What Travel Leaders Want to Resolve at Women Leading Travel Forum 2026
Photo Credit: Women Leading Travel
Skift Take
Every senior woman in travel is carrying the same open questions into a volatile year. Women Leading Travel Forum is where those questions get pressure-tested by peers deciding the same things. Few seats left.
The Women Leading Travel Forum agenda reads like a list of the decisions keeping senior travel leaders up at night. How do you build a team that survives a talent market this volatile? What does the C-suite owe the directors coming up behind them? When do you open a community built on candor wider, and when do you hold the line that made it work? And how do you set direction when the competitive landscape keeps reshaping under you?
These are the calls that will define the next eighteen months for the women running hospitality, aviation, cruise, and destination organizations. They form the spine of three days in New Orleans, June 8 through 10.
What's on the Agenda
Quendrida Whitmore opens with a working blueprint for corporate members for attracting and advancing talent, while retention sits at the top of every board's risk register.
A rising star panel led by Travelzoo's Lisa Oswald puts the managing-up problem in the open, with young leaders from Hilton, Soho House, and Louis Armstrong Airport naming what they need from leadership to stay and grow.
In the featured debate, Kristie Goshow of Loews Hotel & Co. and executive performance coach Courtney Seard take opposite sides of the question this community keeps circling: stay women-only, or evolve to include male allies.
Carnival Cruise Line's Christine Duffy, Visit Philadelphia's Angela Val, and Marriott International's Diana Plazas-Trowbridge close the event by laying out how they steer through economic uncertainty, shifting traveler behavior, and a reshaped competitive landscape.
What's at Stake
Talent strategy, succession, and the structure of your own leadership network compound over time. Read what your rising directors need correctly, and you keep them in a market where replacing them costs more than retaining them. Misjudge where the industry is heading, and you spend 2026 reacting while competitors set direction. These calls rarely get tested against peers facing identical pressure before leaders have to make them.
What to Expect
The peer breakouts, coaching workshops, wellness programming and cocktail receptions turn onstage insight into applied decisions. You leave with answers shaped by women who hold the same title and the same problems you do, and with a network you will call long after the event ends.
Women Leading Travel Forum 2026 runs June 8 to 10 in New Orleans. Only a few seats left. If these are your questions, this is the week to be in the room where they get answered.