Challenge Archives - Page 2 of 2

Qantas Launches Sales Challenge With an Educational Tour in Australia

July 9, 2026 by Amara Nambinga

Qantas lance un challenge de ventes avec un éductour en Australie - DepositPhotos.com, Gudella

IFTM

Qantas invites travel agents to try to win a spot for an exclusive edu-tour in Australia, by taking part in its new challenge, based on Australia sales achieved between the September 1, 2025 and March 1, 2026.

The applications must include a Qantas flight – QF33/QF34 from Paris or QF1/QF2/QF9/QF10 from London – as well as at least one night in Western Australia and one night in Victoria.

Agents must submit their PNRs or ticket numbers to Qantas France no later than March 2, 2026.

This challenge accompanies the ramp-up of the Paris – Perth route operated three times per week by the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, as well as the Qantas Explorer program enabling access to more than 60 Australian destinations.

Also read: Qantas appoints John Simeone as General Manager of International Sales

Qantas Challenge: Participation Criteria and Finalist Selection

To qualify, participants must register via the dedicated form after their first sale, be certified Aussie Specialist and have completed the Victoria, and the Western Australia modules, as well as those for Melbourne and Perth on the Qantas Learning Hub.

Tourism Australia will verify the eligibility of the predefined profiles based on the sales validated by Qantas.

The eight selected agents will be announced in early March 2026 and will participate in a fam trip combining Melbourne, Victoria, Perth and the Coral Coast, including nature experiences, sightseeing, cruises, snorkeling and the discovery of Australian wildlife.

Travel Explorer Motivates Agencies with a Sales Challenge

July 9, 2026 by Amara Nambinga

Translating sales challenge

I need to translate this into fluent English. The original French phrase is, "lance un grand challenge de ventes dédié aux circuits avec extensions." It looks like it could translate to something like, "Travel Explorer launches a major sales challenge dedicated to escorted tours with extensions." I want to capture the essence while making it sound natural in English. Let me finalize this and ensure it’s clear and engaging for the user!Translating travel promotion details

I need to translate some French text into clear English. The first part says that until January 31, 2026, travel agents can win trips for two to iconic locations, like the American West or the Yucatán Walk. Next, the principle highlights that each sale of an extended tour through a specific form gives an extra chance to win. Lastly, for eligibility, agents must declare at least one Voyamar and one Héliades file, with only bookings through Travel Explorer counting.Deciding on terminology

I’m thinking about which term to use for translating "dossier." I’m leaning toward "case" for a formal tone, so it would be "at least one Voyamar case and one Héliades case." However, I realize "Voyamar" is a brand, and saying "Voyamar file" feels awkward. Maybe "Voyamar booking" is better.

As for the French phrase about sales, I can simply translate that to "only sales made through Travel Explorer are considered."

Pioneers Forum 2026: Egypt Faces the Uncertainty Challenge

June 18, 2026 by Amara Nambinga

L’Égypte, une destination emblématique du tourisme international, aujourd’hui engagée dans une nouvelle phase de transformation © IStock

Top of Travel

This 24th edition will bring together 130 sector leaders — tour operators, distributors, hoteliers, transporters, institutions, technology experts, insurers — around a market that alone concentrates a large share of the tourism industry’s current challenges. Post-crisis recovery, fierce competitive pressure, price wars, the role of air travel, evolving customer expectations, and the weight of geopolitical context: Egypt today concentrates many of the questions professionals are asking.

As the sector must learn to move forward in an increasingly unstable environment, the choice of Egypt takes on its full significance. For the destination, what is at stake is not merely a grand travel narrative, but a practical demonstration of what it takes today to restart momentum, refine a positioning, and adapt a tourism model to a shifting context.

A destination that blends heritage and transformation

Egypt stands as a benchmark in international tourism. Few destinations concentrate such a density of heritage, culture, and symbolic significance. Millennia-old sites along the Nile’s banks and the Red Sea’s coastal resorts make the country a premier choice for many travelers.

Today, the destination no longer rests solely on its heritage: it has embarked on a profound transformation of its tourism model. It must both capitalize on its fundamentals and meet new expectations that are increasingly demanding: quality of experience, clarity of the offering, smoothness of itineraries, and diversification of products.

