The End of Industry Boundaries: What Travel, Hospitality, and Leisure Executives Need to Know

There’s a moment in every industry when the old categories stop making sense. When the language we’ve used for decades starts to feel like an outdated filing system for a world that has already moved on.  

We separate airlines, logistics providers, and hotels into distinct industries because that’s how they were built. Airlines moved people. Logistics companies moved goods. Hotels provided places to sleep. Each had its own operations, its own business model, and its own executive playbook. 

But travelers never thought that way. A business traveler booking a trip to Singapore doesn’t mentally separate the flight from the hotel from getting presentation materials delivered on time. It’s one journey with one set of expectations about convenience, personalization, and control. For years, that disconnect between how companies organized themselves and how customers experienced travel didn’t matter much. The friction was just part of traveling. 

Then the friction became intolerable. And the walls came down. 

What Changed

Three forces converged to make industry boundaries obsolete. 

E-commerce rewrote consumer expectations about what “coordinated” means. Global e-commerce sales have reached $6.86 trillion in 2025, representing 21% of all retail. When someone orders a product at 11 PM and receives it by noon the next day, same-day delivery taught an entire generation that coordination across supply chains should be invisible. That expectation didn’t stay confined to retail. Travelers began expecting the same seamlessness. Why should booking a flight, arranging ground transport, coordinating luggage delivery, and checking into a hotel require five separate transactions with five different companies? 

Data made integration technically viable. Airlines couldn’t answer that question when their flight data lived in one system, hotel availability lived in another, and ground transport ran on a third platform with no connection to either. But airlines like Delta and All Nippon Airways have now signed agreements with eVTOL companies planning commercial urban air mobility flights connecting airports to city centers. These infrastructure bets only work if flight schedules, ground transport, and luggage handling can be coordinated through shared data systems. The technical barriers that kept industries separate have disappeared. 

Finally, platform economics made convergence profitable. Marriott’s Bonvoy loyalty program includes over 200 million members. The company ended 2024 with over 9,300 properties across 144 countries with roughly 1.7 million rooms worldwide. When you control customer relationships at that scale, orchestrating an ecosystem of flight bookings, car rentals, and experience providers generates more revenue than any single service. Bonvoy has expanded well beyond hotel stays for exactly this reason. The revenue model shifts from transactions to orchestration. 

What Convergence Looks Like

The theory sounds elegant. The execution is messy and requires rethinking what business you’re actually in. 

Consider what’s happening in logistics. DHL, historically the company that moved boxes from Point A to Point B, has repositioned itself as what they call a data platform with physical assets. Their implementation of digital twin technology at the Louveira distribution center in Brazil achieved 98% accuracy in forecasting staff allocation across shifts. That level of precision creates predictive intelligence that can be sold as a service to other companies. The value isn’t in the warehouse anymore. The value is in knowing how to optimize any warehouse. 

DHL declared a multibillion-euro investment across 2021-2025 in digital capabilities, making clear that the logistics division is no longer a cost center but the company’s differentiator. Their Advanced Quality Control Center uses AI to monitor shipments in near real-time, flagging exceptions and triggering corrective actions dynamically. They describe themselves as a technology company that happens to own trucks and planes. This positioning opens new revenue streams, new partnership models, and new competition with both traditional logistics firms and pure software players. 

The same thing is happening in tour operations. TUI Group, Europe’s largest tour operator, announced in 2024 it was becoming a “global curated leisure marketplace”. Not a rebrand. A different business. The company served 20.3 million customers in fiscal 2024 across 433 hotels, 18 cruise ships, and five airlines, generating €23.2 billion in revenue. CEO Sebastian Ebel’s strategy is to sell travel à la carte—individual flights, hotels, experiences, transfers—not just package holidays. The company partnered with Tealium to build a customer data platform that unifies information across every touchpoint. Ebel describes it as moving “from being a transaction-oriented company which can sell one package holiday per year to a guest, to a leisure company that could sell a lot more experiences on a lot of occasions to our customers.” When Europe’s biggest tour operator talks like a marketplace platform, the old categories don’t work anymore. 

Or consider what’s happening in the hospitality industry. Marriott didn’t just add mobile check-in as a feature. They’re replatforming their entire technology stack, replacing their central reservation system, property management system, and loyalty infrastructure to unify guest data across brands and properties. This represents a multi-year, multi-billion-dollar bet that the hotel business is now a data business. Bonvoy member penetration reached 73% of room nights in the U.S. in Q4 2024. The company knows exactly what those guests bought at the airport, which flights they took, and what experiences they’re likely to want next. 

In 2022, Marriott signed an agreement with Agilysys to deploy cloud-native property management system software across U.S. and Canada luxury, premium, and select service hotels over multiple years. This will replace multiple proprietary systems and create a unified platform. The old categories (we run hotels, you run airlines, they run logistics) don’t describe what these companies actually do anymore. 

The Leadership Gap Nobody Talks About

Here’s where it gets uncomfortable for boards and executives. 

Most senior leaders in travel, hospitality, and leisure rose through organizations defined by their industry category. An airline CEO learned route planning, fleet management, and regulatory compliance. A hotel CEO mastered property operations, brand management, and franchise relationships. A logistics CEO optimized networks, warehousing, and last-mile delivery. 

Those skills still matter. But they’re no longer sufficient. 

We’ve worked with CEOs who ran exceptionally tight airline operations but couldn’t see the opportunity to bundle mobility services with hotel partners and luggage logistics. Their entire career had taught them to think about maximizing load factors and minimizing turnaround times. The idea of treating the airline as one component in a larger customer journey felt foreign. We’ve partnered with hotel executives laser-focused on occupancy rates and RevPAR who missed the chance to monetize guest data through partnerships with local experience providers. The business model they understood was about filling rooms. The business model they needed to understand was about owning customer relationships. 

Domain expertise remains valuable. But convergence demands something additional: the ability to see your organization as one component in a larger customer journey, and to architect partnerships, data flows, and business models that operate across traditional boundaries. Most C-suites weren’t built for that. Most boards aren’t evaluating executives on it. Most succession plans aren’t preparing the next generation for it. That gap widens every quarter. 

What This Means for How We Hire

At Stanton Chase, we’re seeing this play out in real time. A board calls us asking for a “Chief Digital Officer with airline experience.” What they need, though they don’t always have the language for it yet, is someone who has led platform thinking in any sector where physical operations meet digital orchestration. The airline experience matters less than the mindset. 

Similarly, we get searches for “CFO with hospitality background.” Fair enough. But what if the better candidate ran finance at an e-commerce company that mastered omnichannel distribution, or at a logistics firm that restructured around recurring revenue from platform services? Those experiences might be more relevant than two decades of hotel finance, because they prepare the CFO for a business model that doesn’t exist yet in traditional hospitality terms. 

The challenge isn’t finding talented executives. The challenge is recognizing which experiences actually prepare someone for convergent leadership, even when those experiences come from outside traditional industry boundaries. 

About the Author

Toon Balm is a Partner at Stanton Chase Amsterdam, specializing in executive search across consumer products and services, with particular expertise in the travel, hospitality, and leisure sectors. Toon previously held strategic leadership roles at Air France KLM across Nigeria, Iran, Italy, China, and the Netherlands, where he was part of the KLM Management Group. In this capacity, he led commercial strategy, transformation initiatives, and regional operations, developing deep expertise in both traditional business models and the platform-era thinking now reshaping the sector. His unique background—combining aviation industry leadership, executive search expertise, and a tenure with the Special Forces Division of the Royal Dutch Army—positions him to identify leaders who can navigate the complex convergence of technology, operations, and customer experience.