ITB Berlin is offering the global tourism community even more high-quality themed content in the form of newsroom articles, podcast episodes and other innovative formats. Every month, ITB 360° devotes itself to another pressing headline topic aimed at attracting the industry’s attention and sparking discussion, including blended travel, LGBTQ+, the skills shortage, travel technology hypes and China’s travel market.

From 5 to 7 March 2024 ITB Berlin will be taking place live again on the Berlin Exhibition Grounds, providing a platform for the entire value chain of the travel industry. With ITB 360°, the World’s Leading B2B Travel Trade Show is hosting a new content concept that provides a year-round platform for the wide range of topics of the global travel and tourism industry. With ITB 360°, ITB Berlin offers the global travel community access to valuable industry knowledge, including interviews with experts, surveys, trends and other insights – and every month covers a new key topic. It incorporates the expertise and knowledge of all the international trade shows of the ITB brand family – including ITB Asia in Singapore, ITB China in Shanghai, ITB India in Mumbai as well as ITB Berlin, together with that of various international industry experts.

“As an internationally established brand with wide-ranging expertise in every tourism segment, ITB sets standards. With ITB 360°, we are pursuing an integrated content concept by offering the travel community outstanding events, expert knowledge, the latest trends and fascinating insights from around the world. By taking this approach we want to further strengthen our position as a global brand and to inspire, educate and inform the tourism community with first-class content throughout the year. Our extensive network of partners and experts enables us, as a platform for the global tourism industry, to begin a new chapter and communicate a comprehensive range of topics“, said Deborah Rothe, Exhibition Director, ITB Berlin.

ITB 360° kicked off in June with blended travel, currently a much talked-about headline topic. Here, ITB Berlin looked at whether bleisure is likely to be a new form of business travel, or whether it is a trend that in future will merely complement traditional holiday trips. A deep dive podcast episode with Euromonitor International examined the statistics behind the trend. Charlotte Lamp Davies, founder of A Bright Approach, and Stephen Dutton of Euromonitor debated whether the trend towards bleisure and workationing is already reflected in numbers, while an interview with Raoul Dery, founder and CEO of the startup Newworkation, looked at workations, an increasingly popular form of travel. He talked about what companies should consider when planning workations and why remote working is not just a passing fad. Click here for the podcast episode Deep Dive: Blended Travel with Euromonitor International and to the ITB Newsroom article with Newworkation: “Remote Work: What companies should consider when planning workations”.

In July, to mark International Pride Month, ITB Berlin will also be looking at LGBTQ+ Tourism. In the podcast episode entitled ’Low Hanging Fruit for entrepreneurship: Tourism’, Pavel Subrt, Co-founder of East meets West, and presenter Charlotte Lamp Davies, founder of A Bright Approach, will among other topics discuss how to successfully tap into the LGBTQ+ market in Eastern Europe.

In a series of brief podcasts entitled ’300 Seconds With’, together with leading industry experts Dirk Rogl, member of the ITB Berlin Board of Experts, will discuss the state of the travel industry. Lydia Li, Exhibition Director of ITB China, will talk about the belated easing of restrictions in China’s travel industry compared with other regions, and how that impacts the global travel industry. She will provide an insight into estimated travel volumes and growth rates for 2023, present Chinese travellers’ preferred destinations abroad, and talk about the importance of the domestic and foreign travel market. Charuta Fadnis, SVP Research Phocuswright, will present the destinations with the highest overall booking rates in 2022 as well as forecasts for 2023 and the years to come, and talk about the winners and losers among the service providers at destinations and in travel markets. Andreas Wulfes, CEO of Neusta Data Intelligence, will talk about overall developments in the German travel market in 2023 and compare them with the pre-pandemic era.

August will be devoted to the skills shortage, a pressing issue that was already an important topic at the ITB Career Center at ITB Berlin 2023. Topics discussed in that month will include how the tourism industry can become more attractive for Generation Z. Best cases will highlight how companies and institutions can successfully win over young people. As in its June podcasts, and on the subject of the skills shortage and lack of young professionals, ITB Berlin will again pick up on new forms of work. For its Travel Hero Podcast episode, ITB Berlin will be setting up an intriguing blind date with members of Gen Z and older guests who will exchange views on blended travel and share their differing outlooks and experiences.

In September ITB Berlin will take the opportunity to look back on this year’s ITB Berlin Convention and in particular to follow the most important tech trends. Interviews, podcast features and visits to startups and trendsetters are currently scheduled. In addition to the convention and travel tech, the month’s topics will include ITB China, which is taking place in-person again for the first time since the pandemic in September in Shanghai. Together with the market research organization IPK International, ITB Berlin will be analyzing whether China is back in terms of both inbound and outbound travel. In a deep dive podcast there will also be an interview with a high-profile speaker from the ITB China Conference 2023.

Additional information on the focus of autumn and winter topics to come will be available soon from ITB Berlin.