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Gloria Guevara, president and CEO of the World Travel & Tourism Council, brought global tourism leaders to Malta for the October 7–9 Global Summit while advancing a renewed agenda shaped by WTTC’s members. According to membership and planning figures supplied for this article, Guevara and her team have grown the membership base back to well over 210, with another 700 potential members in the pipeline and 22 destinations interested in hosting a future summit.
The Valletta gathering attracted more than 1,000 delegates and featured more than 100 speakers, including former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Donald Trump’s tourism envoy, Nick Adams. For an industry facing technological disruption and political uncertainty, Guevara delivered a consequential gathering. If tourism had a Mover and Shaker Award, she would have my vote.
A welcome that became a roadmap
Guevara’s Thursday welcome address set an ambitious goal: bring people together, challenge established thinking and encourage an industry facing extraordinary change to take charge of its future.
By the time the summit ended, my assessment was simple. On convening influential people and giving the conversation purpose, she had overdelivered.
Tourism conferences have a familiar rhythm. Hosts welcome delegates, speakers celebrate the industry’s resilience, and everyone agrees that cooperation is essential.
Guevara gave that familiar opening a sharper purpose.
She asked leaders to consider the future they wanted to create as technology changes how people work, companies operate, governments make decisions and travelers explore the world.
Artificial intelligence was part of that discussion, but people remained at its center.
That balance matters. Tourism can adopt sophisticated systems, automate transactions and personalize recommendations. Its success still depends on the people who welcome guests, run businesses, protect destinations and make journeys memorable.
Guevara connected technological change with tourism’s ability to create jobs and opportunities. She challenged the room to think about how that potential could be realized, particularly for younger generations.
The summit’s FUTU[RE]SET theme gave those questions a common direction: examine what has changed, reconsider what no longer works and decide what should come next.
A stronger WTTC, with members shaping its direction
Behind the summit’s public program is an organizational development that deserves attention.
According to the figures supplied for this article, Guevara and her team have grown WTTC’s membership base back to well over 210 members. Another 700 potential members are in the pipeline.
The distinction matters: those 700 are prospective members, and converting that interest into participation will require sustained work. Nevertheless, the pipeline points to considerable interest in the organization and its direction.
Membership growth also brings a responsibility to make involvement worthwhile.
Under Guevara’s leadership, members are described as being heavily involved in WTTC’s direction on a daily basis. Each member is to receive a personalized action plan for developing its involvement in the council and advancing its investment priorities.
That approach could make membership more practical and purposeful. A hotel group, an airline, a technology business and an investor may share broad interests while needing different support, connections and policy outcomes.
Personalized plans give WTTC an opportunity to connect its global agenda with those individual needs. Their value will ultimately depend on delivery, but the intention is encouraging: members should help shape the organization and have a clear route to participating in its work.
Eight priorities created by the members
This also changes how Guevara’s eight priorities should be understood.
According to the information supplied for this article, WTTC members created the priorities presented in Malta. Guevara brought them together in a roadmap spanning seamless and secure travel, destination stewardship, sustainability, responsible technology, crisis preparedness, connectivity, workforce development, and policies that encourage investment.
That member involvement gives the agenda a practical foundation. These are issues businesses encounter through their operations, investment decisions, employees and customers.
Travelers experience them when they wait at a border, struggle with a complicated connection, or receive excellent service from a well-trained employee. Residents experience them through employment, infrastructure, and the pressure tourism can place on their communities.
One of Guevara’s most relatable questions concerned the journey itself. If payments can move around the world in seconds, why do travelers still spend so much time queuing and repeatedly proving their identity?
Her vision of digital identity, biometrics, and better-connected systems speaks to frustrations familiar to anyone who travels regularly.
The published summit program carried those concerns into sessions on digital identity, artificial intelligence, mobility and resilience.
The opportunity is clear: make travel easier while maintaining security, and make innovation useful to the passenger who actually has to navigate the system.
The courage to bring different voices together
Perhaps the clearest measure of Guevara’s leadership was the breadth of perspectives represented in Malta.
A global tourism organization needs access to people who influence policy, investment and public confidence. Bringing those people together requires relationships, persistence and a willingness to accept uncomfortable conversations.
Nick Adams‘s participation illustrated that challenge.
The Hon. Nick Adams, the U.S. President’s Trumptourism envoy for touris., is, in my view, among the most controversial figures now representing a major tourism economy. Welcoming him into the summit program was a bold decision. His presence ensured that the U.S. administration’s perspective formed part of the discussion.
Guevara’s interview with former Canadian PM Justin Trudeauprovided another major highlight toward the summit’s conclusion. Her conversation with the former Canadian prime minister brought political experience and a different perspective to questions facing international travel.
Both appearances deserve closer examination, and eTurboNews will address them in separate articles.
Here, their significance lies in what they say about the gathering Guevara helped create. She brought influential figures with sharply different outlooks into a shared tourism forum.
