The Skift State of Travel 2026 Is Out. Here's What Stood Out.

0:24Good morning. Happy Monday.

0:27Michael Goldin: that's right best day of the week fall is not quite here temperature wise but you can smell it it's coming soon so we're uh we're excited down here will it into existence michael will it into existence i think this week will be the hottest week of the year so gotta keep that positive attitude on these monday mornings

0:50Brandreth Canaley: yes exactly um well are you guys so you're still surviving you survived the weekend you're surviving the end of summer heat, anything crazy happen?

0:59Michael Goldin: Yeah, had a great weekend, popped up to Atlanta, saw my dad, my grandma, some of my cousins, some of my old friends, and trotting the two boys around. They had a good time just meeting a bunch of new people and running crazy with some of my high school friends and my cousins that they haven't seen. So a lot of fun. That was awesome. We went up to the mountains, tried to escape the heat. And I think we did pretty successful. We spent a lot of time in a few creeks, waterfalls, the kids just like in me playing in the nice, cool mountain water. So good times. I fell down a waterfall that wasn't fun uh got a nice told you so for my wife so that's always fun we talking like two feet or like 10 oh no just like and it's one of those waterfalls that you slide down so like was at the top sort of was gonna walk over to the middle uh and then slipped fell down and then slid down the area that you're not supposed to slide down and didn't die.

2:18Michael Goldin: So no broken bones, no broken bones. Yeah. All right. Good fun. Yeah. Brandy still still up in the woods.

2:26Brandreth Canaley: I am. Yeah. This will be my last podcast from up here for a little while. I had a big group of friends and there were 15 of us total. So we were just having some mountain adventures. We cooked so much good food, made really nice cocktails. It was great. Really good time. A little tired. And I'm finally ready to go back to Boston. I'm going home tomorrow. So it's been like five weeks. So it'll be my cat's pretty pumped till we go home. Yeah. Well, we have a pretty special episode for everyone today because we have a special guest. Seth Borco, Skiff's head of research, is joining us today. So welcome to the show, Seth.

3:16Hello, everyone. Hello. Hello. How are you doing?

3:19Michael Goldin: We're bringing you on because one of the best reports of the year came out last week, Skiff's state of travel and you are a key designer of said travel. So appreciate joining us today. Are you going to roast me live? Is that what this is about? Roast me to my face about the state of travel or no? We're going to give you a lot of tough questions. Make you squirm and see how you handle it.

3:47Brandreth Canaley: I'm here to keep the peace, Seth, so don't worry. I love, I love, I'm loving all the good morning hospitality lore that I didn't, didn't fully know. Where, where in the mountains are you, Brandy? I'm in the Adirondacks right now. Yeah. I have a place up here and I've been kind of like doing a lot of work travel and using this as my home base for the last like month. So. I'm also a Northeasterner. So I'm excited that we have some, some representation. the rest of the crew is a little more not as northeast exactly well we have so many fun things to talk about today but before we do that I want to give a shout out to our sponsors at StayFi StayFi helps short term rental operators build direct guest relationships through branded wifi portals, email marketing and guest data tools that turn one time bookers into repeat guests so start growing your direct booking revenue today at stayfi.com slash good morning hospitality So we have lots of stats to go over today.

4:51Brandreth Canaley: And the first one I think we're pulling up is mine. So and I had to choose something with AI and we made it basically five minutes before AI came up. So, Will, if you could show our AI stats. So this one I really liked because I think it visually showed me where we're headed. So you can see that the old state of the world is 10 links. You're getting results in Google. You have like a thousand tabs open. And then the transition phase is three to five results. And then the final stage is just going to be one to three properties. And we've talked about this a lot before because, you know, we were talking about how travel and search is going to change so dramatically.

5:39Brandreth Canaley: But I think seeing the one to three properties really hit for me that you are if you are not really conscious and active about where you're choosing, you're just going to get served maybe one option. And we are having this debate on here a lot about whether operators can compete with the OTAs and the LLMs. But even looking at that, even different properties on very powerful OTAs are going to get, I think, kind of left in the dust unless you really figure out the magic sauce to be one of those one to three options that gets recommended. So, Seth, I'd love to hear your take on that. Yeah, I agree.

