What we heard at Travel + Leisure’s World’s Best Summit
Last month, BIRD touched down in New York for Travel + Leisure’s World’s Best Summit: two days of conversations with some of the most interesting names in travel, hospitality and media.
Across conversations spanning hotels, wellness, social media, technology and AI, the same themes kept bubbling to the surface. Travellers want to feel part of something. They want trips that tap into their interests, introduce them to people and places they wouldn’t otherwise encounter, and increasingly, leave them feeling different from when they arrived.
Here are four ideas we came back to London thinking about:
Feeling part of something
Community was arguably the word of the summit.
As Jacqui Gifford, Editor-in-Chief of Travel + Leisure, put it: “If there’s life, there’s travel”. While luxury travel has traditionally been built around privacy, escape and exclusivity, there’s a growing appetite for something more social.
That doesn’t mean forced communal dinners or a token “local experience”. David Prior, founder of PRIOR, argued that hotels need to truly “plug into the world around them”. Travellers increasingly want meaningful access to local culture, encounters with people who share their interests and spaces that naturally bring people together.
PeopleInc. and Expedia CEO, Barry Diller described the appeal of “monoculture moments”: rare shared cultural experiences that give us a sense of collective memory and belonging. This could be a major sporting event, a festival, a concert or even a restaurant everyone suddenly wants a table at.
For hotels, there’s an opportunity to think beyond being somewhere people simply stay. The most interesting properties are increasingly becoming connectors and conveners: introducing guests to a destination, its people and, sometimes, each other.
Beyond biohacking
Wellness isn’t going anywhere, but its definition is changing. After years of optimisation, longevity protocols, tracking and biohacking, there was a noticeable shift in the conversation towards something altogether softer.
Travel is increasingly being used as a way to reset, reflect or navigate a moment of change. Nature, in particular, came up time and again. Dr Sohaib Imtiaz, Chief Medical Officer at PeopleInc, spoke about how novel experiences can encourage connection and neuroplasticity in the brain, suggesting that simply going somewhere new can play a role in shifting perspective and building resilience. That might mean spending time in the wilderness, taking part in conservation work or simply having enough space to switch off.
It’s less about returning home with better “stats” and more about returning home genuinely feeling better.
Niche is becoming the mainstream
One of the most interesting themes from the summit was the rise of passion-led and micro-interest travel, with travellers building entire trips around highly specific hobbies, interests and communities: birdwatching, crafting, trail running. Astronomy, photography and spiritual retreats.
For brands, that opens up much more interesting territory than the traditional “wellness”, “food” or “adventure” buckets. Expert-led trips, hosted journeys, retreats and unexpected partnerships can bring together people who already share a genuine interest. The opportunity isn’t necessarily to appeal to everyone; it’s to mean something to the right people.
Human taste matters in the age of AI
Unsurprisingly, AI was everywhere. Sarah Moore, Head of Capital One Travel, shared that around 60% of travellers now begin their travel planning using LLMs, while 50% of consumers use TikTok before Google for search.
Discovery is becoming far more conversational. Instead of searching “best hotels in Italy”, travellers can ask for a tiny hotel in Sicily with brilliant food, access to good swimming and somewhere nearby to buy vintage ceramics, and expect a useful answer.
For travel brands, this makes distinctive storytelling increasingly important. If every hotel describes itself using the same handful of adjectives, why should either a traveller or an AI platform understand what makes it different?
A more interesting conversation was around what AI can’t do. Barry Diller made the point that data can tell us what has happened, but not necessarily what will happen. Taste, instinct, emotional intelligence and cultural understanding remain fundamentally human. Photographer Frederic Lagrange offered perhaps our favourite piece of advice from the two days, which was to “do the non-obvious”.