In 2024, it already reached a record with 15.78 million visitors. In 2025, it pushed further, welcoming nearly 19 million tourists, a 21% year-over-year rise, exceeding even the goals announced a few months earlier by the authorities.

These figures position Egypt as a genuine case study. First, because they illustrate an exceptional rebound capacity after years marked by crises. Second, because they show that the recovery does not rely on a single engine. Charter traffic to Egyptian destinations rose by 32% in 2025. The country’s archaeological sites and museums, excluding NMEC and the Grand Egyptian Museum, welcomed 18.6 million visitors, a 33.5% increase year over year.

Led by the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, this evolution rests on several structural axes: modernization of infrastructure, upgrading of the offer, diversification of experiences, and strategic repositioning on the international stage. The full opening of the Grand Egyptian Museum fits this logic: a country seeking to reaffirm its place on the international tourism stage by renewing how it tells its story and how visitors experience it.

This dynamic must also be read in a context of intense competition. Egypt operates in markets where comparisons with Turkey, Tunisia, Morocco, or Greece are immediate, and where the value-for-money proposition is decisive again. In the French market, the destination rose 26% in Orchestra’s August 2025 index, driven in particular by a lower average spend. Once again, the message is clear: the recovery exists, but it is also built through commercial, pricing, and distribution battles.

A coordinated mobilization of the destination’s actors

The arrival of the 2026 Pioneers Forum fits within a collective momentum driven by several key players in the sector, whose roles deserve closer scrutiny.

The Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities occupies a central place. This is not merely institutional support, but a true strategic actor. Behind the 2025 results lies a political will to strengthen the country’s attractiveness, accelerate investments, expand hotel capacity, and better structure the tourism offering. The ministry thus carries a long-term vision, aiming to continue elevating the destination in the years ahead.

EgyptAir, as the national carrier, represents a central challenge for any tourism destination: accessibility. In a market where air travel directly shapes flows, competitiveness, and the ability to sustain volumes, its role is decisive.

Travel Evasion, Egypt specialist, provides essential operational expertise. Its on-the-ground knowledge helps reveal the destination’s diversity beyond rhetoric. Travel Evasion is committed to showcasing the country’s variety through itineraries that weave culture, cruises, and seaside experiences. It’s this type of expertise that helps reveal a destination beyond clichés and makes it legible for both professionals and travelers.

The coordination of these actors also illustrates a fundamental shift in the industry: a destination’s performance relies less on mere renown and more on the quality of coordination among institutions, carriers, and operators. Egypt thus offers a particularly compelling example of a collective approach to building tourism competitiveness.

Rethinking models in an uncertain context

The 2026 theme, “steering the uncertain”, will find a particularly relevant echo in Egypt.

In tourism, steering the uncertain means continuing to plan, sell, invest, reassure, and arbitrate even as parameters can evolve very quickly: geopolitical tensions, perceived safety concerns, economic fluctuations, demand shifts, dependence on aviation, price pressures, changes in buying behavior, and the rising influence of technologies like artificial intelligence.

Egypt crystallizes precisely these challenges. The destination has demonstrated a genuine ability to restart its tourism momentum, win back markets, and rebuild its appeal. Yet it remains exposed to the factors that today drive the sector’s fragility: a sensitive regional context, strong price competition, reliance on connectivity, and an image that external factors can rapidly affect.

That is why it constitutes a particularly fitting case for the Pioneers: Egypt does not merely endure uncertainty, it engages with it. It adjusts its offer, strengthens its infrastructure, improves accessibility, invests in new markers of desirability, and tries to transform vulnerability into adaptability. This trajectory speaks to actors far beyond the Egyptian case, because it raises a question that all tourism players face today: how to decide when not everything depends on you?

Observing how a destination like Egypt progresses in this complexity provides the 130 leaders present with material for reflection on their own practices, their models, their leeway, and their management tools.

Lors de cette 24e édition, les décideurs du tourisme pourront croiser leurs regards, confronter leurs expériences et mieux comprendre les dynamiques d’un secteur en mutation. © Jules Despretz / Forum des Pionniers 2025

We are eager to welcome the Pioneers back for this new edition, which promises to be ambitious, inspiring, and deeply connected to the sector’s realities.

There are only a few spots left for general attendees.

💌 Contact us.

