Laura Hyde

Expedition cruising is one of the fastest-growing sectors within the cruise industry. According to the Expedition Cruise Network’s 2025 Industry Insights Report, 100 per cent of ECN member cruise lines recorded growth in 2025, while Cruise Lines International Association’s 2026 State of the Industry Report found 84 per cent of travel advisors recorded steady to significant growth in bookings in the same year. Expedition cruises are often chosen for the promise of discovery they offer:...

Microsoft has warned AI governance must evolve for the agentic era in its 2026 Responsible AI Transparency Report. In the report Microsoft highlights how AI systems are becoming more capable of executing multi-step actions which is creating a new risk landscape in which factors such as access, permissions, memory and how AI is used over time are becoming increasingly important. Microsoft believes this shift requires a more dynamic approach to governance and has re-engineered its...

Firefly, a new luxury golf and resident community in Spring Hill, south of Nashville in Tennessee, has opened its Andrew Green-designed 18-hole championship golf course and nine-hole short layout. The championship course – the first original design of Green’s career – follows the land’s natural movement and is walkable. Meanwhile, the short course has been created to give players the opportunity to play a range of shots and practice with different clubs. “Firefly represents the...

Heineken Global Duty Free is rolling out its draught beer training programme to cruise ship bar crew across the USA for the first time. The training will equip 2,500 bartenders across Europe and the USA with the skills, knowledge and technical expertise they need to deliver a high-quality customer experience when serving Heineken beverages on draught on cruise ships across 125 training sessions in 2026. The Heineken Passion & Quality training programme, which launched in 2023 and...

UK-based building society Nationwide has rolled out Microsoft 365 Copilot across its workforce to deliver better experiences and outcomes for its 19 million members. During the roll out, Nationwide replaced “decades-old” core banking systems, moved services to the cloud and rebuilt customer data, as well as bringing Virgin Money into the group as part of a takeover (completed in April 2026). This was carried out while keeping banking experiences steady for members. “We have to do it...

Las Palmas Cruise Port in the Canary Islands is gearing up to welcome the cruise industry to Gran Canaria when it hosts Seatrade Cruise Med in September 2026. “Hosting Seatrade Cruise Med places our port at the centre of the cruise industry’s most important conversations and gives us the opportunity to welcome cruise lines, partners and stakeholders to experience first-hand the transformation taking place here,” says Susana Gutierrez, general manager of Global Ports Holding (GPH) Canary...

The White & Private Label Expo 2026 will take place from 30 September to 1 October at the Javits Center in New York. The event will bring together thousands of retailers, e-commerce professionals, entrepreneurs, distributors and product developers into a dedicated platform for discovering new products, meeting manufacturers and finding new suppliers. A ticket to White & Private Label Expo gives attendees access to an additional three co-located retail shows covering every stage of the...

Construction has begun on the Lobb + Partners renovation project at Williams Lake Golf & Tennis Club in British Columbia, Canada. Williams Lake was founded in 1946 and is a registered not-for-profit society operated by a volunteer board of directors elected annually by its members. The renovation is one of the club’s “most substantial” on-course projects in recent years and will involve adding new forward tees to create more flexible course routing and more approachable playing...

Construction is underway on Carnival Cruise Line’s newest and final addition to its Excel class, Carnival Tropicale. The first steel was cut at Meyer Werft’s shipyard in Papenburg, Germany, on 10 September 2026, ahead of the ship’s scheduled debut in April 2028. The two firms marked the construction milestone with a western-themed steel-cutting ceremony, attended by several executives, including Ben Clement, executive vice president maritime and new builds at Carnival Cruise Line; Sarah...

The art of merchandising has always been rooted in creativity, intuition and a deep understanding of the customer. Advances in agentic AI are amplifying this by allowing merchants and planners to delegate manual, repetitive work to AI tools, freeing them up to focus on creative decisions. In fact, McKinsey's January 2026 Merchants unleashed: how agentic AI transforms retail merchandising report suggests retail merchants could reclaim up to 40 per cent of their time by offloading these tasks to agentic AI.