Power in the travel industry has shifted. In previous eras, influence was measured by asset ownership, sheer market share, or the ability to dictate terms to intermediaries. Today, however, true power belongs to the "Builders"—the visionaries and engineers constructing the complex digital infrastructure, agentic platforms, and revolutionary business models that define the future of global travel.
Skift’s 2026 Power Rankings identify the top 25 individuals who are doing more than just leading companies; they are building the connective tissue of a new era. These leaders are betting capital, reputation, and talent on versions of the future that do not yet fully exist, racing against time to modernize an industry long shackled by legacy constraints.
The New Definition of Industry Power
At Skift, we have long obsessed over the dynamics of power—who holds it, who is losing it, and where the momentum is shifting. After examining the risk-takers of 2025, our 2026 focus is entirely on construction.
A "builder" is defined as a leader actively constructing the systems—infrastructure, platforms, and products—that fundamentally change how travel functions. We evaluated these individuals across five critical dimensions: Infrastructure, Novelty, Builder Attribution, Scale, and Breadth.
Infrastructure was assigned the highest weight (35%), as the creation of industry-essential products remains the core challenge of 2026. This methodology intentionally favored agile technology leaders over static corporate titans, as the speed of innovation has rendered some legacy giants less influential than the architects of the new travel-tech stack.
Chronology: Building the Digital Nervous System
The trajectory of these 25 leaders mirrors the industry’s rapid adoption of AI and cloud-native architectures.
- 2020-2022 (The Resilience Phase): Leaders like Decius Valmorbida (Amadeus) chose to invest aggressively during the pandemic, theorizing that waiting for a recovery would mean irrelevance. This period saw the foundations laid for "offer-and-order" retailing and cloud migrations.
- 2023-2024 (The Infrastructure Pivot): Companies like Navan and Apaleo doubled down on proprietary data stacks. Acquisitions like Amadeus’s $348 million purchase of Vision-Box marked a shift toward traveler-centric identity management.
- 2025-2026 (The Agentic Era): The focus shifted to "agentic" systems—AI that doesn’t just answer questions but executes tasks. Leaders like Ahmad Al-Dahle (Airbnb) and Garry Wiseman (Sabre) pushed the industry toward conversational, autonomous booking flows that bridge the gap between human intent and system execution.
The Top 5: Who is Redefining Travel?
1. Decius Valmorbida (President of Travel, Amadeus)
Valmorbida tops our list for steering the world’s largest travel processor through a complete metamorphosis. By championing the Nevio retailing platform and acquiring Vision-Box, he is positioning Amadeus as the backbone of a traveler-centric identity ecosystem. With 3 billion flight searches processed daily, his "bet" on aggressive post-pandemic investment has paid off in global relevance.
2. Ilan Twig (Co-Founder and CTO, Navan)
Twig’s "Navan Cloud" is arguably the most complex plumbing in corporate travel. By choosing to train proprietary AI models rather than merely wrapping existing ones, Twig has created a moat that allows Navan’s virtual agent, Ava, to resolve 60% of support queries without human intervention.
3. Ahmad Al-Dahle (CTO, Airbnb)
Al-Dahle has transformed Airbnb’s search from a simple filter engine into a sophisticated "understanding" machine. His focus on matching traveler needs to the perfect accommodation, combined with a 40% self-solve rate for customer issues, illustrates the power of AI to drive both operational efficiency and user loyalty.
4. Matt Welle (CEO, Mews)
Welle, a former hotelier, understands the "heat of the moment." By institutionalizing the "What would Matt do?" rule, he ensures that Mews’ property management platform solves the real-world friction of hotel operations. His focus on automating accounts receivable and AI-driven guest messaging has made Mews a favorite among independent hotels.
5. Laura Calin (SVP, Oracle Hospitality)
Calin is tasked with the monumental shift of moving 73,000 properties to the cloud. Her development of the Oracle Hospitality Integration Platform (OHIP) has opened a historically closed ecosystem, allowing over 3,000 vendors to build on Oracle’s infrastructure. Her vision of a unified consumer industry platform—where loyalty points move seamlessly between hotels and local retailers—is the next frontier for hospitality.
Supporting Data and Industry Impact
The data behind these rankings reveals a clear trend: the unbundling of the monolithic travel stack.
- Efficiency Gains: Leaders in this list have reported that AI-integrated systems (like those at Airbnb and Mews) are reducing cost-per-booking by 10-15% annually.
- Scale of Impact: The companies represented here process over $100 billion in annual booking volume. If the infrastructure provided by leaders like Nium (payments) or SiteMinder (distribution) were to go offline, the global travel economy would face immediate, systemic paralysis.
- AI Adoption: 60% of the code at Airbnb is now written with the assistance of AI, while Sabre and Travelport are seeing exponential growth in API adoption for agentic travel tools.
Official Responses and Strategic Philosophy
Across the board, the message from these builders is one of "trust over speed."
"If you don’t build trust, it’s worthless," noted Evan Konwiser (Amex GBT), emphasizing that while startups can afford to break things, global travel infrastructure requires a "maniacal" focus on reliability.
This sentiment is echoed by Andrew Jordan (Travelport), who warns that society is not yet ready to fully hand over the keys to AI. The builders on this list are not just software engineers; they are risk managers. They are building "supervisor models" to vet AI responses, ensuring that when an agentic system makes a booking, it is accurate, reliable, and secure.
Implications: The Future of Travel
The implications for investors and partners are stark. We are entering an era where:
- The "Expert" Agent is King: Travel booking will shift from static websites to conversational interfaces. The winners will be those who can provide "certainty beneath the conversation."
- Infrastructure as a Moat: Companies that own the data rails—like Hapi (connectivity) or Nium (payments)—will hold more power than those who merely own the customer interface.
- The End of the Expense Report: As envisioned by leaders like Konwiser, the future of business travel is autonomous. The goal is to build systems where the process of booking, expensing, and reconciling becomes entirely invisible to the end user.
A Note on the Future
As we look beyond 2026, the divide between those who "build" and those who "maintain" will only widen. For those in the industry deciding where to invest, the message of these Power Rankings is clear: follow the builders. They are the ones constructing the foundations of the next generation of travel, and they are moving faster than the rest of the world can keep up with.
Methodology: The 2026 Power Rankings were established through a weighted evaluation of Infrastructure (35%), Novelty (20%), Builder Attribution (20%), Scale (15%), and Breadth (10%). All rankings underwent editorial peer review to ensure consistency and integrity across diverse segments of the travel ecosystem.
Pevita Pearce 
Reynand Wu 
Lina Hope 