6:20I agree. I mean, I think that this is like one of the big overarching themes of the whole report and of the whole year and of the whole everything is like, what is AI going to mean for me? You know, me being the operator, like what is it or whoever the listener, what is it going to mean for the industry? And this is one of, you know, it's interesting. Sometimes like you can see the vision and you don't quite know where it's going to go from here and what's clear to us and what we see showing up throughout. our research is very much like AI rewards curation. AI is about synthesis. AI is about, you know, it doesn't very much narrow the field.

7:06People go to AI to avoid having 100 ,000 tabs open at a time. I know many people who work that way. I know very few who enjoy it. People enjoy the travel booking process, but the tabs thing gives them anxiety. and then when you accidentally close the tabs and you lose all of your work all in one go. But those tabs is all, each of those tabs is a different set of considerations, right? And increasingly, we are seeing people go to AI and say, what's the best family-friendly resort? Where should I go? And actually, I think it's interesting. Not only are you seeing fewer properties, those properties will be probably in competition against not just their local properties, but against global properties, right?

7:46People are increasingly going to AI and being like, I want a mountain getaway. And the AI might be like, hey, Blue Ridge is great, and so are the Adirondacks. Which one do you want? Which one has different vibes? And these two STR markets or these two hotel markets, which in the past might have been totally disconnected, are increasingly going to be connected. And I think that's, I mean, it's a major shift. And how exactly that will play out, it's sort of like we know the direction, we just don't know the exact route it's going to take to get there. But I think we can see already the direction we're heading in towards people rely on AI to synthesize, to curate, to cut, to trim, and to personalize.

8:25Brandreth Canaley: Yeah. It's like looking at my tabs right now, I'm like, I am a person that I have like 50 tabs open right now. Do you enjoy that though?

8:37Michael Goldin: Does that give you anxiety?

8:38Brandreth Canaley: It does give me anxiety. Well, and then it's also, I'm like, where are things in this? And I'm actually, I have some travel things on these tabs too. So, Seth, maybe before we dig into the next stat that Brandy's teed up, could you just start with an overview of what this report was, who was surveyed, maybe some of your high-level findings, sections that you find most interesting? What was this report? What was the goal of the report? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, so we can maybe pull the cover back up. It's called the State of Travel 2026. We do it every single year. This is now the fifth year that we've been doing it.

9:20And, you know, I lead our SCIF research team. We're a team of about seven analysts who are doing research into trends, life cycles, the future of travel across all verticals, short-term rentals, hotels, online travel, destinations, airlines, you name it. And this is, I don't like to use like a$10 word, but I call this our omnibus report. It's our little bit of everything report. It's also, by the way, really our only free report of the year. Normally, Skiff Research is only available for its paid subscribers. And what this really is, is it's a little bit of everything. We throw all the ingredients in a pot.

9:56We make a great stew. We give it away for free. And it's your chance to kind of understand and learn a little bit of what Skiff Research does. So what we do is we are trying to understand, I mean, it's in the title, what the state of play for the travel industry is this year. And we do that by pulling on and taking charts and data and insights and quotes from all of our best research reports that we do throughout the year, as well as the best research reports that we read from third parties and others, AirDNA and others, right? And we try and bring them all together into this one chart book. It's about 160 slides.

10:31And we actually tried to trim it from past years. It got all the way up to 300. I think that was just unwieldy. It's about 160 slides. Each slide is a different chart or idea or data point. So you said, who do we survey? It's not one specific survey, although it does pull on our annual list of different surveys. So there are thousands of people surveyed throughout this report, but there's also other stuff in there. And yeah, it's like a big work of love that we do every year. In past years, we would go to every single sector and say, here's your STR section, here's your hotel section, here's your airline section.

11:08We do a little bit of that this year, but we did really try and revise it this year to really be focused on what we're calling frameworks. We're trying to do a lot more frameworks at SCIFT and SCIFT Research as part of this new intelligence ideas that we've got. And the framework we have this year is like, we're calling it the travel stack. You know, you've got like a hotel, like a tech stack where you build, you stack multiple pieces of software, one on top of the other. And that's what we're trying to do this year. So what we're doing is working on these ideas of the stack has four layers to it.

