Here's one of the clearest conversations you'll hear on why Africa is not a single hotel market, but 54 radically different ones.

W Hospitality's Trevor Ward breaks down the realities behind the continent's booming hotel pipeline, and why local capital, not foreign money, is driving most development. Infrastructure, aviation, politics, and risk perception shape hospitality growth in an environment where optimism and operational reality coexist (and collide).

Trevor is an expert on hotel development, investment appraisals, and operator selection who understands the systems behind the systems behind the systems. Hospitality in those 54 markets is transforming in an unexpected, and impossibly fast, way.

Experiential tourism around sports and music has gone stratospheric. BTS just announced they're back together and going on a world tour, and flights and hotels across 34 cities sold out almost immediately.

Kickstarted by Taylor and Beyoncé, music tourism could go to $9 billion globally by 2030—a 50% jump from 2023. Sports could crack a trillion dollars within a few years, especially with FIFA World Cup games this summer and the 2028 Olympics. Why now, is this a matter of right time, right tech enabling all this?

And speaking of tech, GEO and AI visibility are on travel's mind in a dramatically different way compared to even 3 months ago. AI search no longer shows ten links, it recommends a handful of brands. If your travel brand isn’t one of them, it effectively doesn’t exist.

In this era of brand survival, a new customer’s first interaction with your brand is likely to be through an AI summary. If that summary is impersonal, you will be impossible to find against competitors with more emotionally resonant content. But what's hype and what's the real thing? We have guesses.

About 71% of active U.S. travelers say they are more likely to travel internationally than they were two years ago. The U.S. has lost half its market share, 10% of global inbound travel to 5%, since 1995. What is happening exactly? We'll give you a couple of guesses...

Also, how does war and regional instability affect travel routes of the major carriers? And when gas prices for airlines go up because of all these wars, who ends up paying? Again, you'll get a few guesses...

But it's not all doom + gloom, we open with how "grocery store tourism" is apparently a thing now? And $22 smoothies aside, that's a good thing.