Pioneers Forum 2026: Anticipating the Unpredictable — The Sector’s New Challenge

June 17, 2026 by Amara Nambinga

Le Forum des Pionniers : un format collaboratif pour confronter les visions, faire émerger des idées et co-construire des réponses opérationnelles. © Jules Despretz / Forum des Pionniers 2025

Top of Travel

From reaction to anticipation: a shift in posture

Travel has always been a sector exposed to vulnerability. And the profession has always known how to adapt—it’s even one of its strengths. But in recent years, the very nature of uncertainty has evolved. Disruptions have become more frequent, more simultaneous, and above all more structural. Reacting quickly is no longer enough. Most players have managed to cope, sometimes at a high cost to their teams and their margins. The real question now lies elsewhere: how to build organizations capable of foreseeing, modelling, and preparing themselves?

This shift is at the heart of the Forum des Pionniers 2026’s exchanges: moving from a reactive logic to a genuine culture of anticipation. The 24th edition is designed to explore together the terrains where this posture today makes a difference: geopolitics, climate, the economy, and the concentration of the sector.

Geopolitics: knowing your threshold before the next shake

Recent shocks have reminded us of one simple thing: in tourism, decisions are rarely made in comfort. Should we absorb fuel price hikes to protect customers and partners, or pass them through to protect margins? Two strategies, two bets, and often two different outcomes for the companies.

But beyond the decision itself, what distinguishes actors today is what they have prepared in advance. Knowing one’s breaking point, modelling the impact of a shock according to its duration (six weeks, three months, six months…) on margins, supplier contracts and teams: these exercises, long seen as theoretical, are becoming a real leadership skill. Anticipating means giving yourself the means to decide lucidly rather than improvise under pressure. And it also means knowing, in advance, at what moment an adaptation strategy becomes a survival strategy.

Climate: integrating a new geography into strategic decisions

Climate risk has long been treated as a branding issue, or as a marketing argument to mobilize occasionally. It now directly informs operational decisions. Allocations, pricing grids, partner choices, positioning during certain periods: the commercial mechanics of travel rest on seasonality assumptions that no longer hold quite as they used to.

Anticipating here means being willing to revisit parameters long considered stable. Reexamining the place of certain Mediterranean zones in midsummer, watching the rise of shoulder seasons, adjusting dialogues with local hosts who, too, see their trade evolving. It also means anticipating the forthcoming repercussions on travel insurance, on airlines’ investment policies, on the very value of certain destinations over a five- to ten-year horizon. For a few players, this work is already well advanced. For many, it is just beginning.

Economy: capturing value where it moves

Customer behavior is changing, and it is changing rapidly. People travel as much as before, but book later. They look more at France and nearby destinations. They arbitrate differently between duration, distance, and budget.

Yet riding a trend and seizing it are not the same thing. Some players overinvested in long-haul in the post-Covid years, and today find themselves rebuilding positions on proximity destinations they had long considered less profitable. Others, more ahead in market reading, have already repositioned their product mix, adjusted pricing for customers who book later, and are crafting new narratives around territories we thought we knew.

Anticipating the movement of value is not about following the trend a year late; it is about staying ahead of it. Betting, sometimes uncomfortable, that what seems marginal today will be central tomorrow. And above all, accepting that tomorrow’s strategy will not resemble yesterday’s.

Concentration: positioning yourself before the landscape changes

Every major tourism crisis has accelerated concentration. The current sequence follows the same mechanism: widening gaps in resilience among players, shifts between those who managed to secure their margins and those who struggle to rebuild their reserves, opportunities for consolidation multiplying.

The question is no longer whether consolidation will occur. It is how each player wishes to participate. A desirable target, consolidator, strategic partner: these are positions prepared in advance, in market reading, in the robustness of the business model, in the clarity of the vision. Those who anticipate these moves today, who face them head-on rather than with worry, gain a head start over those who will discover the landscape only once it has been recomposed.

In every segment, one model survives and strengthens. Identifying that model, knowing whether we fit into it, outlining our trajectory for the years to come: these are decisions that cannot be made in the heat of the moment, and certainly not alone.

