Show Notes
The vacation rental industry has transformed from a scrappy alternative to hotels into a global powerhouse—but is the model starting to strain under its own weight? In this episode, we explore how the ecosystem is evolving, and where fault lines are beginning to show. Can tech keep pace with rising guest expectations? Will hosts, managers, and platforms ever find equilibrium in their tug-of-war over economics, control, and trust? And what happens when regulators and communities push back agai...
More from Travel Tech Insider
Travel venture capital has fundamentally changed. Funding that hit a decade low in 2023 has rebounded, but it's no longer the growth-at-all-costs era of the 2010s. Today's VC market is disciplined, bifurcated, and concentrated in fewer, larger bets on proven companies. At the same time, alternative funding structures (venture debt, corporate venture, strategic capital) are proliferating. Innovation in travel is increasingly coming from cross-industry partnerships (tech companies entering trav...
Few sectors show the gap between technological promise and market reality like mobility. A decade ago, full self-driving felt imminent, rideshare was going to end car ownership, and EVs were about to go mainstream. Billions later, although we're still waiting, progress has been real. Autonomous vehicles are moving from proof of concept to limited commercial deployment. Peer-to-peer rental, subscriptions, and fleet operators evolving into full-spectrum platforms are reshaping how people access...
The hospitality industry has no shortage of voices — brands, operators, technology vendors, consultants — all with strong opinions about where hotels are headed. But one voice has historically been underrepresented in this conversation: the owner. Hotel owners — from institutional investors to independent ownership groups — are the ones writing the checks. They absorb the capital risk, negotiate the management agreements, and ultimately decide which bets to make on technology, renovation, bra...
Wellness has been one of the fastest-growing categories in travel for the better part of a decade. What started as a forgotten gym, a yoga mat, and a "heart-friendly" room service menu has evolved into a $6.8 trillion global industry — and for a growing share of travelers, wellness isn't an amenity anymore. It's the entire reason for the trip. This episode traces that arc from spa to ecosystem, unpacking how wellness went from a niche, prescriptive fix-what's-broken offering to a mainstream m...
Loyalty programs have always been travel’s most powerful retention tool — but the game is changing faster than most brands can keep up with. The credit card co-brand has long been the engine that funds loyalty ecosystems, but a new generation of challengers is rewriting the rules of what loyalty actually means and who gets to play. Bilt Rewards turned the humble rent payment into a travel currency. Suppliers have continually devalued their own loyalty currencies to the point of irrelevance. C...