Skift Data + AI Summit wrapped up.
If you weren’t there, here is what mattered. Ten key takeaways from the front lines.
We are talking AI strategy. Agents. Search. The messy, difficult work of actually scaling intelligence in travel instead of just slapping a chatbot on the homepage and calling it innovation. It requires real infrastructure, not buzzwords.
Norway Has a Branding Problem It Can’t Score Past
Erling Haaland is magic on the pitch.
Mania is real. Does it boost tourism? Hardly. The fans he might inspire are the exact demographic Norway’s prices are designed to filter out. It’s a self-imposing exile. The country charges a premium that screams “stay away” to the average visitor, regardless of their favorite footballer’s last name.
What good is a goal if nobody can afford the trip to see the scenery?
Hopper Payed the Price for Lies
This shouldn’t be surprising.
Expedia dropped Hopper in 2023. Seventeen months of silence on a partnership, terminated for deceptive practices that undermined the integrity of booking data.
Now the FTC is in on the verdict. A $35 million fine. The government reached largely the same conclusion as the big player Expedia already made: the tactics were fraudulent. It is another blow to reputation that won’t rebuild quickly.
“Trust, once broken in tech, is expensive to repair.”
Booking Tries to Look Bigger
Booking Holdings is forming a new B2B unit.
Agoda’s CEO oversees it. Smart move. Booking has an uphill climb if they want to rival Expedia’s scale in business-to-business channels, but consolidation helps. It makes them a formidable competitor rather than a fragmented collection of brands hoping to stumble into dominance.
They need volume. This might get them there. Or it might just be another restructuring memo nobody reads until it’s too late.