11:48There's a consumer layer, which is where you start. It's the equivalent of like a front-end web developer. There's the commerce layer, which is the transaction layer. There's the operations level, which is where the rubber reads the road. And there's the experience layer, which is like, in a sense, like the back end of the web development is like operations and experience. experience is like the destination itself, what people are actually coming to do. The operations is the operator level on top of that, the commerce layer of your payments, and then the actual consumer layer of behaviors, ideas, preferences, that sort of thing.

12:21Awesome. So I feel like that gives a great, good framework. So like the rest of this, we're like going to go through and we all picked our favorite ones that they sort of generated the best insight and maybe seth you you can tell us why we're wrong or why we're right on finding these uh really interesting uh yeah there's no right or wrong and i like the grab bag approach this is sort of the uh what is it the jc penny of our travel research it's supposed to be a bit of a treasure hunt that's the jc penny thing you're supposed to be different how about where the nordstrom or i don't know i use it as as confirmation bias like we can all find something that confirms their own biases in this report.

13:03All right. Well, we're not trying to install this report. It's a fun one. It's a grab bag one. It's supposed to be a treasure hunt. It's supposed to be really well designed. And you're supposed to find little tidbits here and there. And if you really like the tidbits, you're supposed to subscribe and pay some money to get the deeper data. But that's okay. That's the funnel.

13:18Michael Goldin: Like, comment, and subscribe. Like, comment, and subscribe. That's right. And Brandy, I think that you've got a great one to start with, by the way. The AI one is one of our favorites. and we have a lot on AI here. Clearly, it's like the, like I was saying, the topic of the year.

13:32Brandreth Canaley: Yeah, and I figured of the decade, I know. And sometimes I feel like, are we kind of like beating this down a little bit, like this topic on the show over and over, but then we're going through the report and you see some of the data that you've pulled out. It is just, I mean, I think year over year, we're going to just see, you know, the impact change tremendously. So, well, my second stat is not AI focused. going on to the experiences side of things. So Will, if we could pull up. Yes, perfect. Thank you. Okay. So we've talked on here about the live tourism boom. I mean, the Taylor Swift Airs tour, we had the World Cup and this is like, you know, people want connection.

14:13Brandreth Canaley: And so seeing this, you know, big boom and for specific events is, I think it's really, I don't know, I think it's motivating. I think it feels happy that people are trying to get off their screens with our ever shrinking attention spans and actually get out there and connect with people. So I thought and kind of had a point to slide of that culinary culinary experiences are one of the most popular activities at over 70 percent. People are saying this is what we want to do on vacation. And I think food brings people together and people are willing to go out and find these experiences and maybe even make it a point of the trip?

14:53Yeah.

14:55Michael Goldin: I think this goes hand in hand with the AI, because I think the more that people lean into AI, the more people are going to crave the human connection, whether it's through food, through events or through concerts. So I think that is going to be a continued trend. I've already heard more and more people talk about like IRL and getting together in real life. We're going to have to as humans. It's in our nature. And the more we lean into AI, the more it's going to push us that way too. I saw an interesting stat. I can't source it for you. I think I just saw it mindlessly scrolling Twitter or X, which is really unhealthy for me, but I'll admit that I do it.

15:46So I can't properly source this. So I don't know, but there was a stat that was talking about social and time from in person. And it was basically saying how like there is increasingly, we talk about a K-shaped economy, sometimes in the actual money economy where the rich kind of get richer and the have-nots struggle. And it was something like K-shaped economy in social outgoingness. And that since the pandemic, people who are already social have continued to be social and have recovered their socialness. and people who were introverts have gone from being mild introverts to being extreme introverts.

16:20And so there's a lot of interesting stuff happening there too in this whole connection, food experiences. There's a lot of interesting stuff happening here. I think increasingly, we're going to see that enough. Yeah.

