Announcing the Skift Live Tourism Summit 2026: The Business of the Live Economy
On September 22, 2026, at North Javits in New York City, Skift will convene more than 80 senior leaders for the inaugural Skift Live Tourism Summit, a closed-door strategy forum built around one of the most consequential forces in travel: demand created by live moments.
Live tourism behaves nothing like traditional tourism. It organizes around moments rather than places, opening travel corridors across cities, regions, and borders, and it is reshaping travel behavior in ways that carry measurable, long-term economic impact. The operators reading that shift are already building lasting value from it. The rest are still treating each moment as a one-off on the calendar.
That gap between the live experience and the strategy is what the Skift Live Tourism Summit exists to close.
When live tourism becomes a structural part of the demand picture, the questions change. How do you plan for demand driven by live experiences? How do you support travelers when a single event draws global attention? How do you recover service and reputation when demand tests every system at once? And how do destinations, venues, and travel platforms coordinate when each holds a different piece of the same visitor?
These are the calls the people in this room are already making. The Summit is built to sharpen them.
The format favors operator dialogue, original research, and applied frameworks over stage-heavy programming. It is a working session, sized and closed, so senior leaders can compare notes candidly and leave with frameworks they can act on.
Running through it: original Skift Research separating the myths from the data on what live tourism delivers, and curated roundtables where the room pressure-tests what is actually working and where greater coordination between travel and the sports and entertainment sector can unlock new opportunities.
Who’s in the Room
Attendance is reserved for senior executives shaping how live moments influence travel, destinations, and economic growth. The Summit brings together leaders from destination organizations, hospitality, aviation, sports, entertainment, travel platforms, venue operators, event organizers, and the public sector.
With the room capped and the guest list curated, the value is as much in who you sit beside as in what reaches the stage.
Why Skift Live Tourism Summit
The 2026 calendar is stacked with the kind of moments that will define the next decade of demand, and the leaders deciding how to capture that value are the ones you will be sitting across from. This Summit is presented by Live Nation, a driving force behind the global shift toward live tourism, which puts the room a seat away from the engine itself.
Skift Live Tourism Summit runs the afternoon of September 22 and rolls directly into the opening night reception of Skift Global Forum, positioning you for the industry’s most important week from the first hour.
Live tourism is already reshaping your market. The only question is whether you help set the terms or inherit them.
