Power Rankings 2026

Skift Take Power in the travel industry now belongs to the builders. Those whose initiatives are ambitious, audacious, and — at the same time — gloriously useful. Here’s Skift’s 2026 list of the top 25 people doing that building. At Skift, we’re obsessed with power. Who has it, who is losing it, where it’s going next. Our inaugural Power Rankings named the most powerful people in travel. Last year we focused on risk takers who were taking the biggest bets. This year, we built the methodology around the people who are clearly the 2026-era vanguards — the builders. A builder is a travel industry leader actively constructing something new. Infrastructure, platforms, products, experiences, brands, and business models that impact how travel works. Essentially, they’re betting capital, talent, and reputation on a version of the future that doesn’t fully exist yet. We evaluated each one across five dimensions: Infrastructure — How essential is it? Innovation — How innovative is it? Authorship — How large a role did this leader personally play in creating it? Reach — How many parts of travel does it touch? Scale — How big is what they’ve built? We gave infrastructure the most weight since building industry-essential products is at the heart of this year’s list. We also gave points for novelty and the builders with the personality to capture the excitement and innovation happening across travel today. Scale mattered, but not as much. This pushed some large corporations lower because they lack distinctive builders and haven’t moved as fast as those in travel tech. You can find our full methodology here. Plenty of people have power. Far fewer made the thing they’re powerful for. These builders are racing to the finish at a pivotal moment in our industry’s history. So if you’re deciding where to invest or who to partner with, these are the power builders. The people and companies to watch. – Sarah Kopit, Editor-in-Chief and Seth Borko, Head of Research 1. Decius Valmorbida Amadeus, President of Travel When the pandemic emptied airports in 2020, the natural reaction for travel companies was to tighten belts and ride it out. But Decius Valmorbida, Amadeus’ president of travel, thought the company had to invest aggressively on the theory that it would be too late if they waited until after the crisis. “If we didn’t do that jump and didn’t do that leap, we would have a problem of relevance today,” he said. “That was my bet.” The gamble put more on the table than a single company’s revenue. Amadeus processes 3 billion flight searches daily and handles departure control, check-in, and distribution for more than 2 billion passengers a year. If it went dark, airlines couldn’t sell seats, board planes, or reconcile payments. He drove the creation of Nevio, an offer-and-order retailing platform that allows airlines to price and bundle dynamically. It now powers British Airways, Air France, Lufthansa Group, and KLM, and a quarter of passengers processed by Amadeus flow through Nevio’s retailing tools. In 2023, he spun out Outpayce, the payments arm, freeing the main business from fintech’s regulatory weight just as AI investment accelerated. Valmorbida’s remit immediately expanded. He steered the company to build agent-friendly pipes and products like the AI Commerce tool for hotel bookings, advise Google on its agentic travel booking work, shift to a multi-cloud setup, and establish a new playbook to let partners like Salesforce and Adobe handle more customer-facing work instead of doing it all in-house. One of his greatest ambitions now is biometrics: a traveler’s face as an access pass from booking through boarding, across borders. He sought out Vision-Box, an acquisition for $348 million in 2024, and is now on track to buy Idemia’s public security division for €1.2 billion. The goal isn’t just faster queues, it’s giving travelers control of their own identity data. “We will become a traveler-centric industry rather than a provider-centric industry. Can we cooperate around identity and biometrics? If we do, it means the traveler is the one empowered.” — Adriana Lee 2. Ilan Twig Navan, Co-Founder and CTO Navan co-founder and chief technology officer Ilan Twig is leading an unusual bet for the travel industry: training the company’s own AI models rather than layering features on top of OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google Gemini. Navan Cloud is the foundation, Twig said, and it involved a decade-plus of plumbing to connect banks, card networks, airlines, and hotels to Navan’s corporate travel and expense platform. He said building Navan Cloud nearly broke him and co-founder Ariel Cohen along the way. “If we knew how complicated travel is, we would have done something else,” Twig quipped. When generative AI arrived, that infrastructure became a differentiator. Navan built a proprietary agentic system, Navan Cognition, and a virtual travel agent called Ava that handles roughly 8,000 support chats a day. Ava resolves close to 60% without a human, he said. The stakes are why it took years: “If you book the wrong flight, it’s catastrophic,” Twig said. To prevent hallucinations, a second model vets every reply Ava sends. “It must go through what we call the supervisor, and the supervisor approves it or rejects it,” Twig said. The models themselves are the latest bet. More than 30% of the LLMs powering Ava are now Navan’s own, and it is travel-specific. Twig said they are on par with or better than frontier models for booking tasks. So what’s next? Navan-built agents, or “experts,” for things such as flights, seats, loyalty, hotels, and cancellations, that are embeddable “in any system,” Twig said. For example, Navan customers can talk to Navan within Gemini. “We are very soon to announce way more channels to access these agents,” Twig said. For a newly public company serving 10,000-plus customers, the wager is that owning the whole stack is what will reshape travel. If Navan Cloud vanished, travel genuinely breaks for 10,000-plus companies. That would mean no inventory, no policy enforcement, no real-time spend or duty-of-care data. And, according to Twig, the hallucination guardrail inside Navan Cognition is what makes autonomous booking safe enough to trust with a $12,000 fare. — Dennis Schaal 3. Ahmad Al-Dahle Airbnb, CTO Ahmad Al-Dahle didn’t come to Airbnb to work on a chatbot. Named chief technology officer in January 2026, Al-Dahle said his mission was to “fill the gaps in what you can book — hotels, services — fix the reasons guests were leaving the app, and make the app intelligent enough to stitch it all together.” The Apple and Meta veteran is now developing agents to resolve problems not only in