ask Skift, the AI Chatbot for Your Travel Questions

India is having a moment. And Skift has been there documenting it for the last few years as it is ready to shape the future of the global travel industry. The India outbound traveler is poised to become the biggest global force in coming years, and the Indian domestic market is one every major global brand is now clamoring to be part of.

As Skift enters its 12th year of operation, our global ambitions on how we cover the travel industry in all its facets have also scaled. 

Our largest Skift Global Forum to date is officially one month away and we can hardly believe it. Here is what you can look forward to this year:

The short booking travel booking windows that became the predominant mode of booking in the pandemic — for obvious reasons with lots of uncertainty around Covid & travel plan — are holding strong and in fact increasing in the 0-21 days window, according to the latest quarterly data from Expedia Media Solutions.

For the past decade, tens of thousands of travel leaders from over 70+ countries around the world have joined Skift in New York City to discover what comes next for the world’s most impactful industry at Skift Global Forum. This year will be no different – except, of course, bigger and better than ever before.

It took 28 years, and when it came this Friday evening before Christmas holidays, it slipped under the cover of a historic “bomb cyclone” weather catastrophe playing out over the continental United States.

CEO Christopher Nassetta said Hilton expects to organically develop its own new brands rather than chase costly acquisitions in part because “we don’t want to have to fix other people’s problems.”

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.

Last year, Skift debuted its Future of Lodging Forum in New York City – focused on what Skift has called The Great Merging of how we live, work, and travel. This year, we are bringing this event and a wide cross-section of hospitality leaders together in London on March 29th, 2023.

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.

The annual Global Risks Report, from the World Economic Forum, is here as Davos starts, and this summary chart below of top 10 short-term and long-term risks is fascinating, almost all of them have direct implications in travel, for many of these the travel industry is, in some part, one of the underlying causes of these risks. Read or download the full report here.