Rafat Ali travel tips

The boom of conversational AI is making so many new possibilities dreamt of for decades finally possible. The technology today is 100 percent there, what matters is whether, or when, large companies will adopt it for product development.

All summer, I was thinking through a few long-term themes that I am obsessed with due to their impact on the future of travel. Books, podcasts, a wide range of media sources – this was the hyper-absorption phase of my learning.

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:

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:

Good morning from Skift. It’s Friday, November 11. Here’s what you need to know about the business of travel today.

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 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.

The first tremors of economic slowdown are beginning to be felt in the travel industry: even though Disney Parks had a record quarter, the overall parent company had a disappointing quarter in its other businesses and is now planning a hiring freeze, job cuts and other expense cuts. As part of that, CNBC reports that in a memo sent by Disney CEO Bob Chapek today, the company is cutting back on business travel as well as travel for events and internal meetings.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Skift founder Rafat Ali interviewed Hilton CEO Christopher Nassetta via hologram Wednesday at Skift Global Forum East in Dubai. 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.”

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.”

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.

As the 2022 FIFA World Cup draws to a close, Qatar plans to capitalize on the global event’s publicity, visitation numbers and supporting infrastructure as a an opportunity to put the country on the map as a competitive tourist destination moving forward. 

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.