No Show

Jeff Borman is back, and he is welcomed by math. This week on No Show, he and Matt Brown trade favorite travel numbers of 2026 including:

🌐 What it costs to fuel a cross-country flight

🌐 How airlines cash in on loyalty and lounge crowds

🌐 What happens when budget competition disappears

🌐 How much time hidden fees steal from us

Plus TV-inspired vacations, cruise lines thinking beyond the boat, tourism’s missing seat in government, and a national parks number that measures travel in hours instead of dollars.

Break out the travel glassware and vermouth atomizers, Michael Trager is going to help us untangle the facts and myths of loyalty programs, Vegas visitation, and lounge waiting times.

Michael is founder of TravelZork and ZorkFest, casino loyalty obsessive, luxury travel expert, and the man better known by his superhero name as “The Baccarat Guy.” We'll talk:

• Whether Vegas is still selling something people want to buy
• The biggest lie we tell ourselves about airline miles
• Caviar on planes
• Why airport lounges are a mess
• The ridiculous work required to use your credit card perks
• What the best loyalty programs get right
• Why baccarat is worth your time, literally

Carley Montgomery advises luxury boutique hotels, wellness properties, and retreats on how to transition away from superficial amenities and toward genuine, deeply restorative guest environments. She joins No Show to talk:

• Nothingness, boredom, and silence are features not bugs
• The relentlessness of biohacking trends
• The overlooked signals of a truly restorative space 
• Why small, lower-end properties are well-positioned for restorative hospitality
• Her new book The Restorative Power of Place: How Travel and Hospitality Can Help Us Rest, Recover, and Reconnect 
• Why buildings that "breathe" are worth a look.

Legendary theme park executive and International Theme Park Services founder Dennis Speigel joins No Show to talk about the economics of amusement, the widening divide between regional and destination parks, and why the industry still draws more Americans than all major professional sports combined.

We also talk about:

• Meeting Dolly Parton and how Dollywood became a phenomenon
• How much new rides cost the parks
• The nuttiest concept that made it to the feasibility phase (think firearms)
• Building parks in emerging markets
• How repeat visitation drives nearly everything parks do
• Why food trucks could be the next big park trend
• How hotels are changing regional parks
• Riding the same rollercoaster 33 straight times

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.