homes, but also across newly launched or expanded boutique hotels, experiences and services. What he’s building rests on three systems. The first is matching. “For 20 years, Airbnb search has been a filter engine,” Al-Dahle said, but he’s rebuilding it “as an understanding problem,” which basically means deeper personalization. “The app should know how you travel, what mattered to you last time, and what this trip is for, then assemble the right combination,” he said. “With 5 million hosts and more than 2 billion guest arrivals, small gains in matching compound into millions of better trips a year.” The second system he’s working on is on revamping customer service to solve problems, and “not a chatbot that points you at a help article,” Al-Dahle said. Instead, it’s “an agent that resolves the issue, rebooks you, fixes the reservation, makes you whole,” he added. In the first quarter, Airbnb reported a 40% self-solve rate and a 10% year-over-year drop in cost per booking. Al-Dahle said voice will come to customer service in AI conversations later this year. The third system he’s focusing on is on Airbnb’s internal machinery: AI now writes the majority of Airbnb’s code, roughly 60%. Al-Dahle draws on his experience. “Apple taught me craft,” he said of 16 years that spanned the original iPhone and the Apple Watch. At Meta, he founded the generative AI organization and led product and research teams. There’s been much speculation that CEO Brian Chesky might favor OpenAI given his friendship with CEO Sam Altman. But Al-Dahle said Airbnb stays “deliberately unattached,” testing frontier APIs and “open weights” alike, and routing each workload to whatever’s best. — Dennis Schaal 4. Matt Welle Mews, CEO Matt Welle has run Mews since 2017, building a platform that handles operational needs, like property management, price-setting, and housekeeping, for over 15,000 hotels. Earlier in his career, Welle ran reception at an 800-room Hilton, commanding 70 staff across three reception desks. “I still dream about it,” he said. “It’s the heat of the moment where all of the problems come at the same time, yet you’ve still got to smile at the customer.” At Mews, founder Richard Valtr supplies the vision; Welle keeps the company moving. “Richard is definitely living in the future, and I often make the translation layer,” he said. His fixation on the end user is institutionalized: teams at Mews invoke a rule called “What would Matt do?” The product team designed an embedded revenue management system specifically to survive his scrutiny. (“I found 20 flaws anyway,” he said.) The system’s price recommendations lift hotel revenue per square meter by roughly 13.7% after nine months, the company said. (Revenue-per-square meter captures both room and non-room guest spending.) The pitch to owners increasingly runs through cost efficiency. Mews found that the typical hotel waits seven to eight days after checkout to issue an invoice, then spends weeks chasing payment, occasionally writing off the revenue altogether. A new accounts receivable tool automates invoicing, reminders, and reconciliation, showing finance teams what is paid, pending, and overdue in real time. It’s live in euro-currency markets. Next comes generative AI running on the platform’s proprietary data. An AI guest-messaging product, live in 115 hotels in beta and generally available in October, can field many guest requests. “And no human gets involved in the messaging,” Welle said. — Sean O’Neill 5. Laura Calin Oracle, SVP Oracle Consumer Industries Oracle’s hospitality software could be thought of as a central nervous system at roughly 73,000 properties running operations for 5.2 million rooms, along with 150,000 hotel restaurant workstations. The twist: only about 30% of that property count runs on Opera Cloud, the platform Laura Calin is betting the franchise on. Her job has been helping hotels move data into the cloud without ever going offline. In August, Minor Hotels, the Bangkok-based hotel group, said it had shifted 106 properties across 59 countries onto Opera Cloud. The goal was to have one view of the guest, whether they’re at an Anantara in the Maldives or an NH in Berlin. Oracle’s hospitality technology was long closed to outsiders. Calin championed Oracle Hospitality Integration Platform, or OHIP, which lets hotels and startups build on Opera Cloud more easily. “We were stalling innovation at some point,” she said. “So we completely turned that around, completely giving freedom to customers, to partners, to be who they wanna be.” More than 3,000 vendors now sell through the marketplace. Hotels can innovate, too. One in Eastern Europe built its own spa system on Oracle’s APIs. Minor Hotels built its own paperless check-in on the APIs. The base is broader than Oracle’s big-enterprise reputation suggests. Large accounts make up less than half of its property count, and independents are more than 30% of the hotels it serves. Calin’s next ambition is to build a consumer industries platform spanning hotels, restaurants and retail, built on shared systems for managing identity, payments, and loyalty. She pictures a local diner earning or burning loyalty points at a hotel restaurant without ever booking a room. Her philosophy throughout is that hotels should “become the best version of themselves, not a standardized version of everyone else.” — Sean O’Neill 6. Henley Vazquez Fora, Co-Founder Henley Vazquez didn’t set out to build travel infrastructure. “I fell into travel entirely by accident,” she said. Vazquez grew up on a Virginia farm, landed her first job at Town & Country Magazine, joined the founding team at ultra-luxury agency Indagare, then started her own shop, Passported, where she found herself weighed down by the logistics of running a small business. That frustration became the blueprint for Fora. Co-founded in 2021 with Evan Frank and Jake Peters, Fora is a host agency and technology platform for travel advisors, including those new to the business. Nearly five years in, it counts 15,000 active travel advisors across all U.S. states and more than 180 countries, with nearly 7 million room nights booked. Fora says its travel advisors have booked more than $3 billion in travel. Fora has raised $138.5 million in funding and has a $1 billion private valuation. Investment is positioned as a differentiator. Advisors using Fora’s live “bookable quotes” tool saw a 23% lift in monthly bookings compared to advisors not using it, Vasquez said. Its AI-driven “price drop” tool monitors every hotel reservation and has saved travelers more than $4 million, she said. Vazquez frames Fora’s approach as favoring customer loyalty over earning the highest commissions. “But to us, it is all