Skift announced this week a new event for travel commerce leaders. Skift Commerce Summit takes place on 11 November 2026 at Apella by Alexandria in New York, as a single session running from afternoon into evening. The programme sits in the afternoon and evening, so it fits around a working day rather than replacing one.
The date falls the day before Skift Aviation Forum. An airline executive in New York for the Forum can add the Summit without a second trip, and hotel or OTA executives can treat it as a standalone half day.
Skift has built the agenda around four themes: who owns the customer when AI mediates booking, building direct capability now, payments infrastructure, and innovation beyond NDC. Those four topics cover most of what a commercial head at a hotel group, airline or OTA is weighing right now. Here is why you should not miss this chance.
1. Skift Commerce Summit puts AI-mediated booking at the centre
The lead theme is customer ownership when AI mediates booking. If an AI assistant picks the hotel or the fare and completes the purchase, the brand holding the guest relationship may not be the one the traveller ever sees. Hotel groups that have spent years lowering their dependence on OTAs now have to ask whether an AI layer rebuilds it. Hotels, airlines and OTAs each have a different answer, and the programme is designed to put those answers side by side in one room. For a commercial head, that is the question that decides how distribution budgets get split.
2. The direct versus OTA cost gap is on the table
According to Skift, Accor and H World count a direct booking as costing roughly 4% to 5% of revenue, while an OTA commission takes 10% to 15%. The gap is at least five percentage points of revenue on each booking that shifts channel, and it is the figure behind most channel strategy debates at large hotel groups and airlines. The second theme, building direct capability now, is that argument turned into a plan. For an airline, the same arithmetic applies to every fare sold through an intermediary rather than its own site.
3. The audience is buyers, owners and investors
The audience is executives from airlines, hotels, hotel owners, OTAs, cruise lines, mobility providers and tour operators, along with their investors. Owners and investors sitting beside operators means the people who fund a direct-booking build share the room with the people who run it. The vendor tier, covering GDS and payments companies, is capped separately, which keeps suppliers from outnumbering travel companies.
4. Speakers come from hotels, mobility and consumer travel
The confirmed speakers so far are Tyler Morse, Chairman and CEO of MCR Hotels; Doria Holbrook, President of Oro Mobility at Hertz; and Adam Schwab, Co-founder and CEO of Luxury Escapes. A hotel owner-operator, a mobility business and a travel company all face the same question about who holds the customer. Three sectors on one afternoon gives a broader read than a single-sector conference would.
5. The agenda reaches payments and NDC
Two of the four themes concern infrastructure. Payments infrastructure shapes how a direct sale is taken, and innovation beyond NDC points to what airlines do once that distribution standard is in place. A direct strategy that ignores either is incomplete, and the same day also covers the AI question sitting above both.
Key takeaway
Skift Commerce Summit suits commercial heads at hotels, airlines and OTAs, and the owners and investors behind them. Block the afternoon and evening of 11 November, and if Skift Aviation Forum is already in the diary, arrive a day early. Bring your own direct cost and your own OTA cost, and test both against the 4% to 5% and 10% to 15% Skift cites.
