Weekly Digest: 5 threads for Skift Global Forum 2026, WiT Singapore

Daksh Sharma — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 03:58:31 +0000

Skift Global Forum 2026 opens in New York City on Tuesday 22 September and runs to 24 September, on a stage that drew 5,983 attendees from 5,391 companies across 92 countries in 2025, 62% of them at director level or above. WiT Singapore follows at Marina Bay Sands from 30 September to 2 October. The previews Skift published this week already name the argument both rooms will have: the money in travel has moved from booking to servicing.

Here are the five threads of the week, one number each, and the names to book meetings with before the rooms fill.

Photo: Skift, via the official press page

1. Spotnana puts a number on servicing: 50%

Spotnana CEO Steve Singh told Skift this week that AI automation can cut servicing costs by 50% or more, and that Spotnana’s AI already handles cancelled flight segments, unticketed flights and refunds. “Servicing. We talk endlessly about search, distribution, and booking. What really matters is what happens after the trip is purchased,” Singh said. Why it matters: for a travel management company or an OTA, servicing is the cost line that grows with every booking, and 50% is the first hard figure a vendor has put on it in public ahead of the forum.

2. Singh’s 95% test for curation

Singh set a second number in the same interview. Curation, on his definition, means presenting the options a traveller would have chosen 95% of the time out of the full available list. Why it matters: that is a testable bar for any agent or search product an operator is being sold, and a question to put to every vendor on the floor in New York and again in Singapore.

3. IHG rebuilds its hotel content for machines

IHG Chief Commercial and Marketing Officer Heather Balsley told Skift that IHG is launching a new content platform later in 2026 and restructuring its hotel content to be machine-readable, so that AI tools surface its properties. She argued that the models will not own the guest relationship. “AI tools can only be as helpful as the content they’re drawing from, so content has become increasingly important,” Balsley said. Why it matters: a global chain treating content as distribution infrastructure sets the bar for every hotel group in Asia Pacific whose room and rate data is not yet readable by an AI agent.

4. WiT Singapore 2026, 30 September to 2 October

WiT Singapore 2026 runs from 30 September to 2 October at Marina Bay Sands Expo and Convention Centre, six days after New York closes. Why it matters: an operator can hear the same argument twice in eight days, once from the US side and once from Asia Pacific’s hotel groups, OTAs and airlines, and the gap between the two answers is the brief for the fourth quarter.

5. PATA and ATTIA sign an MoU in Bangkok

PATA and ATTIA signed a memorandum of understanding in Bangkok on 15 September to run policy dialogue and to support each other’s conferences and webinars across Asia Pacific. Why it matters: two associations pooling their conference calendars means one more organiser-side channel for travel-tech speakers in the region, and one more table where policy on the technology gets argued before it reaches a ministry.

Who to watch

Two names to book before the rooms fill. Steve Singh of Spotnana, on the 50% servicing figure and the 95% curation bar, and on which servicing tasks the AI handles without a human today. Heather Balsley of IHG, on the content platform due later in 2026 and what machine-readable hotel content looks like in practice for a property in Tokyo or Taipei. In Singapore, the WiT programme team, whose three days at Marina Bay Sands are the Asia Pacific reading of the same agenda.

Key takeaway

Fly to New York if the servicing cost line is on the fourth-quarter plan, and put Singh’s two numbers, 50% and 95%, to every vendor on the floor. Fly to Singapore if the business runs on Asia Pacific supply, because the same argument will be made again at Marina Bay Sands with the region’s hotels, OTAs and airlines in the room. If only one trip is possible from Asia, we would take Singapore and read the Skift sessions from the desk.

The post Weekly Digest: 5 threads for Skift Global Forum 2026, WiT Singapore appeared first on TravHQ.

Wyndham’s 5-step AI playbook: own agents in ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini

Daksh Sharma — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 12:48:35 +0000

Wyndham Hotels and Resorts has placed its own agents inside ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, supplying the three assistants with real-time rates, inventory, guaranteed room types and personalised loyalty perks, Skift reported on Thursday. The report previews the company’s session at Skift Global Forum in New York next week and sets out Wyndham’s wider AI strategy for search and distribution.