about earning trust because while you might earn less on that booking, what you’re earning is the lifetime value of a customer who knows you’ve got their best interests at heart,” Vasquez said. Via, an AI-powered advisor assistant now in beta, drafts emails, builds client cards, formats itineraries, and researches destinations. “It is an agent for the agent, but in the AI form, not the human form, that lives within the platform and helps you do your work more quickly,” she said. Would anyone notice if it all vanished? “I think our advisors would say it would go very badly for them. They notice if something’s down for half a minute,” Vasquez said. “So it is our technology that is keeping them abreast of all of the AI involvement, but it’s also supporting each other in that community element.” — Dennis Schaal 7. Med Benmansour Nuitée, Co-Founder and CEO Med Benmansour co-founded Nuitée in 2017, when he wanted to give the travel industry the equivalent of what Stripe gave payments and Twilio gave communications: an open, developer-friendly infrastructure platform. “Our ambition is to become the infrastructure layer powering every modern travel experience, whether that’s inside a bank, an AI assistant, an airline, a loyalty program, or a hotel brand,” Benmansour told Skift. Nuitée has powered travel bookings inside companies as varied as European payments company Revolut and Southeast Asian super app Grab. The platform offers partners access to an inventory of 3 million properties worldwide, while opening hotel distribution to a wider ecosystem of sellers. For example, Grab wanted to introduce accommodation booking inside its ecosystem. Through Nuitée, it launched GrabStays, enabling users to discover and book hotels using existing identity, payment methods, and loyalty points. “Hotels are struggling, they have a love-and-hate relationship with OTAs. They want access to different distribution channels but don’t want to build the travel stack because it’s fragmented and complex,” Benmansour said. “We give our hotel partners the power to distribute their inventory directly into the channels where their guests already spend their time, whether that is a banking app, a super app, or an AI assistant.” Nuitée was bootstrapped from founding and closed a $48 million Series A led by Accel in 2024. The company surpassed $1 billion in booking volume and is growing 2x on average on an annual basis. — Deepthi Nair 8. Garry Wiseman Sabre, President of Product & Engineering Sabre has migrated 99% of its computing to Google Cloud, while continuing to rebuild its decades-old PNR (Passenger Name Record) reservation system with modular offer-and-order architecture, and shipped agentic AI APIs before any of its direct competitors. Garry Wiseman is the person leading those build-outs. The most visible AI output so far: a partnership with MindTrip and PayPal that launched in May as a single conversational flow that searches flights, books them, and processes payment without ever leaving the chat. More partners are building on Sabre’s agentic APIs and the Model Context Protocol server. According to Wiseman, adoption doubled between June and July, going from 30 partners to 60, with “four or five of them that [have] gone to production.” Agentic capabilities still haven’t proven themselves as revenue drivers across the travel industry. But Wiseman believes it will happen, and it won’t take that long. “I would give it 12 months [in] the B2C world. And I think there’s still a lot when you look at unmanaged travel that can be achieved with these new assistants,” he said. “Small to medium businesses, which is roughly a trillion dollars of business travel, is not captured today by TMCs. I think there’s a huge opportunity there.” On the core reservation system, dozens of airlines use Sabre’s offer-optimization tools, but most haven’t fully migrated to the new stack. Riyadh Air, as a new carrier, launched on Sabre Mosaic, using the offer-and-order system from day one. Virgin Australia has components in production, but the broader rollout across customers is still early. That attaches high stakes to every move Wiseman makes. Move too slowly and cede competitive ground, because others will then build the groundwork for the future. But act too fast or shift too much, and it risks destabilizing much more than a single initiative. The pain ripples out far beyond Sabre. This is how infrastructure works: If the company went dark for just a few days, Wiseman said, “American, Alaska, JetBlue, Aeromexico would stop functioning. Airports would be overrun.” The play he’s making now is that he can do two things at once: Build and expand the foundations for tomorrow’s travel infrastructure, without breaking today’s. — Adriana Lee 9. Adam Harris Cloudbeds, Co-Founder and CEO Nearly 15 years after its launch, hospitality management system Cloudbeds has become an integral tool for more than 20,000 properties scattered across 150-plus markets, processing roughly $12 billion in booking value each year. Revenue jumped nearly 500% between 2020 and 2023, and last year, the company turned profitable. “We keep telling ourselves, 20,000-plus properties isn’t enough, we need 100 [thousand],” said CEO and co-founder Adam Harris. “So our next goal is 100 [thousand]. That’s what we’re marching toward.” The company’s next catalyst for growth, according to Harris: artificial intelligence. Cloudbeds already offers clients an AI-powered revenue management tool that can issue 90-day demand forecasts with up to 95% accuracy. Another AI-powered offering automates email campaigns based on guest behavior, demographics, or spend. This fall, it plans to launch Ask Signals, an AI copilot that can tackle questions by digging through the entire Cloudbeds data layer on guest history, booking source, payments, and reviews. Plain language answers will answer specific questions about guests and reservations and surface reports and insights. Down the road, Harris envisions AI companions for every job in a hotel, from CEOs to front desk staff. “Agents right now are in their infancy standpoint in terms of what they’re capable of,” Harris said. But at some point, “the hotelier can just ask, ‘Hey, I’d really like to do these three things for all of my future arriving guests.’ And the goal is it writes the code, it connects the workflows and the processes, and then all of a sudden you hit save and there’s an agent support inside Cloudbeds that does that one thing for you.” — Bailey Schulz 10. Ramana Thumu Expedia Group, CTO Ramana Thumu joined Expedia Group in December 2024 as CEO Ariane Gorin’s first major executive hire. When Thumu arrived, he found platform migrations and capacity projects “going in 100 different ways” and challenged the organization to focus on a short list of initiatives, including modern checkout and loyalty. He’s rebuilding the tech stack around a highly modular framework with swappable components — like “Lego blocks,” he said — to reshape how Expedia serves consumers as well as travel businesses. It’s a platform-centric mindset; Thumu talks in terms of a deeper, more adaptable architecture, not the sort of messy one-off features that can break in random ways over time. The stakes are high: The marketplace processes 21 billion API calls per day across 75,000 partners. If it goes dark, millions of travelers are stuck mid-trip and partners lose access to the inventory their own products depend on. But Thumu’s most significant build may not be a particular toolkit or feature update. It’s remaking the thinking around AI that underpins all of it. “Travel is definitely one of the world’s richest reasoning problems,” he said. “The more and more I know travel, the application of AI becomes paramount.” Since he took the tech mantle, Expedia has stood up a shared AI stack with MCP servers exposing its APIs to agents, an evals system to test those agents, and a dozen AI-native teams building specialized bots. He installed the company’s first chief AI and data officer, and he’s looking for more AI talent at the company’s new Silicon Valley offices. What he’s obsessed with right now, in terms of AI, is velocity. “If we cannot actively build the platform stack at speed, future teams fall behind. So we want to make sure we make rapid progress on the platforms, and then activate on the right things,” he said. “The blocker is ourselves — if we don’t make enough progress, everything slows down from there.” — Adriana Lee 11. Tao Tao GetYourGuide, Co-Founder and COO When GetYourGuide launched in 2009, its co-founders struggled to raise capital from investors who thought little of the experiences sector. More than 15 years later, Chief Operating Officer Tao Tao said it is “definitely not an afterthought anymore.” Experiences are one of the fastest-growing sectors in travel, and GetYourGuide has made itself a key player amid this growth. The company turned a profit on an adjusted basis for the first time last year after surpassing $4.8 billion in gross merchandise value (GMV), the total spent by travelers on the platform, from more than 33 million experiences booked. Skift recently reported how GetYourGuide’s scale and recent growth has outpaced rivals like Tripadvisor Experiences and Klook. “I would say we are now growing into that — first becoming a market leader and now really helping to define the category and shape it,” Tao said. According to Tao, it first became clear that the idea was working around the mid-2010s. That’s when he started to notice friends and family use the platform unprompted — “not just because they have to, but because they want to” — and GetYourGuide started to hear from operators who were betting their growth on the company. “Some operators have really built their businesses on the back of us, and that is really amazing,” Tao said. One Dubai-based operator was able to scale to more than 2,000 employees after partnering with GetYourGuide, Tao said. An attraction in Italy noted that 15% of its online channel sales were tied to five online travel agencies, with GetYourGuide accounting for half of those sales. Helping guide travelers to live events — think Broadway in New York, Cirque du Soleil in Las Vegas, and flamenco shows in Spain — will be one of the company’s next targets for growth. Tao also sees plenty of opportunity with AI, although he expects more value on the supply side than the consumer side, with AI helping operators list and verify activities, access automated insights, or spot demand trends. – Bailey Schulz 12. Uli Pillau Apaleo, Co-Founder and CEO Every property management system claims to be cloud-native now. Apaleo is the PMS where outside developers can build anything on top, and increasingly, they’re using AI agents. Founded in Munich in 2017, Apaleo exposes 100% of its PMS functions through open APIs. It doesn’t sell modules, but runs an ecosystem of more than 250 apps — channel managers, revenue tools, payment processors — and lets hotel operators assemble their own stack. “API-first at the same time means the system, the platform, is agent-first,” said co-founder and CEO Uli Pillau. “It is AI-first.” Pillau has been in hotel tech since 1988, and built an earlier cloud-native PMS, hetras, one of the first fully cloud-native systems in the industry. It never scaled before Shiji Group acquired it in 2016. Apaleo is the updated version. The proof points are specific. CitizenM migrated 7,500 rooms across 33 properties in eight weeks, sometimes taking two to three hotels live in a single day by running scripts using Apaleo’s APIs. When Marriott acquired citizenM, it kept Apaleo in place and integrated it with Bonvoy loyalty and Marriott’s distribution system. Numa, one of Apaleo’s more advanced AI users, runs more than 150 staffless properties across Europe. It relies on what Pillau called a “full 100% mobile guest journey” spanning “availability, prices, booking, reservations, payments, and everything else.” Last year at ITB Berlin, Apaleo launched an MCP server, a protocol that lets AI agents interact directly with hotel operations. Around 20 hotel groups, roughly 100 properties, now deploy agents in production, automating everything from parsing guest comments into staff tasks to fully voice-based booking through ChatGPT. The company has 1,500-plus properties across 30 countries, approximately $31 million in total funding, and about 109 employees. If Apaleo went dark, Pillau said, hotels on the platform couldn’t surface availability, take bookings, or process payments. “The full guest journey of what you could do online via apps in a hotel group would go away immediately.” — Adriana Lee 13. Steve Singh Spotnana, CEO and Executive Chairman As one of the co-founders behind travel-and-expense management platform Concur, Steve Singh is no stranger to rebuilding how the world books travel. So when Spotnana founder Sarosh Waghmar asked him to take over as CEO in 2024, Singh saw an opportunity to build out what he could not with Concur’s SaaS-era architecture. “What I really saw in Spotnana was an opportunity to solve a lot of the problems that, as a traveler, just still weren’t addressed,” Singh said. The company runs a cloud-based “Travel-as-a-Service” platform that connects three key players in travel: providers like airlines and hotels; sellers like online travel agencies and corporate travel management companies; and corporate and leisure buyers. Its core components are built with open