Authentic to whom?
What do Gen X operators, Gen Z travellers and the arriving Gen Alpha cohort each mean by an authentic travel experience?

Date – Tuesday, 15 September
Time – 11:00 – 11:40
Location – Auditorium 0B, Euskalduna Conference Centre

Ask a Gen X tour operator what makes a trip authentic and you’ll hear about getting lost, going without a plan, earning the experience the hard way. Ask a Gen Z traveller and you’ll hear about connection — to people, causes, communities — even if the itinerary was found through an algorithm. Ask a Gen Alpha traveller and the honest answer is: we don’t fully know yet.

This session puts those definitions in the same room and lets them collide. It moves past the now-familiar “young travellers want meaning, not sightseeing” thesis and into the harder, more practical questions for the people who design and sell these experiences: What does each generation really mean by meaningful travel? Is AI and algorithmic curation helping travellers find something real, or manufacturing a better-produced performance of it — and is that even a bad thing? And when younger travellers hand organisations direct feedback about what they want, we’ll hear some practical industry case studies and insights about what it takes to build that into a programme, not just a marketing line?

Built for all travel tour operators, adjacent suppliers, and cultural exchange providers in the room — the goal is a spirited, perhaps uncomfortable, cross-generational debate that leaves attendees with something they can act on.