The move reverses the usual order. Most hotel groups wait for the models to find them, live with whatever the model has scraped, and hope the recommendation comes out right. Wyndham is feeding the models directly, so a traveller who asks an assistant for a room gets the group’s own rate and its own loyalty benefit rather than a third-party summary. Hotels, OTAs and the loyalty teams inside both are the ones this hits first. The approach amounts to a hotel AI distribution strategy that breaks into five decisions, each one small enough for a hotel group or OTA of any size to copy.

Photo by Mikhail Nilov on Pexels

1. Put the agent where the traveller already is

Wyndham’s first step was a native app inside ChatGPT, launched on 6 May 2026. Users explore its hotels on a map, with amenity filters and hotel cards, without leaving the chat, then complete the booking on WyndhamHotels.com, the company said in its launch announcement. The agents now inside Claude and Gemini extend the same conversational AI hotel booking model. The assistant does the discovery and Wyndham keeps the transaction.

2. Point AI at the AI

The second step is the one most groups skip. Wyndham uses AI to monitor how travellers phrase long-form searches inside the assistants, then adjusts the data it supplies in response. After seeing searches for beach hotels with “dedicated beaches with umbrella coverage”, it added that detail to its feeds. The feed is treated as a living product, rewritten around the questions people actually ask, not a one-off export from the property system.

3. Give the agents something to sell

An agent with nothing to upsell is a brochure. More than 5,000 hotels are live on Wyndham Connect, which generated over USD 11 million in upsells in 2025. The Wyndham AI Concierge converts 35 per cent of calls into bookings. Franchisee retention stands at 96 per cent, which matters because every feed and every perk the agents offer depends on owners staying in the system.

4. Fund it over years, not quarters

None of this came from a single budget line. Wyndham has invested more than USD 450 million in technology since 2018. AI has cut its average call centre handle times by 7 per cent. The company says top-performing hotels averaged more than USD 60,000 in incremental revenue, with the highest above USD 200,000. Those are property-level numbers, which is how a franchisor persuades owners to keep paying for the platform year after year.

5. Partner rather than build everything

“Conversational AI is reshaping how travelers discover and book,” said Scott Strickland, chief commercial officer at Wyndham Hotels and Resorts, in the ChatGPT app announcement. The partners Wyndham names are the model companies themselves, OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, alongside Oracle, Amazon, Adobe, Salesforce, Canary and Aven Hospitality. The group’s own work sits in the feeds, the loyalty rules and the booking path. The models and the middleware are bought in.

Who to watch

Geoff Ballotti, president and CEO of Wyndham Hotels and Resorts, is a confirmed speaker at Skift Global Forum 2026 at the North Javits Center in New York on 22 to 24 September. His session is the place to hear Wyndham’s AI strategy laid out by the company itself, with the numbers behind the Claude and Gemini agents. Organisers planning an AI distribution panel for hotel owners have a ready-made case study in this one, and a franchise-heavy operator is the version of that story most owners in Japan, India and Singapore can act on.

Key takeaway

We read this as the first published AI distribution playbook that works below the luxury tier, and the cost of copying it is mostly discipline rather than money. Any hotel group or OTA with a loyalty programme and a live rate feed should test steps one and two this quarter: expose a rate feed to at least one assistant and start reading the long-form queries that come back. Groups without a direct booking path to hand the assistant to can wait, because an agent that passes the transaction to someone else is just a new commission line.

The post Wyndham’s 5-step AI playbook: own agents in ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini appeared first on TravHQ.

TravHQ » Skift Global Forum

Weekly Digest: 5 threads for Skift Global Forum 2026, WiT Singapore

1. Spotnana puts a number on servicing: 50%

2. Singh’s 95% test for curation

3. IHG rebuilds its hotel content for machines

4. WiT Singapore 2026, 30 September to 2 October

5. PATA and ATTIA sign an MoU in Bangkok

Who to watch

Key takeaway

Wyndham’s 5-step AI playbook: own agents in ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini

1. Put the agent where the traveller already is

2. Point AI at the AI

3. Give the agents something to sell

4. Fund it over years, not quarters

5. Partner rather than build everything

Who to watch

Key takeaway