APIs, allowing companies like corporate spend platform Brex and expense management platform Expensify to build their own travel products on top of Spotnana’s infrastructure. Revenue is growing at a pace of north of 100% annually, and Singh expects to hit profitability within 18 to 24 months. Unlike online booking tools, Singh said Spotnana can effectively target three corporate travel segments simultaneously: transient travel, the meetings-and-events space, and unmanaged travel for small-to-medium sized companies. The platform has also made inroads in leisure travel, with more than 1 million transactions this year and “exponential” growth expected in the years ahead, according to Singh. “What’s great about the Spotnana technology stack is it can be applied through partners in every one of those segments,” Singh said. “And that’s what’s fundamentally different about Spotnana, that you couldn’t do — I couldn’t do — at Concur, and frankly, I don’t think it can be done on any other platform.” An agentic travel agent — which Singh believes will be Spotnana’s “biggest product” yet — is expected to launch within the next year, designed to follow a traveler across every trip type and make suggestions based on personal preferences. “That’s what an agentic travel agent has to be able to do. It has to predict what’s in your mind and serve your needs, not sell to you,” Singh said. “Agentic agents don’t work if all they do is sell. You have to be able to service.” – Bailey Schulz 14. Andrew Jordan Travelport, CTO Andrew Jordan came to Travelport from the other side of the counter. He spent nearly five years running technology at CWT, a Travelport customer, and arrived in early 2025 with a long list of agency grievances about how the old GDS model worked. As he tells it, the incumbents had long treated distribution as “here’s a load of content, go and consume it, see you later.” Eighteen months on, as chief technology officer, Jordan has made TripServices the centerpiece of his work. Launched in June, it’s cloud-native and in his words, “for the world that is coming, not the one we are leaving behind.” “This isn’t a ‘we’re going to build it’ conversation, this is a ‘we’ve already built it’ conversation,” he told Skift. In May, Travelport struck a deal with Cognizant and Anthropic to embed Claude across both the build process and the platform, allowing outside customers to run their own services on Travelport’s rails. On the hot topic of agentic travel, Jordan is measured rather than breathless. He suggests the technology is maturing, but the holdup is trust. “Society is not ready to hand over the keys to AI,” he says. Forgetting a frequent traveler’s free Wi-Fi perk is an inconvenience; putting them in the wrong city is not. His favorite caution is that North America has 13 places called Birmingham, and an agent that books the wrong one won’t be very popular. The role he wants Travelport to own is the certainty beneath the conversation, turning natural language into a confirmed and dependable booking. That instinct traces to a career in data instead of classic engineering. Jordan says he tries to look at problems such as caching dynamically priced fares “through the eyes of science rather than travel.” His reference point is generational. His own children now have disposable income but no intention of booking through forms. Jordan believes the builders who have already architected for them are the ones who are going to win. — Gordon Smith 15. Evan Konwiser Amex GBT, Chief Product & Strategy Officer Ask Evan Konwiser what it’s like to build inside the world’s largest corporate travel company and he does not romanticize it. A startup, he said, can ship fast, break things, and nobody cares. A company at Amex GBT’s scale moves slower, but everything it does lands and matters. With thousands of global customers relying on the platform each day, you can’t afford to break what already works. Konwiser joined the firm in 2014 having built three digital travel products from nothing, including as co-founder of luxury travel service Skylark. He now owns the product roadmap for a group that closed its $540 million purchase of CWT last September. Already a giant, the deal cemented its lead as the world’s largest managed travel company. The scale is real — on a typical day, Amex GBT is responsible for the booking of 188,000 flight segments and 146,000 hotel beds. His defining build is the Marketplace, now threading hundreds of airline and hotel connections into one bookable inventory. On top sits the agentic engine behind Egencia AI, relaunched in April with a conversational assistant and a native tie into partner systems. Speaking to Skift about the technological arms race, Konwiser is dismissive of those publishing white papers about capabilities he said GBT has run for years, and clear about what agentic travel actually needs. “When you build trust you can do things. If you don’t build trust, it’s worthless,” he said, describing a “maniacal journey” to earn it. Konwiser is not ready to let an agent fully transact for him yet, and expects human-in-the-loop to maintain importance, even as emerging technologies mature. For Amex GBT, the real advantage is the data. With millions of travelers to learn from, the company can “tell at scale what works and what doesn’t work very fast” — something no startup can match. Asked for his wishlist, Konwiser wants to kill the expense report outright. “I want kids who are in college today not to ever know what an expense report is.” Another obsession is overcoming disruption. A self-described travel geek who knows every trick for rescuing a broken trip, he wants to turn that instinct into something Amex GBT can run for millions of travelers at once. — Gordon Smith 16. Alix Boulnois Accor, Chief Commercial, Digital & Tech Officer Accor hired Alix Boulnois in 2020 to lead its digital transformation. Six years later, she runs almost everything that makes Accor’s 45-plus brands visible, bookable, and commercially viable — she now oversees roughly 5,000 people, building the operating system that runs Accor across 120 countries. Her first major construction was the Digital Factory, launched in 2021. The idea was to reorganize engineering teams around business outcomes rather than technical ones — a shift that sounds obvious but wasn’t. “None of my engineering teams are objectivized on technical KPIs,” Boulnois told Skift. “What they have in their bonus is business KPIs.” The technology she inherited was close to 90% in-house and on-premise — systems built 15 to 20 years earlier. Her sequencing has been deliberate: CRM and data first, then property and revenue management systems, with the central reservation system last. Accor now