Music boom towns, sports tourism growth, and the rise of GEO for travel brands

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.