Travel venture capital has fundamentally changed. Funding that hit a decade low in 2023 has rebounded, but it's no longer the growth-at-all-costs era of the 2010s. Today's VC market is disciplined, bifurcated, and concentrated in fewer, larger bets on proven companies. At the same time, alternative funding structures (venture debt, corporate venture, strategic capital) are proliferating. Innovation in travel is increasingly coming from cross-industry partnerships (tech companies entering trav...
Sep 15
1 hr 2 min
Few sectors show the gap between technological promise and market reality like mobility. A decade ago, full self-driving felt imminent, rideshare was going to end car ownership, and EVs were about to go mainstream. Billions later, although we're still waiting, progress has been real. Autonomous vehicles are moving from proof of concept to limited commercial deployment. Peer-to-peer rental, subscriptions, and fleet operators evolving into full-spectrum platforms are reshaping how people access...
Sep 1
59 min
The hospitality industry has no shortage of voices — brands, operators, technology vendors, consultants — all with strong opinions about where hotels are headed. But one voice has historically been underrepresented in this conversation: the owner. Hotel owners — from institutional investors to independent ownership groups — are the ones writing the checks. They absorb the capital risk, negotiate the management agreements, and ultimately decide which bets to make on technology, renovation, bra...
Aug 25
1 hr 12 min
Wellness has been one of the fastest-growing categories in travel for the better part of a decade. What started as a forgotten gym, a yoga mat, and a "heart-friendly" room service menu has evolved into a $6.8 trillion global industry — and for a growing share of travelers, wellness isn't an amenity anymore. It's the entire reason for the trip. This episode traces that arc from spa to ecosystem, unpacking how wellness went from a niche, prescriptive fix-what's-broken offering to a mainstream m...
Aug 18
1 hr
Loyalty programs have always been travel’s most powerful retention tool — but the game is changing faster than most brands can keep up with. The credit card co-brand has long been the engine that funds loyalty ecosystems, but a new generation of challengers is rewriting the rules of what loyalty actually means and who gets to play. Bilt Rewards turned the humble rent payment into a travel currency. Suppliers have continually devalued their own loyalty currencies to the point of irrelevance. C...
Aug 11
1 hr 3 min
If you want to understand where travel tech is going, follow the money. And right now, the money is doing some very interesting things. Venture capital investment in travel has been in a complicated place since the post-COVID boom ran out of steam. Rising interest rates reshaped return expectations, a string of high-profile late-stage corrections reset valuations, and many LPs grew cautious about the capital intensity of marketplace and infrastructure businesses. But underneath that macro tur...
Aug 5
1 hr 1 min
For more than two decades, travel’s marketing funnel has been anchored by a familiar set of certainties: Google at the top, OTAs in the middle, and brand.com at the bottom. The entire industry was built around this architecture — SEO strategies, meta-search plays, display retargeting, and paid search campaigns all tuned to move consumers from inspiration to booking. That architecture is now being dismantled in real time, or is it? Generative AI search engines, from Perplexity to ChatGPT to Go...
Aug 5
50 min
Sustainability in travel hasn’t disappeared, it’s just gone quiet. After a decade of bold net-zero commitments, ESG branding, and high-profile climate pledges, the conversation in the U.S. has cooled. Political pressure and cultural backlash have pushed sustainability out of the spotlight, leaving many to assume momentum has stalled. But beneath the surface, the opposite may be true. Major airlines are still investing in SAF. Hotels continue to fund energy efficiency and retrofit progra...
Jul 21
48 min
Destination management organizations occupy a strange place in the travel ecosystem. They exist to promote places — countries, cities, regions — to travelers around the world. But they rarely control the product, they almost never touch the transaction, and their ROI has always been notoriously difficult to measure. Which raises a question that’s hard to avoid right now: do DMOs still matter? The short answer is yes, but not in the way they used to. The traditional DMO playbook — trade show p...
Jul 14
57 min
Travel is one of the largest industries in the world, yet its economic significance is chronically underappreciated — by consumers, by policymakers, and even by the markets that price it. In the United States alone, domestic travel accounts for the vast majority of the industry’s GDP contribution — yet public discourse and government measurement almost exclusively focus on inbound international tourism. Meanwhile, the World Travel & Tourism Council estimates that travel and tourism repres...
Jul 7
51 min
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