moves more than 100 hotels to a new PMS every two weeks. The reservation system is still ahead. Under her watch, Accor’s loyalty platform has roughly doubled in membership since launch to more than 120 million, spanning 110-plus non-hotel partners. Boulnois is building the next version around prediction rather than reward. “Most loyalty programs, they reward the past,” she said. “What we’re really trying to build is something where we know you so well that even if you haven’t spent with us yet, we want to reward you in anticipation of what you’re going to do with us.” More than half of hotel business is corporate, she said, and the ALL loyalty program is expanding to match by rolling out a B2B component this year — benefits for companies, not just the travelers who work for them. On distribution, Accor has launched an app on ChatGPT, a live MCP integration with Anthropic, and is preparing for Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol, rolling out over the next six months. Asked what the most consequential decision she has made at Accor was, Boulnois didn’t name a system or a platform. She named her team. “It’s not a one-woman show,” she says of the function she’s built. “It’s truly a team delivery.” — Luke Martin 17. Prajit Nanu Nium, Founder and CEO Prajit Nanu spends his time on something most travelers never think about — how money actually moves when you book a trip. As founder and CEO of Nium, he’s spent the past decade building the payment rails that let cash cross borders as easily as people do. Nium reaches more than 190 countries, pays out in over 100 currencies, offers real-time payments in roughly 100 markets, issues cards in 40 countries, and holds licenses in more than 40 jurisdictions. The origin story is personal: “Nium was born while I was planning a holiday to Thailand and had a challenge orchestrating payment for my accommodations,” said Nanu. That hiccup planted a bigger idea that while data moves instantly, money doesn’t, especially in travel, where airlines, travel platforms, hotels, and independent operators are all stuck on decades-old systems. Nanu acquired travel payments company Ixaris, launching Nium Airline Payments with UATP to smooth out airline settlements, rolling out virtual cards across Asia-Pacific, and teaming up with wholesaler G2 Travel in 2025 to handle hotel payments in 20-plus local currencies. In 2026, Nium launched stablecoin card issuance that plugs digital assets straight into Visa and Mastercard through one system interface. Nanu is clear about what separates real infrastructure from hype. “Direct access is hard work,” he says. “It requires regulatory investment, significant capital in some markets, and years of relationship-building with central banks, local payment schemes, and local regulators.” If he rebuilt travel’s financial plumbing today, he’d start with real-time programmable settlement — refunds baked into payments, not reconciled after the fact. What’s next? Nanu’s betting on programmable money and stablecoins. “Programmable money can automate conditional logic — refunds, holds, payment splits — that requires manual reconciliation today,” he explains. Stablecoins, meanwhile, cut foreign exchange costs and free up cash companies would otherwise lock away, enabling “just-in-time funding.” — Peden Doma Bhutia 18. Kevin King Shiji Group, CEO When Kevin King joined Shiji Group as COO in 2015 — fresh off 17 years at Micros Systems through its 2014 merger with Oracle — the company was a China-focused network provider. King had the option to buy and modernize existing legacy platforms. He chose instead to build a new system from the ground up. And he used on cloud-native infrastructure before cloud was standard. That decision produced the Shiji Enterprise Platform, now serving over 91,000 hotels with property management systems, point-of-sale, guest engagement, distribution, payments, and data intelligence. King targeted the top of the market deliberately — five-star and luxury operators, enterprise chains, multi-property groups — arguing that most technology companies start with a minimum viable product and add functionality later, while Shiji planned for enterprise scale from day one. The platform grew through a mix of internal builds and acquisitions: ReviewPro for guest feedback, Concept Golf and Spa (now rebuilt as Meridian), payment and distribution technology built in-house. The result is a single guest-profile architecture that spans casinos, resorts, independent hotels, and full-service enterprise chains. King added the CEO title at Shiji International in late 2024, alongside his Group COO role. His biggest recent move: a September 2025 alliance with Amadeus to cross-license solutions. — Deepthi Nair 19. Naveen Manga Marriott, Global Chief Information Officer Marriott expects to spend at least $360 million on digital transformation this year, more than any other hotel group has disclosed. It’s the latest installment in a multiyear replacement of the company’s three core systems for reservations, property management, and loyalty. Naveen Manga, who joined Marriott in 2021 as global chief technology officer and is now global chief information officer, has helped run the replatforming. “The bet I made coming in five years ago is that we are going to build technology fundamentally different than the rest of the competition,” he said. The tech stack, built with Amadeus and Agilysys, is live at over 2,500 limited-service hotels in the U.S. and Canada, with full-service properties set to adopt it by the end of 2027. “Every hotel company has access to the same AI models, the same vendor software, the same consultants,” he said. “It’s the in-house architecture that differentiates.” Manga’s authorship shows in what sits on top: nine patent applications for his team’s work. He’s especially proud of what he calls a “composable chassis” for AI agents, with an “agentic mesh,” or shared orchestration, layer, to support real-time APIs. What would break without these improvements? Guests’ digital experience would “snap back into filters and forms,” front-desk staff would return to “swiveling” between siloed systems, and “the efficiencies it’s finding for hotel owners” would be lost, Manga said. One benefit for guests arrived in June with Ask Bonvoy, conversational search functionality on Marriott’s U.S. site and app in beta. For 2026, the plan is scaling AI across the enterprise, including tools for the 4,000-plus agents in Marriott’s contact centers. “Model routers” pick the most cost-effective model for each interaction, a hedge as AI costs climb. “We don’t want to go to a frontier model to answer a customer question about hours the pool is open,” Manga said. — Sean O’Neill 