FOMO. How the Industry Confuses Presence with Relevance
For years, the luxury travel industry has been driven by a quiet but powerful fear: the fear of disappearing.
The fear of not being seen, not being present, not being part of the conversation. This fear reshaped how brands, hotels, DMCs, and intermediaries behave, often without anyone explicitly naming it.
Presence became a proxy for relevance.
Industry calendars filled with events, gatherings, showcases, and forums, each reinforcing the same message: if you are not there, you do not exist.
Visibility stopped being a consequence of quality and turned into a prerequisite for survival.
The industry learnt to move constantly, not necessarily forward, but sideways, from one appearance to the next.
This is how fear enters the system.
Not loudly, but structurally.
Visibility Becomes a Defensive Strategy
Fear of missing out does not create better products.
It creates defensive behaviour.
Decisions start being driven by where one needs to be seen rather than by where one can deliver real value. Resources are allocated to attendance, presence, and representation, while operational depth remains unchanged.
Being visible becomes more urgent than being precise.
In this environment, relevance is no longer earned. It is performed.
The industry starts rewarding those who are most active in the room, not those who are most capable on the ground.
Participation replaces contribution, and the ability to show up is increasingly mistaken for readiness to deliver.
Visibility becomes a substitute for verification.
As a result, influence shifts away from those who actually carry responsibility.
Travel agents and intermediaries dominate the conversation, while DMCs who deliver, calculate risk, and absorb consequences remain structurally secondary, even though the product cannot exist without them.
Over time, this creates a distortion where being part of the conversation matters more than having something concrete to stand behind. Presence becomes a defensive strategy, not a signal of value.
It protects position, but it does not build capability.
This is how fear quietly reshapes the system.
Not by lowering standards explicitly, but by rewarding motion over substance and visibility over readiness.
The Cost of Presence-Based Validation
Constant presence carries a cost that is rarely discussed.
Time is diverted from product development. Energy is pulled away from refining operations. Focus shifts from execution to positioning.
The paradox is clear: the more the industry talks about innovation, transformation, and experience, the less time it leaves to actually build any of it. Narratives evolve while products stagnate.
Promises grow more ambitious while structures remain unchanged.
Presence-based visibility produces noise, not progress.
This is particularly visible in how “new buyers” and “fresh blood” are discussed.
The industry claims to need them to survive, mostly to keep the event-based cooperation model alive, yet makes no effort to change the structures that caused stagnation in the first place.
Instead of refining who it works with, it expands who it accepts. Quantity becomes a survival tactic.
The result is dilution.
What Ten Minutes of Presence Actually Give You
At industry gatherings, the mechanics of presence become very clear.
You meet sixty suppliers per event.
Each conversation lasts ten minutes, often accompanied by a short presentation and a rehearsed introduction. You exchange business cards, contacts, and promises to follow up.
And yet, at the end of the day, you know almost nothing.
You do not know how far someone’s operational capacity really goes. You do not know where their limits are.
You do not know whether what they present has ever been delivered under the specific conditions of your niche, or whether it exists only as a concept that sounds convincing in conversation.
You have a name and contact details. What you do not have is an understanding of readiness.
When you ask more precise questions, most answers lead to the same phrase: we are tailor made.
In theory, this sounds reassuring.
In practice, it often means that if you request a product that does not yet exist, the supplier will start looking for it only after the meeting ends.
In many cases, that search leads nowhere. In others, it succeeds, but what is delivered is untested. The first client becomes a trial.
The itinerary becomes an experiment. And the risk of non-delivery shifts quietly to the buyer and, ultimately, to the guest.
This is where flexibility replaces responsibility.
Instead of drawing a clear boundary and stating that a product does not exist or cannot be delivered reliably, suppliers lean on the language of adaptability. Openness is presented as a virtue, even when it means building something unproven under real pressure.
The question is whether this is actually what we are looking for.
Is flexibility the goal, or is it a way to avoid saying no?
And if a product has never been delivered before, is it a solution, or a risk disguised as customisation?
In a system driven by presence, these distinctions disappear.
Ten minutes are enough to be seen, but not enough to be understood. Visibility fills the gap that should be occupied by proof.
A Different Direction
Luxury travel does not need to be louder.
It needs to be clearer.
Relevance will not belong to those who attend everything, but to those who build products that work without explanation.
Trust will not be given to those who are most visible, but to those who are most consistent in what they deliver.
Fear may keep people moving.
But it has never built anything worth sustaining.
If this perspective resonates with how you design, deliver, or evaluate luxury travel, this conversation is already relevant to you.
Not everyone needs to be part of it.
