Hosts Global Forum convened in Athens to celebrate ferocious creativity
Destination Management Companies (DMCs) embody a wealth of resources for planners, helping with access for everything from transportation and entertainment to decor and gifting. They are strategic partners who can help build a program based on client goals and budgets. All of that was on display this week in Greece at the historic Hotel Grande Bretagne Athens as partners and clients gathered for Hosts Global Forum.
Kurt Paben, CEO of Hosts Global, an international collection of local experts, set the stage from a dinner at the Acropolis Museum with the glowing Parthenon in the background. “Hosts Global Forum is all about connection, discovery, learning and fun,” he said.
Attendees celebrated the power of creating “goosebump moments” and managing operational challenges while learning more about the birthplace of democracy.
The landmark gathering also included social giveback moments and a sustainability initiative thanks to the planting of 2,035 trees, enough to remove 303,000 kg of Co2 from the atmosphere by Zeero Events. In lieu of a room gift, Host Global made a donation to SOS Children’s Village in Vari, Greece, another example of how the DMC helps clients find aligned ways to give back locally all over the world.
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In a fast-paced agenda built based on attendee feedback, the group explored the future of incentive travel and how AI could help everyone plan smarter.
Read More: How AI is Revolutionizing Travel and Events
Standing in the ballroom at Hotel Grande Bretagne, Pádraic Gilligan, SITE head of marketing and co-founder of the Irish-based SoolNua consultancy company, called this time, “an inflection moment in history not unlike the Renaissance or the Age of Enlightenment.”
He acknowledged that an epoch of change brings opportunity and fear because everything we have done in the past may not work any more.
Uncertainty seemed to be the word of the day. He pointed to a joint SITE-IRF study that showed 32% of Western Europeans saying in 2024 that they didn’t know what to expect in 2026. “The unrelenting growth interrupted by Covid that came roaring back afterward is now in question,” he said.
Part of the reason budgets have become more challenging is a shift to cover hotel and airline costs away from activities and agency fees. “The spend for a destination experience that makes a trip unique going down is not good for anyone, including the attendee,” he said.
“Incentive travel should be a unique, bucket list transformative experience that makes a fundamental difference in the lives of our attendees,” he added. Increasingly that means finding fresh locations that groups have not used before.
Read More: Incentive Travel 2025: Trends, Challenges and Opportunities
Gilligan also shared data that showed a polarized approach to the existential crisis of climate change between the U.S. and Europe. “It is important that as the wind starts to blow in another direction, we don’t go that way as well. We need to stand strong,” he concluded.
The reluctant Futurist—or Now-ist as he prefers to be called—Henry Coutinho-Mason quoted Jeff Bezos in encouraging event designers to think about what isn’t changing. We are the same humans with the same basic human need for connection as the people who built the Theatre of Dionysus, he suggested. “People who understand people will always win.”
What could help everyone win, he said, is the thoughtful implementation of AI, not to take over half the jobs, but to remove the redundant, BS portions of jobs so people can be more creative and learn faster in concert with multimodal AI. “Use AI to learn faster and perform better in the moment for richer, more relevant human connections,” he suggested.
“People who understand people will always win.”
– Henry Coutinho-Mason
“We can only create the future we are able to imagine,” he concluded.
The 2026 Hosts Global Forum will go to the ends of the earth to uncover more essential meeting truths by gathering in Alaska as guests of Alaska Destination Specialists.
