Ari Emanuel Is Assembling a Live Tourism Conglomerate

The most consequential new travel company of this decade is being assembled by a Hollywood super agent, and the travel industry has barely been paying attention. The World Cup final in New Jersey on Sunday closes a six-week tournament of 104 matches across 16 cities, carrying the highest-grossing World Cup hospitality program ever assembled, run by a company controlled by Ari Emanuel. Live tourism is our term at Skift for travel organized around scheduled events: sports, music, theater, art fairs, conventions. It has always existed. The distinction that matters is between servicing travel demand and originating it. Hotels, airlines, and online travel agencies do the first: they sell the room and the seat once someone has decided to go. Emanuel's companies increasingly do the second: they own the events people decide to go to, the platforms where the deciding happens, and the operation that converts the decision into a packaged trip. Over the past nine months, t