What makes a great hotel feel effortless? As hospitality strategist, architect, and owner's representative Vito F. Lotta explains, it's rarely the obvious design decisions. The best hotels succeed because thousands of invisible choices work together to create an emotional experience (while balancing operational realities).

Even seemingly mundane decisions ... shower doors, elevator placement, storage rooms, lighting, and soundproofing ... are a balancing act for both guest and owner. In this episode we talk:

• The psychology of hotel arrivals and first impressions
• The hidden operational side of hotel design
• The changing role of the lobby bar
• Can the guest room bathroom be saved?
• Authentic materials vs. practical alternatives
• Why hotel room phones still exist
• How creative teams overcome stale thinking
• Finding the "spark" in hospitality projects

In just two weeks, the GBTA | Global Business Travel Association 2026 Convention kicks off in Chicago, bringing together thousands of leaders shaping the future of business travel.

Ahead of the event, Jeff Borman and Matt Brown sat down with Katharine Farrell, Vice President, Americas at GBTA, to talk about what's happening in the industry.

While AI is dominating the headlines, travel managers are navigating geopolitical uncertainty, evolving traveler expectations, tighter budgets, duty of care, and a rapidly changing technology landscape.

In this episode:

🛎️ The big themes at GBTA 2026.

🛎️ Why travel managers are more strategic than ever.

🛎️ How AI is actually being used inside corporate travel programs today.

🛎️ The unique challenges facing small and mid-market organizations.

🛎️ Whether the traditional RFP still has a place in an AI-first world.

Daniel Kuperschmid has spent his career helping people discover exceptional places, first through three decades with Hyatt Hotels and now as President and CEO of the San Diego Tourism Authority.

Daniel joins No Show to explore what it really takes to steward one of America's most visited destinations, balancing tourism, local communities, government, infrastructure, and long-term city building. We get into:

• Why and how San Diego is evolving its reputation.
• Where the majority of visitors are coming from.
• A tourism ecosystem that has to account for dollars coming in but also for the quality of life of the people who live and work in San Diego.
• The future of the San Diego Convention Center, environmental and social concerns, and the role of Measure C.
• Classy hidden neighborhoods, restaurants, and cultural gems every visitor should experience.
• The power of Comic-Con!

Joff Romoff, Google Cloud's Global Head - Travel & Hospitality, unpacks the real and imagined cultural gaps between Silicon Valley and the hotel industry. We talk how tech companies are asset-light and data-forward, while hoteliers are asset-heavy and still inclined to think of the room, not the customer, as the product.

And, how AI is (very) quickly transforming how travelers get inspired via longer, richer prompts, demand for activity outranking accommodation, and a strong desire to trust the new infrastructure of search.

But AI's real value is reducing friction, not obliterating human experience. The industry is now in an all-out technology arms race, with OTAs, brands, suppliers, and pretty much everybody else you can think of on the front lines.

Here's one of the clearest conversations you'll hear on why Africa is not a single hotel market, but 54 radically different ones.

W Hospitality's Trevor Ward breaks down the realities behind the continent's booming hotel pipeline, and why local capital, not foreign money, is driving most development. Infrastructure, aviation, politics, and risk perception shape hospitality growth in an environment where optimism and operational reality coexist (and collide).

Trevor is an expert on hotel development, investment appraisals, and operator selection who understands the systems behind the systems behind the systems. Hospitality in those 54 markets is transforming in an unexpected, and impossibly fast, way.

Experiential tourism around sports and music has gone stratospheric. BTS just announced they're back together and going on a world tour, and flights and hotels across 34 cities sold out almost immediately.

Kickstarted by Taylor and Beyoncé, music tourism could go to $9 billion globally by 2030—a 50% jump from 2023. Sports could crack a trillion dollars within a few years, especially with FIFA World Cup games this summer and the 2028 Olympics. Why now, is this a matter of right time, right tech enabling all this?

And speaking of tech, GEO and AI visibility are on travel's mind in a dramatically different way compared to even 3 months ago. AI search no longer shows ten links, it recommends a handful of brands. If your travel brand isn’t one of them, it effectively doesn’t exist.

In this era of brand survival, a new customer’s first interaction with your brand is likely to be through an AI summary. If that summary is impersonal, you will be impossible to find against competitors with more emotionally resonant content. But what's hype and what's the real thing? We have guesses.

About 71% of active U.S. travelers say they are more likely to travel internationally than they were two years ago. The U.S. has lost half its market share, 10% of global inbound travel to 5%, since 1995. What is happening exactly? We'll give you a couple of guesses...

Also, how does war and regional instability affect travel routes of the major carriers? And when gas prices for airlines go up because of all these wars, who ends up paying? Again, you'll get a few guesses...

But it's not all doom + gloom, we open with how "grocery store tourism" is apparently a thing now? And $22 smoothies aside, that's a good thing.

For 70 years, duty free sat at the intersection of monopoly on concessions, opaque pricing, cross-border tax rules, very captive audiences, and political insulation. Non-aeronautical revenue — retail, food, alcohol, duty free — accounts for roughly 40–60% of total airport revenue at major hubs.

Duty-free shopping existed for a pretty straightforward economic reason: it helps countries capture spending from international travelers. When a traveler leaves a country, the products they buy in the airport are technically exports. Because those goods are leaving the country and won’t be consumed locally, governments allow retailers to remove local taxes like VAT or GST.

But does it still work? And why? Surely you're not saving that much in a system that's only gotten more rigged through the decades. Or ARE you.......