More than 500 travel content creators and entrepreneurs attended Women in Travel Summit, held this past May in Chattanooga, Tenn.
Women in Travel Summit (WITS) bills itself as the world’s largest gathering of women travel content creators, bringing more than 500 attendees together to learn about digital content creation, entrepreneurship, and building partnerships with travel brands and destinations.
Beth Santos
Social impact, sustainability, and elevating underrepresented communities in travel are all issues that their community values deeply, WITS founder, Beth Santos, told Convene. However, the number of people attending sessions devoted to those themes at WITS has historically told a different story.
“When it came to having to choose between that and this other session that’s about how to make six figures in two months and quit your full-time job, there was a clear winner,” Santos said, “because [the latter] felt more urgent and more necessary in the moment.” Santos — who also is the founder of Wanderful, a global community of 40,000 women travelers and travel creators — said focusing on being relevant in the moment means that “we need to make sure that everyone is in the room for what we think are the most important conversations.”
That prompted a major shift in the way Santos and her team strategized about their session content. In the summit’s early years, WITS chose speakers through open applications and often hired celebrities and motivational speakers as main-stage keynoters. “That was fine,” Santos said. “It went well. It was very inspiring, but I think one thing we realized is over time was we … as the conference organizers didn’t have a voice. We had kind of given that voice to somebody else and [were] just picking from what was offered to us and not spending a lot of time curating. We had all these missed opportunities … to talk about things that were important.” After the pandemic, Santos said they began to reevaluate WITS’ value proposition and how they could “design this conference as an intention and not an afterthought.”
‘A Huge Energy Shift’
This year, WITS — held May 29-31 in Chattanooga, Tennessee — chose to put those important conversations on the main stage. The 2026 keynote sessions included a talk on what the travel media landscape misses when it comes to making storytelling accessible to disabled, neurodivergent, and visually impaired audiences. Another featured a panel discussion on whether the lightning-fast speed at which digital travel content is produced and consumed works against responsible, authentic storytelling. And a third keynote tackled work-life balance, addressing the unique challenges women travel content creators face while juggling other responsibilities.
Santos and her team noticed “a huge energy shift” during this year’s main stage sessions compared to previous years. “I think the entire audience cried, like three times,” she said. There was a “deep emotional connection that happened in the room that was like nothing we’d ever seen before. The speakers were bombarded with people who wanted to talk with them after. I think it was because these topics were really bothering creators.
“And maybe they weren’t going to take their afternoon to go to a breakout session to talk about that, because there are so many other things that they need to focus on, but hashing out these important topics on the main stage seems to have given participants the shared awareness that, ‘Oh wow, we all are really trying to figure this out,’ and it gave them a feeling of community and solidarity.”
One example of how WITS created more in-person value was turning short, awkward time gaps between sessions into main-stage opportunities for attendees.
To Stream or Not to Stream
In addition to being more intentional about the speakers and topics guiding their content, the WITS team also has become more calculated about how their content is delivered. Last year, they decided they would not livestream or record main-stage sessions, a decision that seems to run counter to WITS’ always-online audience of content creators. But conjuring that you-had-to-be-there magic requires, well, being there, Santos said.
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“Over the last year, the entire arc of our conference has really pointed towards, how can we make sure that everything that we’re creating here is something that can only happen in person?” Santos told Convene. “Because I think people miss the in-person experiences and they miss that magic.”
‘Over the last year, the entire arc of our conference has really pointed towards, how can we make sure that everything that we’re creating here is something that can only happen in person?,’ Beth Santos said.
WITS’ closing session, “The Whole Life Creator: Sustainability Beyond the Screen,” focused on the unique challenges marketing and creative professionals face when it comes to creating work-life balance, a topic that hit home for Elaine Rau, a creator development director who spoke on the session panel.
“I was invited to talk about creator burnout — an extremely sensitive topic if you’re REALLY honest about it — and I poured it all out on that stage,” she posted on LinkedIn. “I would never post a crying video online, nor have I ever talked about this topic on stage before … but how many of us have related to a heartfelt video or a candid speaker and felt better afterwards? Because the session wasn’t recorded, I felt like I could be honest, plus it was in front of humans I had been interacting with all weekend.”
That approach hits on one of the biggest takeaways from the Freeman Trends Report, “Unpacking XLNC: The Future of Adult Learning at Conferences and Tradeshows, Part One” — specifically, that “in-person events remain the primary destination for professional learning” but they need to look significantly different than what digital experiences can offer. Digital channels “are an undeniable part of the modern learning experience … and these channels aren’t going away,” the report said, but “in-person events deliver what digital formats cannot: face-to-face interaction … it’s not ‘an either/or’; it’s a ‘both-and.’”
“We rarely get negative feedback,” Santos said, but she noted one thing her team heard “in the last couple of years was, ‘This breakout session was great, but I could have learned this online.’ And that really stuck with me. If … in-person gatherings want to exist … we have to be creating something that cannot be learned in a YouTube video. It has to be [an experience] where you are actively working through something or you are getting feedback in real time [from] someone or you’re having a conversation with a group of people that is impossible to replicate in an online space.
“Those were the things that really started to guide our ethos” in planning the summit, she said. “Making sure that this is an in-person event for a reason and that it isn’t something that we could just do online.”
Jennifer N. Dienst is senior editor at Convene
Meetings, Made Personal
This article and those listed below are part of Convene’s August 2026 issue cover and CMP Series story package.
