Rafat Ali travel tips

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.

A great talk by Michael Swiatek, the chief strategy and planning officer at Avianca, who happens to be legally blind.

Due to an increase in demand in the short-term rental sector, Skift is back with our Skift Short-Term Rental Summit on June 7 in New York City. Building upon Skift’s comprehensive coverage of short-term rentals, this summit will focus on the forefront of the impact of technology, platforms, and professionalization on both the urban and traditional vacation rental category.

India is projected to surpass China as the world’s most populous country later this year, as China begins to decline and India’s population growth shows no sign of slowing until 2064. That shift carries huge implications for travel across the globe, and has the potential to rewire the race for attracting global tourists around the world. Skift addressed this in its Megatrends 2023 package in the story India Becoming the New China in the Reordering of Asia Travel.

A smart new campaign launched by Hilton, highlighting its connected rooms feature, for travelers looking for larger spaces when booking family or group travel. First in this “Connecting Room Concerts” series, a performance from Brandi Carlile, six-time Grammy-Awards winner – and nominated seven times for tonight’s 2023 Grammys Awards – from a pair of connected rooms at The Beverly Hilton.

The Microsoft-owned also-ran search engine Bing has relaunched around conversational chatbot technology powered by ChatGPT, the new sensation owned by OpenAI. In an event today, the CEOs of Microsoft and OpenAI gave a demo of the new Bing, and it will be open to all in coming days. The refreshed Bing provides a chatbox with annotated AI answers — powered by ChatGPT– to the right side of traditional search results. 

Ever since the launch of ChatGPT in late November, Skift has been on top of what this new generation of generative AI could bring to various parts of travel.

Anko van der Werff has a thing for airline bankruptcies. Either they follow him or he follows them. All of the three previous airlines he has worked for and led, Aeromexico as CCO, and as CEOs of Avianca and now SAS have gone through their rites of passage after he joined or after he left. And he relishes his role as tthye sharp but genial turnaround artist.

Skift, Inc., the most influential media company in global travel, and ShortTermRentalz, a division of the International Hospitality Media portfolio that provides the news and intelligence for the short term rental industry, are announcing a content and media partnership to share fresh ideas and insights at their respective events.

Adam Harris, the CEO of hotel management software company Cloudbeds, has a great no-nonsense grasp of the macro – and micro – environment in the startup fundraising world, a fact that I learned in a few back and forth LinkedIn messages and subsequent calls between us gossiping about the travel tech startups that were raising money or got sold for pennies on the dollar in the last few months.

I am back with another short video on my thoughts on AI+Travel, fourth in the series over last few months. Part 1, part 2 and part 3 are here.

It started with a Linkedin post.

I have known Brian Harniman, the head of strategy at digital transformation agency From since the early days of Skift — he was amongst the first online travel veterans to latch onto the potential of what we were building. Harniman is a serial entrepreneur with over 25 years experience leading innovation in travel companies. He was on the founding team of Priceline.com and held executive positions at Kayak, Hickory Global Partners, Open List, Where I’ve Been, and more. He and I have talked about travel startups informally on and off for years.

On September 26-28, we will be hosting our TENTH annual Skift Global Forum – a.k.a. the top travel industry conference – and we can hardly believe it. It’s crazy and exciting to see how far we have come and how many talented and insightful travel industry leaders we have welcomed onto our stage.

Skift Research believes that generative Artificial Intelligence represents a $28 billion-plus opportunity for the travel industry. It stands to change the way that we search for travel, how companies provide customer service, and could drive operational efficiencies across the industry.

Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky was very open with me in the interview I did with him earlier this week, where he tantalizingly hinted at how Airbnb will change in the next year, much of it predicated on AI.

Airbnb is at the cusp of the revolution happening in artificial intelligence, not only because its roots are in the Silicon Valley tech ecosystem, but also since there is a close connection between CEO and Co-founder Brian Chesky and OpenAI Founder and CEO Sam Altman.