Travel & Tourism: It's a Blockbuster End to WTM London 2025

World Travel Market London 2025 closed with a high-profile fireside chat, this year featuring an Oscar-nominated British actor sharing his love of travel with a senior member of the UK government in front of a standing-room-only crowd.

Richard E Grant, nominated for an Oscar for Can You Ever Forgive Me? in 2019, talked travel with Sir Chris Bryant MP, recently appointed the UK’s minister of state for trade policy.

The wide-ranging discussion covered filming in UK stately homes, eating a bull’s testicles in a kibbutz and an awkward meeting with the King of Swaziland (now Eswatini) after a colleague failed to secure timely work permits for a film crew. 

Swaziland-born Grant, who has lived in the UK for 45 years, revealed he’s an avid traveller, in recent years taking solo trips with hand luggage only. This summer he visited eight different destinations across Africa and Europe. 

“I love it, absolutely love it. I like being on an aeroplane, I like getting to a city and just walking and not following Google Maps, just finding stuff I’d never have discovered by following where to go on Tripadvisor or Instagram… I find that very exciting and liberating,” he enthused.

He added that while working across the UK he walked and ran every day making him “a constant tourist.” And he revealed his top under the radar destination - a sticky toffee pudding factory in Bristol. 

Too many tourists, not enough SAF?

In a session entitled Rethinking Overtourism: Are we ready for real accountability? Aleix Rodriguez Brunsoms from Skift commented that recent anti-tourism protests in Southern Europe were aimed not at tourists themselves but at the tourism model. But he pointed out Europe receives nearly a quarter of global tourism volume.

Addressing the causes within the tourism industry he highlighted poorly managed air and bed capacity, seasonal funnelling by tour operators, and marketing efforts that didn’t tie up with a metric-based growth strategy. Meanwhile, external factors included the limitation of the school calendar and social media trendsetting.

Intrepid Travel’s Joanna Reeve said more collaboration was needed, with suppliers considering where and when they travelled, tackling unsociable behaviour and ensuring the money customers spent stayed local.

Typically, only 20% of customer spend stays in the destination, she pointed out.

However, Reeve struck an optimistic note by saying the operator saw the market for authentic, sustainable experiences “coming towards us.”

Malta Tourism Authority is now looking at visitor spend rather than volume said Tolene van der Merwe. “It’s about locals understanding the value of tourism and visitors understanding the value of the culture,” she said.

She also highlighted the success of a recent initiative which requires visitors to the Instagram favourite the Blue Lagoon to reserve free tickets in advance. It has reduced numbers from 12,000 at one time to 4,000.

Chris Fair, President & CEO, Resonance Consultancy, said of tourism protests: “Travel has been a bit of a target for social and economic discontent.” However, he thought considering the wellbeing of locals in tourism areas should be part of a destination’s strategy. “We need a more holistic approach to how we measure tourism. That will be the first step in how we manage it better in future.”

He added if tourism was seen as contributing to local quality of life, the industry would earn a seat at the table of destinations’ wider planning discussions.

A later session considered where the responsibility for funding sustainable power for aviation and fuel fell.

“The problem with SAF scale up is there isn’t enough of it… and the cost,” said Jane Thompson of ICF, adding that sustainable fuel currently costs three to five times more than fossil fuel. And she pointed out: “Wind power required strong government support at the outset… government support [for scaling SAF] is absolutely vital …it is a very nascent industry.”

Nico Nicholas of Zeero Group said that anyone in the tourism “chain of supply” had a responsibility to invest and the industry should be proactive now to get ahead of fines for fossil fuel use coming on the horizon.

“Ponant has the ethos that sustainability is what we have to do to carry on working as a company,” said Anthony Daniels of Ponant and The Expedition Cruise Network. He added: “there’s a bit of a race to who creates the first zero emissions ship and I think that’s great.”

Hans Rood of Transcend Cruises highlighted the disconnect between Corporate Social Responsibility and customer willingness to pay. This theme was picked up by Munnmunn Marwah of Thinkstrawberries who added affordability was customers’ overriding concern. She suggested loyalty benefits might help entice further take up.

Artificial intelligence keeps it real

AI continued to make its presence felt across the final day. Ani Attamian from LEMA Collective raised the issue of the “guardrails” that companies adopting AI need to consider, identifying eight clearly defined areas, from vendor and platform vetting through to data privacy, retention and deletion policies.

“Companies need to be clear about these guardrails and to keep them in mind as they build out their AI presence,” she said.

