Travel

What will one of travel’s most exclusive brands look like with a private-equity owner? The change for Soneva, which has three resorts in the Maldives, takes shape Monday with a rebrand: “Barefoot Luxury” becomes “Bare Luxury,” anchored by a new operational mantra, “Just What Matters,” and a new logo.   Soneva opened its first resort in

United CEO Scott Kirby is still interested in merging with American, saying that he has heard interest in the tie-up from unions and customers. “We would need the unions, we need the customers, the shareholders, the regulators, and the management team,” Kirby said to reporters at the IATA AGM in Rio de Janeiro on Sunday.

Online travel agency Ixigo said Friday it plans to acquire a 54.66% majority stake in hotel booking platform Brevistay Hospitality for INR 657 million ($17.4 million). Once the deal goes through, Brevistay will become a subsidiary of Ixigo. Brevistay was founded in 2016 and offers short-stay and overnight hotel bookings through a network that includes

The CEO of Air New Zealand has pushed back on suggestions that the airline’s headline-grabbing premium products are difficult to justify at a time of mounting losses and cost cuts. “These projects for us, they’re not vanity projects, they’re existential,” Nikhil Ravishankar told Skift on the sidelines of the IATA Annual General Meeting in Rio

Skift Take: We heard from more than two dozen of travel's most important tech leaders — the people actually deploying AI solutions every day. Here's what the industry still needs to get right. Read the Complete Story On Skift View original source here

The U.S. leisure and hospitality sector ramped up hiring in May — the biggest jump among all industry groups — as businesses gear up for a World Cup tourism boost, even as booking data suggests international demand may fall short of initial forecasts. The sector added 70,000 jobs from the prior month, according to the

India’s largest carrier IndiGo announced on Thursday that it is temporarily stopping flights to Langkawi, Krabi, Ho Chi Minh City, Hong Kong, Shanghai from July 1 and to Siem Reap from July 3. All six routes are expected to remain shut until September 30. The airline said the move is meant to match flying capacity

Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky may have a new side gig: He’s in the early stages of funding an AI lab — though he doesn’t intend to be its CEO, a source close to Airbnb told Skift. Bloomberg first reported news of the venture, saying Chesky envisions developing AI models, and is considering a focus on

SKIFT DATA + AI SUMMIT 2026 THE ARGUMENT In AI search, a hotel either appears or it doesn’t. Slavin cited research showing only 6% of hotels surface in AI results, making visibility a commercial problem, not just a marketing one. He also said the AI-search consumer is not a monolith. Budget travelers price-compare, while luxury

Code-writing used to be an engineering bottleneck, but now that AI can write it in minutes, the new challenge is cross-team collaboration. “Now the bottleneck becomes humans reviewing the code and making sure it’s there,” said Vipul Hingne, Interim Chief Technology Officer at Booking.com. “Then the next step in the process is deploying the code

Priceline has rebuilt its AI travel assistant, Penny, so a traveler can compare destinations and move toward booking inside one conversation, rather than clicking across separate searches, filters, and tabs.  It is the most substantial overhaul of Penny in two years. “Our conviction from the start was that the real advantage in AI travel would

Francis Davidson built Sonder into one of the most ambitious but ultimately cautionary tales about hospitality startups. Now he’s back with another venture that couldn’t be more different from Sonder: There are no long-term apartment leases and hardly any physical footprint. The company is called Odessia — meant to conjure a “Greek goddess of travel” —

Vietnam is riding one of the strongest tourism surges in Southeast Asia right now, and it just found a new partner to help keep it going. On Monday, Vietnam and the Philippines signed a Tourism Cooperation Program for 2026–2029 in Manila, during Vietnamese President Tô Lâm’s state visit. Both governments are committing to joint marketing

The race to build the best travel AI model has had two years to play out. The winners haven’t been determined by which model is most sophisticated. Vipul Hingne, Booking.com’s Interim Chief Technology Officer, is bringing a different competitive frame to Skift Data + AI Summit 2026. The Competitive Variable Is Trust Vipul’s argument is

The travel industry puts AI in every investor deck and every conference keynote these days, and has for three years now, so it’s worth knowing what happened when 64 potential buyers were asked to put actual capital behind AmexGBT, the world’s largest corporate travel company: 46 of them said no, most citing AI disruption as

Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, told an investor conference this week that competitive moats in banking are largely fleeting — technology creates only a temporary edge.  The argument was that corporate culture and the passion to innovate and invest in the future matter more than code. And if you’re not building the next

A new paper from EHL Hospitality Business School and an incoming INSEAD PhD candidate makes a confident argument: luxury retail should adopt the hospitality mindset, and the data now proves it pays. The best concierge and the best sales associate, the authors write, are doing exactly the same job. They are not selling a room

This sponsored content was created in collaboration with a Skift partner. Hotel owners are under pressure from multiple directions at once. Costs are rising, returns are thinning, and the US commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBS) delinquency rate for limited-service hotels has more than doubled since 2022, pointing to growing financial strain across parts of the market.