The Recalibration: A CEO-to-CEO Letter on How to Think About the Rest of 2026

Every travel company I know entered 2026 with a plan. Revenue targets, headcount decisions, event calendars, market expansion, AI pilots. Some of those plans were ambitious, some were conservative, but all of them shared a set of assumptions about the world that, with Q1 nearly over, no longer apply.

This is not a piece about the Iran war. It is not about oil prices, AI, the U.S. government shutdown, or the organizational fragility of the World Cup. It is a piece about all of them, all at once, because that is the actual operating environment. And the industry’s instinct to treat each disruption as a separate headline with a separate response is precisely the instinct that will get companies in trouble.

I’m writing this as a CEO leading a company through the same storm. We have 100 employees across 16 countries, and I’m having the same conversations with my team that I suspect you are having with yours. This is not advice from the sidelines. This is one CEO’