Stay22 at The Phocuswright Conference 2026: Leading Through Pressures, Power and Pivots

Stay22 is heading to the Phocuswright Conference in Fort Lauderdale, Florida ! 

From November 17 to 19, travel's senior leaders will gather at the Diplomat Beach Resort in Fort Lauderdale for The Phocuswright Conference. Stay22 will be there, represented by Andrew Lockhead, CEO and Co-Founder, and Malcolm Archer, Head of Supply.

This year's theme, Pressures. Power. Pivots., is a fitting frame for the conversations happening in leadership teams across the industry. How travellers discover, decide and book is shifting faster than most strategic plans can keep up with. For executives, the challenge is no longer spotting the change. It's deciding where to commit.

The pressures

The forces reshaping travel are converging at once:

• Discovery is fragmenting across creators, publishers, social platforms and AI assistants.
• AI is compressing the path from question to booking, and changing who owns the customer relationship.
• Acquisition costs keep rising while loyalty gets harder to earn.
• Trust has become one of the scarcest assets in the industry.

Where power is shifting

Influence over travel decisions increasingly sits with trusted voices: the creators and publishers who shape where travellers go, and more and more, where they book. For leadership teams, that raises questions that go well beyond marketing. How do you build lasting relationships with those voices? How do you measure their real contribution? And how do you stay visible as AI assistants become another first stop for travellers?

The pivots worth discussing

For many travel leaders, these pressures point to a few open questions:

• How does distribution strategy change when AI becomes a primary discovery layer?
• What does it take to treat the creator economy as core infrastructure rather than an experiment?
• What do aligned, long-term partnerships between suppliers and content look like?
• Where should companies invest now to stay relevant to the traveller of the next decade?
• How do organizations build the ability to pivot quickly without losing focus?

Let's continue the conversation

If you'll be at Phocuswright, Andrew and Malcolm would welcome the chance to exchange ideas: Andrew's email / Malcolm's email.

Pressures will keep coming. The leaders who turn them into pivots will define the next chapter of travel.