16:34Brandreth Canaley: Well, and Michael brought this up a couple of weeks ago, but one of the skills that is so important now is the ability to talk to people, to network, to forge these connections. And Michael did a great job putting on this retreat a couple of weeks ago. And I think that really showcased that need also for connection. And there is no LLM or any software that can replace like actually being in person and talking to each other and getting, I don't know, that level of, I don't know, you know, in intimacy and getting to know people, you can't, you can't replace that. And I also just kind of personally love that everybody is traveling for food.

17:11Brandreth Canaley: I'm a big, big food person. Amen. Amen. I mean, I think, you know, it's become the food thing. I almost think the wellness people will be upset with me because I'm not using the term right. But I almost think it's almost increasingly becoming like a wellness thing where people need to be in person, connect, have these food experiences, all these things. It's like not wellness as a product, but wellness as a concept of like in this AI world, in this post-COVID where I'd like to go and have meals and try these interesting things. Big deal. Yeah, absolutely.

17:44Michael Goldin: That's an interesting perspective on the wellness side because you associate wellness with yoga retreats or spas or things like that. But actually, human connection is equally as important and powerful.

17:58Brandreth Canaley: Yeah, definitely. Well, before we jump into Michael's stat, I wanted to give a shout out to our sponsors at Built. They're helping restaurants and hotel F &B teams better understand their guests and create more personalized experiences to drive repeat visits. So if you care about loyalty and guest experience, it's worth checking out. Head to joinbuilt.com slash GMH or you can find that link in the show notes. All right, Michael, over to you. I'm a Build Card member. I'm a Build Card member. Are you? Yeah. Okay. Again, you get the dine-in bonus when they have all their local restaurants. So we get Okay, we have a real IRL user.

18:37So IRL, IRL, but remote. IRL user talking to you remotely about payments for food. Sorry, Michael, go ahead.

18:46Michael Goldin: All good. So for me growing up, when I traveled with my family and my dad, he was a Marriott guy. There was no getting out of Marriotts. If we were going to Rome, we were staying in a Marriott. If we were going to the mountains, we were going to find a Marriott. But those days are over. And a lot of that was points driven and loyalty driven for him with his travels for work so much. But brand alone is no longer enough, according to Skiff's research. Travelers trust AI recommendations more than they trust brand signals. And 56, is it 55 % of folks prefer a better reviewed hotel regardless of the brand.

19:34Michael Goldin: And I think this for me could distill challenges for brands in the AI digital world because that loyalty is gone. there's a slide earlier that talks about credit card rewards and how now that's actually the biggest influencer not the actual brand and the brand points and the membership points so i still i think the brands have done a really good job of adding enough properties that people can find what they want within their umbrella but according to this research it's still not enough Seth? Yeah, I would maybe inject some nuance into that piece of research. This was a bit of a hypothetical that we asked travelers.

20:24Let's pull the slide back up if we can. And we said, right, if an AI-powered travel assistant could only recommend two options to you, which would you trust the most? The best-reviewed hotel, regardless of brand, a globally well-known brand, but a smaller brand that's known for one thing, like a specialist brand, or a hotel that is a part of my loyalty program, regardless of other factors. In other words, we're sort of trying to think forward. Again, we were talking to Brandy about this. Like, we know the direction that AI is going in. We know people are asking for directions. We don't know the specifics that the path to get there is going to take.

20:58And so we're thinking through. We're trying to prompt people to think through. When AI gives you recommendations, what is most important? And would you override your loyalty preference if an AI made a really great recommendation for you? And the results that we're getting back are pretty clearly that AI has the ability to override loyalty. That's not to say it will immediately. That's not to say that Bonvoy is dead. Far from it, in fact. That's not to say that large hotel brands actually won't be the beneficiaries of AI and have in that footprint. But it is to say it's sort of meant to be, and we did some deeper research, Sports are meant like a warning shot across the bow to brands under the assumption that loyalty lock-in will keep your customers in that points ecosystem forever.

21:44That all you need to do is just invest in supply and product, that you continue to add product. You go across the globe. You get these people in through the business travel door. You give them points, and then they're in. That's the old model. It works well. I'm not saying it's going to stop working. But I am saying that there are warning signs that some of these AI tools and recommendation tools and algorithms and search processes could start to pry people outside of those loyalty systems in a way that they weren't before. And that the loyalty moat is not as deep as it once was. I still think there's a moat there, but I think this is more like a, like I said, I keep repeating myself, but a shot across the bow that that moat may not be as deep as it once was.

