Distribution's friction points need a stage. Tell us which one you'll take.

• Who collects the commission when the agent books?
• SEO is now GEO — getting surfaced inside the answer, not ranked below it
• When your best shopper is a bot — rate request volume, look-to-book, and what your connectivity contract actually says about machine traffic
• The attribution black hole — an agent-assisted booking lands on your direct channel. Who gets credit, and what does that do to your channel-mix reporting?
• Wrong answers at scale — content accuracy as a distribution risk, not a marketing task

We especially want to hear from: hotel commercial and digital leaders · CRS and channel management providers · OTAs and AI-native travel platforms · practitioners with GEO data rather than GEO theories.

• Personalization, dynamic, or surveillance pricing? Getting the words right — and why the shorthand is what causes the trouble
• Your RMS in a document request — what counsel now asks distribution and revenue teams for
• One rate strategy, twenty-four legislatures — building an approach that survives a state patchwork
• The case law hoteliers should know, and the housing-sector comparison that keeps not fitting
• Data governance for distribution teams — who owns which signal, and what leaves the building?

Sessions in this track present the landscape and the definitions. HEDNA educates rather than advocates — speakers are welcome to hold positions, but the session frame won't take one. HEDNA's published brief, The Line Between Personalization and Surveillance Pricing, is the primer for this track.

We especially want to hear from: hotel general counsel and compliance leads · RMS providers · economic and academic researchers · anyone who has actually answered a regulator.

• Total price, twelve channels — who owns compliance when a third party displays your rate?
• Merchant of record vs. facilitator — the same booking, taxed two ways
• There is no industry standard for communicating tax type, rate, and jurisdiction across a booking. Should there be? (working session — output is a straw-man taxonomy)
• All-in pricing, one year on — what it did to conversion, ADR optics, and comparison shopping
• The local tax map — occupancy tax, marketplace facilitator rules, accommodations intermediary statutes, and why compliance in one state tells you nothing about the next

We especially want to hear from: hotel finance and tax leaders · OTA and wholesaler commercial teams · payments and merchant-of-record platforms · tax technology providers · outside counsel.

Anchor keynote — Beyond the Plastic: How Financial Institutions Are Redefining the Travel Ecosystem.
Card organizations were payment engines and co-brand partners. Several are now full-scale travel retailers with proprietary booking portals, acquired travel technology, and a direct claim on the traveler relationship. A senior card or bank leader on what that business actually looks like from the inside — followed by a hotel-side respondent, because this one deserves two chairs.

• Inventory provenance — how your rate reached a bank portal you never signed a contract with
• Two currencies, one booking — when a bank's points stretch further inside its own portal than your loyalty program does on your own site
• Super OTA or closed user group? What bank portals mean for parity, ADR, and guest data
• What the cardmember booking looks like on the hotel's P&L — on-property spend, cancellation behavior, cost of sale, all of it
• Selling to a bank — what a financial institution's travel desk buys, and where hotel content keeps failing its standards

We especially want to hear from: card issuers and bank travel desks · brand and program loyalty leaders · wholesalers and bed banks · white-label travel platform providers · embedded-travel fintechs.

• Hotel's NDC moment? What air's decade of fragmentation should teach us about standards, sequencing, and the real cost of getting servicing wrong
• RFP season is broken — static negotiated rates against dynamic pricing, attribute-based selling against a rate code, procurement designed in 2005
• Virtual cards, settlement, and the cost of getting paid
• Duty of care needs clean data — the compliance case for connectivity investment
• Who serves the mid-market? TMCs, aggregators, and the corporate demand no stack is built for

We especially want to hear from: corporate travel buyers · TMCs and booking tool providers · GDS and aggregator commercial teams · hotel B2B and global sales leaders · payments providers.

• The Friction Walk — one booking, live, from shop to settlement. Every handoff on screen, an owner named for each, and the room identifying what breaks. The output is a written friction list the closing roundtable ranks.
• Content debt — your amenity, policy, and accessibility data is wrong somewhere, and now a model is quoting it
• Hands-on with modern distribution APIs (laptops open)
• Standards and certification — what gets certified today, and what the room thinks should be next
• Consolidation watch — the vendor you sign this year may not be independent at renewal. How do you write a contract for that?

We especially want to hear from: connectivity and integration engineers · CRS, PMS, and RMS product leaders · hotel distribution operations · consultants who implement rather than advise.

• What didn't work — failed AI, connectivity, and distribution experiments, told by the people who ran them. No presenting your own product in this one.
• Independents and small groups — same shift, no team
• Distribution beyond the U.S. echo chamber — EMEA and APAC practitioners on what North America is getting wrong
• The view from the top — one named executive, unscripted, on where distribution goes next
• Closing roundtable: the friction list — the room ranks what surfaced across three days, and HEDNA carries the top items into Discipline work and published briefs

We especially want to hear from: anyone willing to talk about the thing that didn't work.