The future of travel is being discussed as if it’s a destination, according to Mark Antipof, chief growth officer (CGO) of HBX Group.
But the reality is that “the future of travel … it's not coming, it's here,” Antipof said onstage at the company’s MarketHub Americas event in Punta Cana on Wednesday.
Antipof was prepping the crowd for a lineup of stakeholders from across the industry who shared their takes on travel’s future and what matters most as technology advances.
Presenters focused on trust, artificial intelligence (AI), the human touch in travel, AI as an accelerator and the need to prioritize diversity in travel’s next chapter.
Here’s a snapshot of the highlights from each presenter’s time on stage.
Mark Antipof, CGO, HBX Group
While the conversation around the future often centers on technology, Antipof said really the future is about choice—and, more importantly in travel, trust.
“If you cannot trust as a consumer what you are bringing, or your supply, or the journey or whatever it is, that broken trust is very hard to recover,” Antipof said.
Technology is not the great differentiator. Companies have access to many of the same tools, he said, but the future depends on trust.
“Who earns trust next will be [a] very interesting conversation,” Antipof said.
And trust isn’t only important to the human side of the industry equation. Companies will need humans and agents to trust their agentic AI.
Zeina Gedeon, COO of Trevello
Zeina Gedeon, COO of Trevello, which empowers travel advisors, talked about AI as not a competitor to industry professionals but as an “amplifier.”
“The future belongs to AI-powered humans,” she said.
AI cannot change the “feeling” that is required for travel to happen.
“It can answer questions, it can tell you where to go, what to do, but it can … never give you the feeling of, I want that specific beach from my honeymoon—or the family that saves years to go somewhere to take their kid to this special place,” Gedeon said. “People travel to connect, to celebrate—there's so many reasons they do it.”
AI cannot further humanize travel, she said.
The future will not be about finding information, as AI can do, but offering confidence as consumers make decisions, she said.
The newest commodity is not access, but trust, she said.
“Trust becomes the luxury,” Gedeon said. “Trust becomes the product, the advisor that understands the traveler, the company that knows how to remove the uncertainty from a booking process.”
Matthew Martinez, CEO of GrupBlox
Matthew Martinez, co-founder and CEO of GrupBlox, which offers streamlined hotel block contracting, said the industry needs to get comfortable with being uncomfortable with regard to AI’s rapid evolution.
But he rejected the idea that AI is going to take jobs away from humans.
People don’t start working in travel to “put in data in the spreadsheets and negotiate rates and terms.”
The aim is really to foster relationships and to create exceptional experiences for consumers. He thinks AI can supercharge that.
“At the end of the day, what AI is going to do is it's going to take all of that remedial work,” he said. “It's going to free up your time, it's going to give you back your time, and once you have that time, there's only one thing that you can focus on, and that's hospitality.”
Oriol Pamies, founder of Queer Destinations
Oriol Pamies, founder of Queer Destinations, which is partnering with HBX Group, started his presentation with data points.
“I want to start with numbers, because numbers talk, money talks, and I think this is one of the most important things to start a conversation,” he said. “We're talking about the future of travel. Did you know that 10% of the population self-identifies as LGBTQ+? And if you talk about the future … Gen Z, already 23% self-identifies as LGBTQ+.”
The travel industry has to capture that market, he said, noting the community’s acquisition power is $4.7 trillion globally.
“This would make us the biggest economy in the world if we were a country,” he said, later adding that “the main goal of what we are doing is unifying the queer economic power.”
Queer Destinations has created what Pamies called a “closed-loop ecosystem,” directing its economic power to governments, destinations and companies that support the LGBTQ+ community.
“It's tapping into one of the biggest and fastest-growing economies in the world, and in this case, it's not only the right thing to do, but it's also the smart thing to do business-wise,” Pamies said.
He concluded: “If you are interested to be part of the future of travel, the future of travel has to be with diversity.”
*This reporter's attendance at the event was supported by HBX Group.