We're giving away TWO tickets to Skift Forum Europe so you can bring a colleague and share the experience. With over 400 attendees representing 200+ companies, plus 20 speaker sessions and additional hands-on workshops, you'll want to tag team the networking and learning.

It's been just over a year since Marriott made its move, the first in a wave of such measures. But instead of getting knocked down by the trend, independent meeting planners are finding ways to take control of their businesses.

Meals and hotel stays are becoming a bigger cost for business travelers. Airfares have dropped, although this doesn't help companies that dispatch their workers in cars for meetings in nearby cities.

Meeting guest experience requirements is too often a series of boring checklists. But improving the end-to-end experience can be a joyful, creative project that involves everyone from the general manager to the most junior staff. Here's a way to think about it.

Customer-experience software companies Medallia, which is planning to go public this year, and Qualtrics, which SAP has just acquired for $8 billion, are receiving cash injections that should rev up their services. That's significant news for travel businesses that depend heavily on positive customer sentiment but increasingly face customer survey fatigue.

Midtown Manhattan is rapidly changing, thanks to new zoning laws, and Trump might be feeling edged out. One of his first big projects is being torn down forever, and who knows — maybe he'll get nostalgic. There will be taller buildings, and the Grand Central train station will get a facelift.

The old adage is that there is no such thing as bad publicity. The Bahamas plans to turn the popular focus on the Fyre Festival debacle into a showcase for the beauty that led those scammers to select the destination in the first place.