20. Sean Fitzpatrick Lighthouse, CEO Lighthouse built the rate intelligence layer that most hotels now depend on for their commercial decisions. Sean Fitzpatrick is betting the same platform can replace the revenue manager as the industry knows it. “The number one problem that most hotel owners, managers, and stakeholders are looking to solve is revenue growth,” Fitzpatrick told Skift. “A lot of the cost base is relatively fixed. So if you want to drive profitability, you’ve got to drive revenue.” The platform now serves more than 80,000 hotels across 185 countries and processes 400 terabytes of data daily. The $370 million Series C, led by KKR in 2024, valued the company at unicorn level — “validation for Lighthouse, but also validation for every other investor,” Fitzpatrick said. Lighthouse has completed six acquisitions — most recently The Hotels Network, which added a marketing layer the platform was missing, and Hotel Rank, which brought AI-driven search visibility. The build that matters most right now is Ernest, an AI commercial operating system launched in June, rolling out in beta ahead of a wider release later this year. Most hotels, he said, are lucky to have a qualified revenue manager. Commercial teams are “not just swimming; they are drowning in data.” What they need, he argues, is “an AI co-worker” that understands their systems and acts on their behalf. “There are going to be fewer people looking at dashboards, and more people orchestrating agents,” he says. The projection for the next three years: one revenue manager to 50 hotels. “The winners in this new era will be those who close the gap between insight and action.” — Luke Martin 21. Michael Leidinger Hilton, Chief Information Officer “When the property management system is down, the hotel is down,” said Michael Leidinger, Hilton’s chief information officer. That system runs check-in, payments, housekeeping, and billing, plus the links to reservations and loyalty. Leidinger’s team spent years ripping out OnQ, Hilton’s aging property management system, and replacing it with a cloud-based “Property Engagement Platform,” or PEP – now live at 6,791 of the company’s roughly 9,300 hotels. The migration is set to be completed “in the coming year.” His formula: buy commodity software, then customize heavily. PEP’s core comes from HotelKey, a vendor whose property management system was picked for its API-led architecture. Hilton then layered on custom code to enable digital check-in and check-out, digital keys, and the ability to confirm connecting rooms at booking. A few hundred people work on PEP at any time, drawn from a technology organization of 1,300. It hasn’t been a straight line. In 2024, PEP’s dashboards looked fine to developers, but employees using the tools weren’t always happy. Leidinger stood up a “PEP Talk” online user forum to gather feedback and share lessons, supplementing feedback surveys. In one example of listening, front-desk workers at a Homewood Suites in California told him the new system was fine except it couldn’t send mid-stay folios, essentially invoices. Leidinger pushed through a fix in the U.S. and Canada. Leidinger’s team touches the full stack, from Hilton’s in-house central reservation system to a revenue management system from IDeaS that reprices rooms continuously against market signals. What’s next comes in three pillars: commerce and distribution (a ChatGPT app live since May, with more AI assistant connectors and “agentic AI bookings” coming), guest experience (a Hilton AI Planner started rolling out this year to capture the dreaming phase of trips with natural language search), and tools to help find operating efficiencies for margin-squeezed owners. — Sean O’Neill 22. Luis Segredo Hapi, Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer IHG wanted to offer a perk that may sound simple: hit a loyalty tier, get a food-and-beverage voucher, redeem it in the app mid-stay. Hapi, the connectivity company that Luis Segredo co-founded in 2017, made it work across a jumble of property systems. “We normalize data,” said Segredo, who is also chief strategy officer. “Data from different system providers may look different coming in, but it’s all normalized by the time a loyalty system receives it from Hapi.” Simplification is the goal. “A typical hotel has close to seven live connections through us, and not one of them required the partner on the other end to configure a connector to that hotel’s property system,” Segredo said. At IHG, when a guest taps “check out” in its app or site, Hapi software queries that property’s system, verifies what the guest spent, confirms the final bill, and handles administrative processes by writing updates into a hotel’s system. This digital check-out automation is live in more than 3,600 IHG hotels across three property systems and recently had a 97% success rate. Without Hapi, IHG would lose its voucher program and its streamlined checkout. The number of hotels relying on Hapi industry-wide roughly doubled in the past year to about 15,000. Many Wyndham and Sonesta hotels in the U.S. have signed up. Normalized data and real-time connectivity are critical for preparing to talk to AI-based systems. “Every hotel group has an AI ambition right now,” Segredo said. “Almost none of them has data ready for it, meaning governed, current, and consistent.” — Sean O’Neill 23. Sankar Narayan SiteMinder, CEO and Managing Director Sankar Narayan runs the company that powers how tens of thousands of hotels sell their rooms online. As CEO of SiteMinder, he oversees software that lets hotels list and price rooms across booking sites like Booking.com and Expedia, and their own websites, all from one screen — instead of updating each one manually. Narayan joined SiteMinder in 2019 as its first CEO, sharing leadership with founder Mike Ford, after two decades moving through a wide range of companies including Virgin Australia, Vodafone Australia, and Boston Consulting Group. The company now serves 53,000 hotels in 150 countries, with 2.5 million rooms and more than 300 million room nights processed a year, worth over AU$85 billion ($60 billion) in booking value. Narayan’s pitch is that distribution was just the starting point; the real value now is turning SiteMinder’s data — pulled from hotels worldwide — into forecasts hotels can act on. “For a long time, SiteMinder was a channel manager. It has now transitioned to become a hotel commerce platform, which is good at distribution and also provides revenue intelligence,” he told Skift. The clearest sign of that shift is its partnership with Mews. SiteMinder’s distribution tools are now built directly into the Mews Operating System, letting roughly 3,000 hotels running both