Designing Demand Together

Welcome to Antalya

Opening welcomes from Routes as co-convenor, from the host destination, and from a voice in the local community.

Designing Demand: from diagnosis to delivery

Ged Brown opens the fourth summit with refreshed demand data and the brief for the three days. What has changed in the last twelve months, where the pressure is now, and what this room is here to build.

Everyone Who Moves People, One Stage

A cruise line, a port, an airline and an airport, together with a national tourism authority, on one stage to test a single question: can the businesses that carry travellers plan the low season together rather than in isolation? These conversations usually happen in twos, behind closed doors, and never with everyone in the chain present. Delegates asked for this session by name at last year's summit.

On stageCruise line · Port authority · Airline network planning · Airport route development · National tourism authority

Coffee and networking

The Host in Focus: Antalya's low season

Antalya is a destination built for summer, on a coast where the peak is about as steep as it gets. A local DMO, a resort operator and an independent hotelier take the host apart in front of the room. If designing demand works here, it works.

On stageHost DMO · Local resort operator · Independent hotelier

One Question, Every Row

One question to the whole room, polled live on your phone, with the result on screen inside a minute. Three minutes talking it through with the people beside you, then answers taken from the floor. It sets the tone for the next two days.

Recap and scene-set

Pick up day one and lay out the shape of the day.

Season Changer I

A destination leader who has moved their own low season, in twenty minutes: the decision, the risk they took, what it cost, and what actually changed. Three Season Changers run across the three days, one from a destination, one from a hotel group and one from a tour operator, and they're the proof the rest of the programme rests on.

A working life on the seasonality problem

A conversation with a tourism leader who has spent a career on the question this summit exists for. What actually shifts a destination that has always traded half the year, how long that takes, what has to be argued for internally before anything changes outside, and what he would tell someone starting the same work now. Speaker announced shortly.

The Cost of Closing

Closed isn't free. A hotel that shuts for the low season still pays its debt, its insurance, its security and its upkeep, loses value on an asset earning nothing, and pays again to reopen in recommissioning, recruitment and retraining. Almost nobody puts a number on it. A destination that trades six months and closes six has capped what it can earn before the year begins, and it's worth asking out loud what that ceiling costs.

This panel counts the closed side first, then counts honestly what it costs to trade through, then asks where the line crosses. Bring your own numbers.

On stageHotel group commercial lead · A resort that closes · An independent hotelier that trades through

Coffee and networking

Who Carries the Season

The people who absorb both the surge and the quiet, and how the industry holds on to them. A six month job isn't a career, and the sector loses trained people to industries that can offer twelve months of work, then pays to find and train them again every spring. Extending the season is a workforce argument as much as a commercial one, and this session treats it as one.

On stageHospitality workforce lead · Workforce or union representative · Training provider

Six Weeks That Set the Year: the school calendar

The fixed school calendar manufactures much of the peak, and almost nobody in the industry will touch it. This panel asks how much of the problem really belongs to the calendar, what the sector can influence and what it can only lobby for, alongside the policy friction that sits beside it in package rules, tax and visas.

On stageEducation policy · National tourism policy · Travel association regulatory lead

Lunch and networking

Season Changer II

A hotel or resort group that moved its own low season, told to the same structure: the decision, the risk, what it cost, what changed. The morning panel asked where the line crosses between closing and trading through. This is a property group that crossed it.

Economic Leakage: keeping the money in the destination

Convened with our partners at ICRT Global. Much of what a visitor spends leaves the destination almost as fast as it arrives. This panel follows the money and asks what keeps more of it local, from supply chains and ownership through to hiring and procurement.

On stageICRT Global · Destination economist · Local supply chain lead · Community enterprise leader

The Freedom Years: both ends of the calendar

Most people get two windows of freedom from the school calendar, one before children and one after, and the entire peak is built around the years in between. The case for courting both ends, and an honest account of what a destination takes on when it does. Heat gets treated as what it is, a push away from the peak rather than a guaranteed migration into a pleasant low season, because climate change is changing the low season too.

On stageYouth travel operator · Mature-market operator · A destination courting both ends

Culture

Culture is what makes a destination unlike anywhere else, and it's not only buildings and monuments. It is festivals, music, food, language, craft and the people who keep all of it going, and none of that switches off when the peak ends. A traveller who wants to understand a place has no reason to go when everyone else goes, and a good case that the low season serves them better: fewer people between them and the thing they came for, more time from the people who can explain it, and a version of the place closer to how it's actually lived. Twenty minutes on how large that market is, where it already travels outside the peak, and what a destination needs in place to earn it. Speaker announced shortly.

Dark Skies

Astro-tourism needs long nights, which makes the low season the product rather than the discount. The size of the market, what certification and infrastructure it demands, and what a destination realistically earns from months it currently writes off. Speaker announced shortly.

Coffee and networking

Accessible Tourism

A large and under-served market that the quiet months serve better than the peak: less crowding, more staff attention, easier movement. The scale of the opportunity, what it costs to be genuinely ready for it, and what destinations get wrong when they treat accessibility as compliance rather than demand. Speaker announced shortly.

Three Niches, Your Questions

All three Low Season Niches speakers on stage together for open questions from the floor. Each has had twenty minutes to size their own market. This is where you test them, compare one against another, and ask what it would actually take to build one of the three at home.

On stageThe three Low Season Niches speakers

Day two wrap

Close the day and hand to the final morning.

Recap

Pick up the two days and frame the final morning.

Season Changer III

A tour operator that moved its own low season, and the demand side of the series. A destination and a hotel can open the doors, but somebody has to sell the months. Set directly before the panel that sets out why so few others have.

The Hard Part: what actually stops this

Everyone in the room agrees the low season is worth building. Almost nobody has built it. This session takes the obstacles seriously rather than treating them as a failure of will: air capacity committed two years out, staff who can't be kept on for a season that doesn't yet exist, boards that won't fund a loss-making quarter to reach a profitable year, and the cash flow of a business built to earn in five months. What has to change, who has to change it, and what a single operator can do without waiting for anyone else.

On stageHotel or resort group finance or asset lead · Airline network planner · Destination leader who has funded a season extension · Tour operator commercial lead

Coffee and networking

Changing the Scoreboard

Measured only in headcount, the low season always looks like failure. The room votes live on the indicators worth adopting instead, from value per visitor to resident wellbeing and environmental load, and leaves with a ranked shortlist it agreed on together. How the low season gets measured is one of the reasons it doesn't get funded.

On stageTourism observatory · Destination intelligence lead · Resident wellbeing researcher

Four Conclusions

Four senior figures who have sat through the whole summit give their conclusions in public. Not a summary of the agenda, but what each of them actually took from the three days, what they now think differently about, and what they disagree with.

Each speaks for one of the four groups the summit brings together: destinations and tourism boards, operators and hotels and cruise lines, airlines and airports, and policymakers. Each closes by naming the one thing their own part of the industry should do in 2027. Those four answers go into the State of Tourism Seasonality 2027 report as part of the record of the summit.

On stageDestination or tourism board leader · Operator, hotel or cruise line leader · Airline or airport leader · Policymaker

What Did We Miss

The open floor we run every year because it earns its place. A last chance for the room to name what the programme skipped, and what the fifth edition has to cover.

Closing keynote

The last word of the fourth summit. Speaker to be announced.

Convenor close

Ged Brown closes the summit, and names the date and the place of the fifth.

Networking to 13:00