That takes confidence. It also makes a summit more relevant to the complicated world in which the industry operates.
Tourism needs this kind of convening power
Hotels, airlines, cruise companies, airports, destinations and technology businesses share an interest in people traveling. Their priorities, pressures and relationships with governments can differ considerably.
Getting them into the same room is valuable. Giving them a reason to engage with one another is harder.
The Malta program connected government policy with business decisions across investment, connectivity, workforce development and destination management. Its breadth reflected how many different parts of the economy shape a traveler’s experience.
A tourism CEO can invest in a property, but cannot independently resolve border delays. A minister can promote a destination, but needs businesses and workers to deliver the experience. A technology company can improve a booking process, but cannot replace the hospitality awaiting the guest.
Guevara’s welcome address recognized these dependencies. Her call for public and private cooperation had a practical foundation: the industry’s most persistent problems require people with different responsibilities to work together.
Malta offered an opportunity to renew those connections, including through conversations in hallways, at private meetings and over shared meals. For a sector built on relationships, those exchanges can be as consequential as the formal program.
The reported interest from 22 destinations in hosting a future Global Summit adds another dimension. Expressions of interest are not confirmed hosting commitments, but they suggest that destinations see value in bringing this network of decision-makers together.
Growth has to work for the people who live there
Guevara also placed destination stewardship within the discussion of tourism’s future.
Visitor numbers and investment announcements can be impressive, but residents judge tourism through its effect on their own lives.
Does it create worthwhile employment? Does it support local businesses? Are public spaces and natural assets protected? Can the community continue to enjoy the place visitors have come to discover?
Malta Tourism Authority CEO Carlo Micallef expressed a related ambition at the opening press conference: tourism that generates economic, social and environmental value and delivers benefits to host communities.
For a summit hosted by an island destination, that discussion was especially relevant.
Tourism’s long-term success depends on communities seeing a future for themselves within its growth. The member-created priorities presented by Guevara acknowledged that responsibility.
Making room for the next generation
The summit also looked beyond the leaders already established in the industry.
WTTC’s program included the launch of its Youth Movement, intended to connect students with industry leaders and give younger participants a voice in shaping tourism’s future. Together in Travel, its initiative supporting small and medium-sized businesses, also featured in the program.
These initiatives matter because tourism’s future will be built by people who are still deciding whether the sector offers them a worthwhile career or business opportunity.
Their participation brings another responsibility: keep listening after the conference ends.
Guevara recognized young people as contributors to the future being discussed. Sustaining that involvement would give Malta’s ambitions a life beyond the summit.
Remembering the people who helped build global tourism
Looking ahead, Guevara also made room for people whose enormous contributions helped shape the global tourism sector we know today.
The recognition of former UNWTO Secretaries-General Taleb Rifai and Francesco Frangialli brought an emotional dimension to the summit. Both were honored in moving moments that connected the discussion about tourism’s future with the experience, relationships, and dedication that helped lay its foundations.
For those of us who have known and worked alongside these leaders over many years, this recognition carried particular meaning. Institutions evolve and leadership changes, but the contributions of people who brought countries and communities together deserve to remain visible.
The gathering also included figures such as Korea’s Ambassador Dho, herself a mover and shaker whose influence often comes through patient work behind the scenes, and Geoffrey Lipman, a longstanding voice in international tourism.
Their presence added depth to Malta’s gathering. Alongside new technologies, emerging leaders and ambitious plans stood people who have spent decades building bridges across the sector.
This was another reason to appreciate Guevara’s approach. Building tourism’s future also means remembering—and welcoming—the people whose work helped make it possible.
A shared achievement, with Gloria at its heart
Credit belongs to many people.
WTTC Chairman Manfredi Lefebvre, the council’s team and members, Malta’s government and its tourism authorities helped make the gathering possible. Hosting an event of this scale requires extensive work, much of it unseen by delegates.
Guevara’s particular contribution was the energy, relationships and sense of purpose she brought to the occasion.
She moved across the worlds of government, global business and tourism with an evident understanding that each needs the others. Her welcome address gave the summit a direction, while the range of participants gave that direction substance.
The membership figures, prospective-member pipeline and personalized action plans point to an ambition extending beyond one successful event. They suggest a WTTC seeking to deepen participation and turn its members’ priorities into sustained work.
The next test is follow-through. Better travel systems, stronger careers, responsible growth and new investment will require delivery long after delegates have returned home.
But leadership also deserves recognition when it creates the conditions for that work to begin.
In challenging times, Guevara and her team helped bring tourism’s world to Malta, strengthened the organization’s membership base, made space for differing perspectives, honored longstanding contributors and welcomed the next generation into the conversation.
If there were a Mover and Shaker Award for global tourism, she would have my vote. Her Thursday welcome set the ambition. The summit that followed gave us good reason to take it seriously.
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