platforms manage rates and inventory without switching screens. Narayan frames it as a preview of where hotel tech is headed: not one company owning everything, but specialists — distribution, operations, revenue, guest engagement — plugged into each other, with SiteMinder as what he calls the “trusted execution layer.” He’s betting the next stage is agentic: hotels running several AI systems at once rather than one master platform. “The future is all these intelligent systems working together,” Narayan said. — Deepthi Nair 24. Andrew Nocella United Airlines, Chief Commercial Officer Since Andrew Nocella joined United in 2017, the airline has become one of the industry’s trendsetters — with rivals closely watching its next move. Investments have included introducing Starlink to United’s fleet of over 1,110 aircraft, new Polaris Studio suites that are just a touch below first class, a “Relax Row” in economy, and some of the carrier’s most ambitious international schedules. United has also placed orders for more than 250 aircraft over the next two years to accommodate a surge in premium demand. “We know our customers want something new every year, whether it’s something on board the aircraft, or a new destination, or a new way approach from technology, or food, or you name it, and we go to work every day with an ability to come up with ideas,” Nocella told Skift. “Not every idea makes it to prime time, but we’re allowed to come up with ideas.” Just a decade ago, United lagged behind rivals American Airlines and Delta Air Lines when it came to profits and customer satisfaction. But following an activist campaign and shaking up the carrier’s leadership with Scott Kirby as CEO, United now makes up the bulk of the U.S. airline industry’s profits along with Delta. Nocella, who joined United from American, said part of the appeal of the move was the ability to build the carrier up. “There were a lot of people saying, ‘Well, United was always going to be third place,’” he said. “I saw the true building block for what United had, including its team, but also the amazing route network. And it just needed a little bit of elbow grease, as they say, a little bit of shine in, and I knew what the potential was on day one that I got here.” — Meghna Maharishi 25. Amala Duggirala Delta Air Lines, Chief Digital and Technology Officer Since taking over as chief technology officer at Delta in January, Amala Duggirala has been overseeing one of the largest technological transformations at one of the most profitable airlines in the U.S. Delta has been integrating AI into every layer of its operations, from piloting a concierge service on its app to distributing and routing bags on connecting flights. To get a feel for the job, Duggirala has spent the past few months shadowing every business function at Delta with a goal to build tools that make employees’ jobs easier and personalize the travel experience for customers. She wants to make sure employees on the frontlines are armed with the right tools to know everything about each customer. “We are on a journey where we can give that information to them on our fingertips, so that we know everything about you,” she said. “When we are serving you, we can actually greet you the right way. We know exactly what you are calling about to be able to provide that service to you in a very personalized fashion.” Much of her philosophy around AI mirrors that of Delta CEO Ed Bastian, who has cautioned about its overuse in the airline industry. “Unless the AI agents are going to be flying the airplanes or providing surveys, I don’t think it changes our equation,” Bastian said in an episode of the podcast “Rapid Response.” At the end of the day, a relationship with an airline is personal.” Duggirala said even as other airlines also adopt emerging technologies to personalize customer experiences, she thinks balancing that innovation with a human touch will keep Delta ahead of its competitors. “Our service and our people will be our true differentiator, no matter how the technology is,” she said. — Meghna Maharishi METHODOLOGY Which travel builders get to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the greats of these past eras? That’s an awfully tough question to answer. But it’s just what we built (pun intended) our Power Ranking: The Builders methodology to answer. The first step of our methodology was to short-list the builders themselves. Skift’s editorial and research team nominated builders across our sector and finalized 25 to be evaluated across a structured set of metrics. Once the short list was established, each builder was evaluated across five key dimensions: Substitutability/Infrastructure: This metric measures how essential the product being built is to the travel industry. Our short-hand for this was what we call our “72-hour test.” What would happen to travel if this tool broke for 72-hours? Easily substitutable products received low scores while essential industry infrastructure received the maximum score. Novelty of construction: How innovative is this product? Has the builder created something on the cutting edge or just re-skinned some old tech with AI added as a marketing ploy. This score helps surface companies doing something novel. Builder attribution: Since this is a builders list, not just a company list, we included a score for how much of an active role the named builder played in creating new products/tools/services. The more of an individual footprint that the builder brought to their product, the higher the score they received in this category. Scale and investment: How big is what has been built? We measured this by transactions, customers, and capital investment, among other metrics. The bigger the product, the higher the score earned on this metric. Breadth of impact: How widespread is this technology and/or company? This is different from scale because you can have a large base of customers within a single sector or within a specific region. To receive full marks for this metric, the tool being built had to be both global and cross-sector. Each builder received a 1-5 score across each metric which was then weighted to create an aggregate score. Final scores were weighted as follows: Infrastructure (35%), novelty (20%), builder attribution (20%), scale (15%), and breadth (10%). Raw Score = (0.35×Infrastructure) + (0.20×Novelty) + (0.20×Attribution) + (0.15×Scale) + (0.10×Breadth) Final rankings were based on Raw Scores with editorial oversight. All scores underwent peer review. Outliers were double-checked to ensure integrity and consistency. Skift’s 2026 Power Rankings are sponsored by Turo. Hear from Turo’s Tim Rossanis on the future of mobility and what’s next for travel.