22:29Brandreth Canaley: Yeah, I think that another interesting component with brand and loyalty also comes back there's in the report information on credit card. And I think that if I way the way I can see this kind of, I don't know, manifesting is you connect your credit card loyalty points to Claude or whatever. And then that's, you know, going to find you when people do all like the point maxing and figuring out the best deals to get. But it's like, okay, I just want to stay at a nice hotel in the city where I'm traveling, use my points in the most effective way possible. And then that's where the loyalty lies, like to your credit card and to the best possible deal that Claude can find you that day.

23:07Brandreth Canaley: And so I do think that you're right that this is a bit of a warning for Marriott's, the Hilton's, where if your product isn't on chase or whatever, or if it's not, the points might start to shift away from your specific hotel brand and more to credit cards. Yeah. And that research that you were referencing earlier, Michael, I think we asked about what do people find most rewarding? And they found credit card programs very rewarding. And I think that speaks to the flexibility of the credit card programs, because increasingly these credit card programs, you're not locked into hotels, just hotels or just flights.

23:42Although, in fairness to the Bonvois of the world, they are adding in more and more stuff. You can increasingly book hotels through airlines and experiences through hotels and yada yada. So they're building flexibility. But also the loyalty plans, the credit card plans now, and this isn't even promo for Bilt. But increasingly, the credit card plans, like the Bilt's of the world and the Chase's of the world, you can do restaurants too. Bilt tries to do this whole SoulCycle thing. I'm not a SoulCycler, so I don't understand how it works, but they do do a whole SoulCycle thing. I don't know the details of it yet.

24:16Yeah. I don't think I'm joining the cult, but there is stuff like that in that they're building these credit card plants. And so, yeah, you're in this world where the points flexibility is moving towards credit cards. The personalization is moving towards AI and the price search tools are moving towards AI. So where does that leave the OTAs and the hotels? I don't know. So my question here for you is like, all that seems like context for the AI, right? This like notion that it's like choosing between a good reviewed hotel and a bad reviewed hotel. Like, I mean, you go into any market and there's hundreds of hotels, right?

24:55And there's going to be lots of really good ones. And so now it's like, what is the additional stuff that it's going to feed into context. It's like, oh, I'm a Bonvoy member. I'm a built credit card member. I've got these many points across these many things. And it's going to help me optimize for my travel, given all those things. So I kind of disagree with this premise of good versus bad or points versus no points, because it's all going to feed into the decision-making process, isn't it? yeah but i think what you're saying is agreeing with what i'm saying jamie i think you're just you're saying you're disagreeing but you're actually what your words you're saying are agreeing because i i think the in many ways the goal of a first party supplier branded loyalty program doesn't have to be a hotel it can be an airline can be anything is to keep you inside of a walled garden, right?

25:56And it's a beautiful garden, but it's a walled garden. That's the idea. Keep you inside our ecosystem. Delta, we'll get out. We won't talk about our hotel. I know it's good more hospitality, but we'll talk about an airline just because I can talk about an airline and not up 71. Delta does not run a loyalty program out of the goodness of its heart. They run a loyalty program to keep you on Delta planes. And if they have to give you a couple of perks outside of there to make sure that you keep flying Delta planes, they'll do it, right? And so the same principle applies to all these folks. And so I think anything that causes these people, these customers who have been...

26:30There are customers... I'm going to use Delta again. There are customers who just are obsessed with Delta. They've been loyalty members forever. And they would never even consider another brand. But actually, let's get you from point... There's plenty of flights out of Atlanta, Michael. I hate to break it to you. There's a lot of airlines that fly you to Atlanta. but there's no bad reviews of Delta that are causing me not to fly Delta but my point is well all I'm saying is that the fact if you just get even a couple people who just love their loyalty and won't look outside their loyalty to all of a sudden shop once or twice outside their loyalty program it can break that spell and that's the risk is what I'm saying I'm saying you two are under a Delta Airlines spell and maybe you won't Maybe you insist that it's Delta forever, but United flies into Atlanta and they fly just as well.

