Brands Must Meet the Five Imperatives of Travel.

Without Transformation, Scale Alone Cannot Deliver Future Value.

Travel has rebounded to a $7.7 trillion contributor to the global economy, nearly 10% of global GDP, with 1.2 billion arrivals in 2023 approaching pre-pandemic levels. Yet the industry’s leading names are conspicuously absent from the world’s most valuable brand rankings. Hilton fell off Interbrand’s Best Global Brands in 2001, Marriott only appeared once in 2008, while Airbnb has surged to become the fastest-rising brand globally in 2023. The paradox is stark: a thriving sector in scale, but failing to translate into enduring brand value.

The comparison with Kodak is unavoidable. Once a byword for cultural moments, it collapsed not because it failed to invent, but because it misunderstood where value shifted, from cameras to online sharing. Travel risks its own Kodak moment. Operators remain stuck in crisis mode: moving fleets, managing supply, and minimizing costs rather than redefining demand. This operational mindset, born of pandemic disruption, compounded by conflict, energy volatility, and regulatory headwinds, has created a race to the bottom where experience, service, and differentiation flatten.

Competitive advantage will not emerge from squeezing margins or chasing volume. It will come from human-centric transformation, reframing travel as Explore. Five imperatives, leadership, ecosystem, experience, assets, and identification, define whether brands preserve relevance or drift into commoditized service.

Leadership: From Survival to Stewardship

Leadership in Explore is defined not by compliance but by foresight. Travel brands are now more trusted than many institutions, and with that trust comes responsibility. The $8 trillion sector has outsized consequences for biodiversity, communities, and global value chains. Leadership requires balancing prosperity with preservation, proving that environmental and social responsibility can be more profitable than extractive models.

Aman Resorts shows how global luxury can coexist with local authenticity, delivering consistent service while embedding cultural heritage in each location. Virtualtrips demonstrates how technology extends access while reducing ecological strain, offering VR tours that lower the need for carbon-intensive journeys. These are not marginal innovations; they represent a shift from profitability to prosperity, where the planet is treated as product.

Brands that lead on stewardship are rewarded with cultural legitimacy, consumer loyalty, and regulatory favor. Those that continue to externalize costs, eroding ecosystems, ignoring social equity, will see growth evaporate under activist, regulatory, and market pressure. Leadership is now a growth model, not a CSR add-on.

Ecosystems and Collaboration

Travel brands operate within ecosystems that are increasingly political, technological, and activist-driven. Governments set standards on sustainable transport, incentivize renewable adoption, and reshape tourism policy. NGOs like WWF and Greenpeace mobilize consumer sentiment against unsustainable practices, while advocacy groups such as Travelers Against Plastic reframe what travelers expect.

Collaboration is no longer optional. Airlines, cities, and regulators are working together to integrate sustainable aviation fuels, electric and hydrogen transport, and circular infrastructure. Virgin Atlantic’s Flight100, a London to New York crossing powered entirely by sustainable aviation fuel, was not a single brand achievement but a consortium effort, involving Boeing, Rolls-Royce, and research institutions. The precedent is clear: radical partnerships accelerate innovation faster than isolated investments.

Brands that embed themselves in these ecosystems capture subsidies, policy alignment, and cultural authority. Those that do not are left reactive, constrained by frameworks others have already shaped. In Explore, ecosystem participation is not collaboration for its own sake; it is the mechanism by which market rules are written.

Experience: Reinventing the Journey

Experience has long been travel’s differentiator, but the pandemic shifted its terms permanently. Business travel volumes remain 10–20% smaller than pre-2020. The U.S. Travel Association estimates poor service cost 18 million trips and $52 billion in 2023, as travelers avoid stress-inducing processes. Two-thirds of passengers rate air travel on par with bureaucratic frustration. This is the cost of a survival mindset.

Experience advantage now depends on delivering personalization, convenience, and sustainability. Amex GBT and Harvard Business Review research into 425 U.S. professionals found that business trips increasingly serve internal collaboration, not just sales, a signal that brands must reframe value propositions around new motivations. Technology is pivotal: AR and VR are reshaping destination discovery, biometric systems are redefining check-ins, and AI assistants are customizing itineraries in real time.

