We Asked, You Told Us: What’s Coming in Season 8 of our Travel Trends Podcast
🞉 2026 has already been a landmark year for our Travel Trends Podcast.
Our weekly listenership has grown to five times what it was in 2025, introducing our show to more travel industry listeners around the world than ever before. We are incredibly grateful for that growth, but we also wanted to make sure our next season was shaped by more than numbers.
We wanted it to be shaped by you.
At the end of Season 7, we asked our listeners what they valued most, what they wanted more of, which topics we had been missing and how we could make the show even more useful.
The results were clear and they have directly influenced what we are building for Season 8.
Launching September 9, 2026, our Season 8 will feature our first monthly Travel Trends Report, the widest range of topics we have ever explored, more high-profile guests, more behind-the-scenes content and new opportunities for our listeners to be part of the show.
Here is what you can expect.
OUR FIRST
MONTHLY
TRAVEL TRENDS
REPORT
One of the strongest messages from our survey was that listeners want more timely news, data and analysis to help them understand what is actually changing across the travel industry.
We heard you.
The first episode of every month will now feature our new Travel Trends Monthly Report, sponsored by our friends at Sherpa.
Each report will identify and explain the signals we believe the industry should be paying attention to. We will look beyond the biggest headlines to examine the data, trends, technologies, consumer behaviours and business developments that are affecting the industry.
Every report will also be available as a downloadable resource, giving our listeners a practical monthly overview they can read, share with their teams and refer back to.
Our goal is simple: to help you separate the signals that matter from all the noise.
🟐 Our Widest Range of Topics Yet
Travel technology and AI remain important to our audience (and hence our Summit V3 Oct 28-29), but your feedback also made it clear that you want us to explore a much wider cross-section of the industry.
🞧 Season 8 will introduce dedicated conversations covering:
Expedition Cruising
Wellness Travel
Culinary and food tourism
Accessible Travel
Indigenous and Purpose Driven Travel
Emerging Destinations
Travelling with Pets (a fun Christmas edition)
Our three-part Marketing Strategy series, sponsored by Propellic, will explore how travel brands are earning attention and bookings in a rapidly changing discovery landscape. Topics will include agentic AI, brand marketing, performance marketing and what happens as paid search begins to lose some of its traditional influence.
Our Destination Management Companies series, sponsored by TourConnect, will examine how DMCs are evolving into technology-enabled growth partners and who owns the customer relationship as tour operators, OTAs and DMCs increasingly compete for the same traveller.
Together with our new standalone topics, this will make Season 8 our most varied season yet.
🟐 Bigger Guests & More Behind-the-Scenes Stories
Our listeners continue to value one-to-one conversations with industry leaders more than any other format.
You told us you want to hear from influential executives, entrepreneurs and travel personalities who can provide a genuine inside look at their companies, careers and ideas. You also asked for more founder stories, practical examples from successful independent businesses and candid conversations about leadership, culture and what it takes to build a travel company.
We will be bringing all of that into Season 8.
You can expect more high-profile guests, but profile alone will never be enough. We will continue looking for people with valuable lessons, honest perspectives and a clear view of where the industry is going next.
We are also expanding Travel Trends on Tour, taking listeners behind the scenes at major travel conferences around the world. These reports will capture the people, ideas and conversations shaping the industry while they are happening.
🟐 Making Season 8 a Two-Way Conversation
Season 8 will not only be about the people we interview. It will also be about the people listening.
We want to turn the podcast into a more active two-way conversation by featuring listener questions throughout the season, sharing stories from our community and recognizing some of the people who consistently listen, comment, share and contribute.
Our listeners have helped turn our Travel Trends Podcast into a global community, and we want you to have a genuine voice in where the show goes next.
If you have a question for an upcoming guest, a trend you think deserves more attention or a travel industry story worth sharing, we want to hear it.
🟐 A Community That Recommends and Takes Action
The survey results reinforced just how engaged this community has become.
Our fully completed survey responses produced a strong Net Promoter Score of +50, along with an average recommendation rating of 8.8 out of 10.
We were also encouraged to learn that 48% of respondents who answered our sponsor-engagement question had taken action after hearing about one of our partners. That included visiting a sponsor’s website, following the company on social media, researching its services, requesting a demo or becoming a customer or partner.
That matters to us because we work hard to feature companies that are relevant to our listeners and actively contributing to the future of travel. It also demonstrates the value of thoughtful, well-aligned partnerships that introduce useful solutions without taking away from the listener experience.
CONGRATULATIONS
TO OUR
SURVEY WINNERS
Thank you to everyone who took the time to share ideas, recommendations and honest feedback. Your contributions have already made Season 8 better.
We are delighted to announce that Rodrigo from Impulse Travel is our grand-prize winner and will receive a $500 Airbnb gift certificate.
Rodrigo provided thoughtful feedback on leadership and organizational culture, potential guests and the challenge of keeping up with a busy weekly release schedule. His point about choosing episodes based on their potential value was an important reminder to make every topic, title and summary as useful as possible.
We have also selected five respondents whose thoughtful contributions helped shape our plans.
Each will receive a Travel Trends prize pack:
Stacie Chan
Jason Elkins
Christian Hoeffel
Steve Farelly
K. Hulbert
Congratulations to all six winners. Our team will be in touch directly with details about your prizes.
▶ Thank You to Our Season 8 Partners
None of this would be possible without the incredible organizations supporting our work.
A huge thank you to our Season 8 title sponsors:
Quark Expeditions
Intrepid Travel
Kaptio
Repayd
Holafly
Propellic
We are also grateful to our theme sponsors:
Sherpa, sponsor of our Monthly Travel Trends Report
Propellic, sponsor of our Marketing Strategy series
TourConnect, sponsor of our Distribution and Destination Management Companies series
Your support enables us to bring together the conversations, insights and connections that keep our travel industry moving forward.
Most importantly, thank you to everyone who listens, watches, subscribes, shares our content and tells us what we should explore next.
Season 8 has been created around what you told us you wanted, and we cannot wait to share it with you. ၊၊||၊-✈
Travel Trends Podcast Season 8 launches September 9th, with new episodes every Wednesday through January 27, 2027.