27:22They don't fly as many places, but you get what I'm saying. Forget airlines for now. We're talking about hotels and short-term rentals. You get the point, which is that if an AI tool is able to make someone non-loyalty curious because there are so many great hotels and so many highly reviewed hotels, I don't know. That's just all I'm saying. That's all I'm saying. Cool.

27:48Brandreth Canaley: All right. Well, I'm sorry. Go ahead, Jamie. Yeah. And maybe I'll share one of mine and I'll, I'll pick my, my favorite one. Um, um, and maybe we'll have time to talk about the second one too. So I loved, um, set the framework that you guys use, like consumer commerce operation experiences. So I, and the, the one, and I picked one consumer, one commerce. My commerce one, how do they book is my first one. And I thought this was a really great question and sort of framework of looking at the difference between vacation rentals, hotels, and airlines. And why I picked it was this sort of, because I feel like it identified the sort of gaps and opportunities within the vacation rental sector.

28:35So for vacation rental, like it was clear, like I'm where they are. I'm not doing as well as maybe the, yeah, here it is, uh, airlines and hotels, user-friendly website and apps, loyalty programs, and preferred payment options. They're all sort of underserved, uh, versus the others. So those sort of make sense to me and maybe highlight. I'm clearly loyalty programs and vacation rentals are not, don't really have any form of lock-in. I'm Vrbo launched theirs and booking has theirs, but there's not much really there. And then where vacation rentals are, the OTAs are really winning and it's wide range of options.

29:25It's flexible booking options. So being able to book variety variety of different things and then recommendation from friends and family so maybe vr does have the best uh nps score out there of people are really recommending uh that type of option so that was mine yeah that was great thank you thank you there's so much more to say beyond that i think you've read that chart right and that it's like there's a lot of nuances to all these different products and where they win and where they don't. And to your point about loyalty, I think vacation rental struggles, I understand why, struggles with loyalty, whereas other sectors have it.

30:08And I think that's also like, I mean, we're talking, I think there's a large STR crowd here, but like, it's a slog. And could you imagine if hotels had to fight that slog? And what we're sort of saying is that maybe they will have to fight that slog once more. That was that debate we were having, Jamie. I don't know if you still agree with me or not. I don't know if I've convinced you, but that's okay. I can be wrong. There's also no brand

30:32Michael Goldin: that has built loyalty besides the OTAs, right? In hotels, there's Marriott, Hilton Hyatt, IHG. In short terminals, no one's been able to crack the code of building a consumer brand. Yeah, and at that framework that we think of, I've been thinking about consumer commerce operator experience, And the loyalty in hotels is at the operator side and the loyalty in short term rentals is at the commerce side. And that's one of the things that's interesting about this business.

31:03Brandreth Canaley: Yes, maybe someday someone will crack it, but we've been not talking about that topic for a very long time.

31:11Michael Goldin: Jamie, do you want to do your last one? Yeah, let me do my last one because, Seth, you said this was one of your favorite ones too. and I feel like it talks about maybe where the future of travel is going. And I sort of paired them. They're sort of back to back in the report. And it sort of called out the continents and countries where travel is a lifestyle priority.

31:37And these emerging market countries, I mean, 84 % of consumers in China, I'm calling out that travel is really important to their overall lifestyle. 87 % in India, 71 % in Western Europe, and that compares to 69 % in the US. So as much as travel is really important and ingrained in sort of the US consumer psyche, it's even more so in a lot of these other countries. And this is the next emerging middle class. That is where wealth is being built right now. And if they're going to spend a larger share of that wealth on travel than even Americans or Western Europeans do, that could bode really well for our sector.

32:30And then travel mobility opening up new markets. So the fact that now as more and more people are prioritizing travel, that they have more options, their visa, their passport can get them into more countries and that we're taking down barriers to travel, not putting them up, I think is ultimately really good for our industry. And we can debate on whether the U.S. is putting up or taking down barriers and that whether or not we're going to get our fair share of those travelers. But I think ultimately that may change in due time.