At the same time, customers demand trust in how their data and their carbon footprints are managed. GDPR-compliant systems, encrypted platforms, and transparent sustainability reporting have become essential parts of “experience.” The brands that invest in these layers create new loyalty levers; those that delay will continue to lose demand, market by market, trip by trip.

Brand Equity Anchors in Operational Integrity

In Explore, brand equity is anchored in operational integrity. Consumers and investors expect disclosure across manufacturing, safety, supply chains, and emissions. Aviation has shown how quickly lapses in production can corrode trust; infrastructure bottlenecks expose systemic risk. The only response is asset transparency embedded into brand strategy.

Carbon accounting is no longer niche. Offset pricing for flights, emissions visibility in ride-shares, and disclosure of circular practices are now minimum expectations.

Paris-aligned reporting requirements are forcing disclosures not just on ambitions but on measurable progress. Companies that align governance and reporting with brand identity are rewarded with trust and preference.

The outcome is a reframing of assets as brand currency. Trust in disclosures lowers reputational risk, secures investor confidence, and differentiates choice. Brands that fail to integrate accountability will not simply risk fines; they will commoditize their offer by erasing any meaningful distinction in the market.

Identification: Codes That Carry Legitimacy

Brand codes once symbolized aspiration. Today they carry cultural weight, judged on inclusion and environmental relevance. Virgin Atlantic’s 2022 uniform reform, allowing staff to choose attire consistent with their identity, stretched codes to reflect contemporary values. NEOM, still under construction, is investing in a visual language that foregrounds biodiversity and natural heritage, embedding sustainability into its identity from inception.

The risk is clear: unrefreshed codes become icons of over-tourism and climate harm. Logos and uniforms that once inspired adventure can quickly be read as signals of exploitation if they ignore cultural responsibility. Codes that evolve, however, transform identity into leadership. They create emotional connection not just by aesthetics but by proving alignment with the values of travelers and communities alike.

Moving Forward

Reframe Leadership Around Prosperity: Elevate environmental and cultural stewardship into the core business model, with explicit accountability tied to growth metrics. Without this shift, brands remain locked in cycles of cost-cutting and declining service.

• Design Ecosystem Advantage: Proactively build alliances with regulators, NGOs, technology partners, and even competitors to accelerate sustainable aviation fuel, integrated transport, and plastic-free supply chains. Waiting for mandates forfeits first-mover advantage.

• Rebuild Experience As A Growth Driver: Make personalization, data protection, and service quality inseparable from demand. Brands that set new norms through biometric efficiency, AI-driven customization, and seamless journeys will capture pricing power.

• Make Asset Transparency Non-Negotiable: Disclose supply chain integrity, safety standards, and emissions with rigor. Carbon accounting and circular practices reduce reputational risk and attract capital. Non-disclosure will exclude laggards from consumer and investor consideration.

• Refresh Identity Codes Continuously: Treat codes as living systems that must evolve with inclusivity, sustainability, and cultural legitimacy. Static codes risk becoming icons of exploitation, while refreshed ones extend relevance across generations.

Taken together, these imperatives are a blueprint for value creation in Explore. Executives must embed them as the organizing principles of growth strategy, not as incremental fixes.

Bottom Line: Transformation Is The Survival Filter

The travel industry’s size will not protect it from irrelevance. Scale without legitimacy creates fragile brands, vulnerable to regulation, activism, and consumer abandonment. The Explore economy demands that leadership shifts from extractive models to prosperity-driven stewardship, that ecosystems become sites of radical collaboration, that experience is rebuilt as a loyalty engine, that assets are disclosed with full accountability, and that identity codes stretch to reflect cultural legitimacy.

Those who act decisively will convert responsibility into pricing power, regulatory alignment, and sustained brand value. Those who remain in survival mode will discover that margin optimization and operational efficiency are not substitutes for relevance.

The five imperatives are not optional; they are the conditions of participation in the future of travel.