About ESCAET and Travel-Insight

Pioneers Forum 2026: AI, a New Leadership Challenge for Tourism Leaders

June 16, 2026 by Amara Nambinga

Au Forum des Pionniers, les dirigeants du tourisme confrontent leurs visions sur les transformations qui recomposent leurs métiers. © Jules Despretz / Forum des Pionniers 2025

Top of Travel

A Quiet Revolution, Yet Profound

Two or three years ago, AI in tourism was for many simply a matter of technological watch. Demos were watched, chatbots were tested, and questions were raised about possible uses. Today, the tools are deployed, teams are using them, and early feedback is beginning to outline a reality more nuanced than the initial promises.

AI hasn’t revolutionized everything all at once. It settles quietly, in successive layers, into very different functions. Destination risk monitoring, customer guidance, automation of repetitive tasks, compliance in business travel: in each area, it adds value, but it also moves something. Part of professional judgment, part of decision-making, a certain relationship to the craft.

It is this shift, more than the technology itself, that the Forum des Pionniers 2026 will explore. A 24th edition to understand how AI quietly reshapes four structural dimensions of the sector: risk monitoring, customer guidance, team management, and the steering of business travel.

Risk Monitoring: How to Use AI Effectively to Truly Protect

Tourism is one of the sectors most exposed to external crises. Conflicts, climate events, health alerts, diplomatic tensions: recent months have reminded us of this. And atop this exposure there is now growing regulatory pressure, turning monitoring into a genuine obligation. In the face of this double challenge, AI now promises an unprecedented protective capability: it aggregates weak signals, models scenarios, and raises real-time alerts. Dedicated tools can now evaluate a destination’s risk in minutes, where previously human monitoring took days.

But using it well requires understanding its legal and operational levers, its strengths and its weaknesses. Canceling a program six weeks before departure, covering a fuel-price increase over six months, maintaining a destination when authorities partially discourage it: these trade-offs remain human, often solitary, and largely irreversible. AI sees, sorts, alerts. It is the leader who bears the responsibility. And in this new setup, a question naturally enters boardrooms: at what point can we say we have “listened” to AI, and at what point does the opposite decision become hard to defend?

Guidance: When AI Prepares, Human Judgment Reclaims Its Role

The travel advisor profession has always rested on a skill that’s hard to automate: listening, understanding, and anticipating what the client does not yet know how to express. AI today is deeply restructuring this work. From understanding the client’s need to delivering a relevant offer, models quietly transform every step of the booking process, without the traveler, or sometimes the seller, noticing. The search for content is reinvented, old filtering criteria become obsolete, and teams adopt the tools quickly enough.

But this new organization of work profoundly changes the place of humans in the sales act. When AI prepares a recommendation, it’s not that expertise vanishes; it’s the advisory time that is freed up. The question remains what to do with it. A simple quality check of what the algorithm produced? Or, on the contrary, a revalorization of judgment, centered on what the machine cannot see: hesitation, unspoken desire, an unvoiced family constraint? The answer is neither fixed, nor identical across organizations. But it is what will largely determine the value advisory can command in the years to come.

Outils de veille, de recommandation, de productivité : l'IA s'invite désormais dans le quotidien des dirigeants du tourisme. © iStock

Teams: AI Quietly Reshapes Jobs

AI often takes root in organizations from the top: strategic decision, chosen tool, planned rollout, expected adoption. But it’s at the bottom that things actually change. The advisor who finds their brief shortened. The marketing team discovering that its content can be generated in seconds. The back office whose tasks are automated without having been given time to discuss it with them.

AI does not brutally destroy jobs; it quietly reshapes roles. And it is precisely this silence that can gradually generate resistance, disengagement, and a loss of meaning. For leaders, the question is no longer only about choosing the right tool. It is about whether teams were involved, listened to, and supported before deployment. It is also about what to do with the time freed by automation, and who decides how it is used. Upskilling, reallocation of workload, headcount reduction? Three answers, three different companies, and three managerial cultures that reveal themselves as AI arrives.

Business Travel: Between Technological Promises and On-the-Ground Realities

Business travel is perhaps the arena where AI promises are strongest: massive data, codified processes, travel policies to enforce — everything seems assembled for an ideal application. And yet, 60% of large French companies still do not know how to exploit the volumes of data they generate.

This is the paradox. Between disappointing chatbots and AI audits with ROI now proven, the gap between the technological promise and the field reality is almost never technical. It is organizational. Identifying where AI truly creates value, laying the right foundations now, and not confusing deployment with adoption: these are decisions that do not happen by accident. And those who make them today will avoid paying tomorrow the price of delay.