33:11Brandreth Canaley: Yeah, I think it's going to be really interesting how this new kind of generation of travelers that are coming from different parts of the world are going to shape the global travel industry, where maybe for the last couple of decades, it's catered more towards U.S. consumers or European consumers. and I'm really curious to see how, like what new flavor travel is going to take on in the coming decade as this whole new group has more money, different tastes and travels differently. Yeah, I love, I'm so, I'm glad you picked those two, Jamie. And yeah, we were talking a little bit, just a little bit of prep for this.

33:48And I said, what's your favorite? I said, this one. And Jamie said, I picked that one already. And I'm glad that we were both thinking on the same kind of economist macro mindset here. I love the visa one. That is a passport index. They track the median number. So you look at every, they track every passport from every country in the world and how many countries that passport allows you to access visa-free. It's a measure of passport strength. And what we did was we calculated the median. So if you looked at all 192, I think that's the number, however many UN countries there are with passports, 190 something.

34:22And you say on the median, what is the average number of countries that the median country's passport will allow you to access visa-free. And how has that changed over time? And it's doubled. It's almost 90. I mean, there's 100, what, there's something like 200 countries. There's 90 something that are on average passport-free. 50 % of countries have more access than that. So, you know, that's half the world at this point. It used to be 50 or less. And so, you know, it really shows, and that's in just a couple decades, It shows this generation, this decade is not like we thought travel was big before.

34:59There is a whole world out there that required stamps, paperwork, application fees, wait times, embassy visits, consulate visits that is now available, not just for us to visit, but for them to go outbound, for them to come inbound to us and across Europe. It's really a different world. And that doubling of mobility is huge. And it's huge for Saudi Arabia, for Indonesia, for India, for China, of course. Like there's these amazing populations out there, markets out there, people. And it's super cool. So I love that you picked that one, Jamie.

35:36Brandreth Canaley: I saw one of the graphs that said that in the last couple of years, Uzbekistan has like relaxed their visa requirements and saw this enormous jump in inbound travel. And then I just anecdotally know some people that have gone recently and been like, oh, that's interesting that that's like popping up now as a cool destination. Tosh Kent is on your list for travel now, Brandy. Yes. I would love to go. I actually, I hear incredible things at Silk Road. It's beautiful. Yeah. Yeah, I hear it's amazing. Maybe a gift team outing to Uzbekistan. Yeah, the Tosh Kent retreat, the Silk Road Tosh Kent retreat maybe.

36:14One day.

36:15Brandreth Canaley: Well, we literally could probably do so many episodes about this. There's so much more that we could dive into. Seth, thank you so much for joining us today. Is there anything that you want to wrap up with? Any parting thoughts? Download the report. Come on. Isn't it obvious? Go ahead and download the report. So this is the link to the research page. Go to skiff.com slash insights slash state of travel. Get the free report. You will have to give us your email. You should expect an email from us saying, if you like this, why don't you subscribe? And if you did like it, why wouldn't you subscribe?

36:51So go and check. I got to sell a little bit. I know. You're doing great.

36:55Brandreth Canaley: You're doing great. The report's free. Check it out. Tell us your favorite. Email me. Tell me your favorites or the team. They'll pass it on to me. And yeah, if you liked it, learn more about Skiff Research. That's the team I lead. And I think it's a great team. You should know more about it. Amazing. Well, listeners, it'd be great to hear once you read through the report what your favorite nuggets were, um, it'd be good to get some listener feedback from that as well. Um, Michael, Jamie, what is on the docket for you this week? Surviving the heat is going to be a hot one. There'll be a lot of inside time over the next, uh, uh, 10 days, but no travel.

37:33Um, head to Denver next week.

37:36Brandreth Canaley: Nice. Nice.

37:38Michael Goldin: No travel until guest evolve. So excited about that one. Um, Um, and yeah, same as Jamie trying to keep the head down and the sun from being burned or my skin from being burned by the sun.

37:51Brandreth Canaley: Amazing. It's, it's little, little wins, little wins. Um, amazing. Well, um, it's great chatting with you, Seth. Um, always so interesting. It's such a great report. Also visually it looks beautiful. Um, so hope all of our listeners enjoy that. Thanks for everyone that was tuning in, in the live show and for everyone listening later on, and we will see you all next week.

38:15We'll be right back.