Another session, provocatively titled “The death of distribution?”, touched on one area of AI that is often overlooked – the cost in cash terms for businesses using enterprise AI – and there was a rare difference of opinion.

Brian Reeves from Roomangel Foundation was confident that the costs would come down over the next twelve months as AI becomes more efficient. In contrast, Monish Luthra from Odyssey Solutions said that “Mark Zuckerberg is offering billion dollar packages to attract AI talent so he’s going to make sure it stays expensive”. Kathy Morgan from Sabre said that costs were more of a bump on the road rather than a blocker.

The panellists were in agreement that the death of distribution is not on the horizon, although distribution dynamics will change for the benefit of travellers.

Taking place at the same time, in a marketing session entitled AI Trends That Will Shape Travel Marketing, Dan Christian from Travel Trends Podcast seemingly went off-message, saying “AI is massively overhyped at the moment.” However, he qualified this statement by likening the situation to the early days of the dotcom boom. “The change is going to be profound and there are many ways to capitalise on it,” he said.

He suggested that tourist boards need to recognise how traveller behaviour is changing, with up to 70% of travellers using AI tools for planning holidays based on their prompts. “It’s a new internet,” he said.

He had good news for PRs who he considered would be “the backbone of AI visibility,” because the results returned by AI requests were greater from ‘earned’ rather than ‘bought’ media. He also warned that as sources quoted by AI were skewed towards the more recent, evergreen content would need regular updating.

Agentic AI that can plan, execute, monitor and adjust tasks automatically will shake up marketing team roles he also warned. “The reality for all of us is we’re going to be supervisors [rather than producers].”  

He concluded that trust and authenticity would win in an AI-saturated world, in which travellers would become sceptical of generic content. 

A new era for destinations

Elsewhere, a session looked at how live event tourism is now a “destination magnet”.  Kate Irwin from Skift referenced its proprietary research which found that 68% of global travellers start their trip planning with the experience rather than the destination.

Singapore is at the forefront of this shift, with the city-state seeing a significant boost to its tourism revenues thanks to its hosting of six Taylor Swift concerts and a Formula One race. Kershing Goh from the Singapore Tourist Board explained how live tourism and major events are part of a longer-term government strategy to change the global perception of Singapore to somewhere for the world to “live, work, invest and play”.

Both panellists advised other destinations to consider “alternative collaboration and partnership models” between event organisers, tourist boards and trade partners to not only attract live events but also to maintain momentum off the back of success.

Travel’s got talent

Students and young people seeking a role in travel should persevere with applications and network as much as possible, said speakers at the Institute of Travel & Tourism’s Future You careers event.

Kate Irwin from Skift was on this panel too. She offered 10 tips, ranging from ‘make all the mistakes’ and ‘fail loudly’ to ‘graft’ and ‘use humour’.

A panel debate with young people echoed her themes about the importance of persistence, drive and ambition: Gabriella Hayward explained how she gained a placement with travel safety consultancy Sanderson Phillips as part of her degree after she’d sent out about 200 applications; Harneet Singh Sachdev, from Black Diamond overcame rejections because of his need for a visa; Boris Bijlstra, co-founder of Hubby eSIM, switched from management consultancy McKinsey to become more entrepreneurial.

Claire Steiner, co-founder of the ITT’s Future You Foundation, urged delegates to make the most of opportunities offered by the ITT, including a “ground-breaking” new AI collaboration with SystemsX, helping young people to practise their employability skills.

TrendFest success

Thursday also saw the third and final day of TrendFest, WTM’s new feature with cultural showcases celebrating food, wellness, sport and adventure.

Over the course of WTM, delegates were able to relax with ‘Mindful Mornings’; watch dance performances from St Lucia, the Bahamas, Dominican Republic and Romania; and enjoy cooking demos from the likes of Croatia, Greece, Peru and Ecuador.

The space also enabled exhibitors to showcase vehicles, such as Sherbet Taxi Media – whose CEO Asher Moses and account manager Kery Kedze were on hand to discuss new developments – and the Snowman Afternoon Tea Bus, promoted by Dominic Wong from Golden Tours/Gray Line London.

Esther Indut Luat, from the Sarawak Tourism Board, was also at TrendFest with a host of handicrafts to publicise Sarawak’s culture and the state’s tagline: ‘Gateway to Borneo’.

Other features at TrendFest included massage chairs, a Wanderlust photography competition, and a selection of food stalls.