Wednesday 21 October - Industry Reunion
RACV Royal Pines, Podium Lawns
CEO & Leaders Cocktail Party (invite only)
Thursday 22 October - Aligning the Industry
Registration & Coffee, Expo Hall
Gus Balbontin
Gus isn’t about vague predictions—he’s about preparing you for whatever the future throws your way. As an “Alternative Futurist,” he’ll guide you through the trends that matter, with a sharp focus on what you can do now rather than later.
Gus inspires audiences to start playing with novelty to increase their tolerance to change and pull the future towards us. Waiting for it to happen is a recipe for disaster.
Stop wasting time on speculation, and start taking action.
Two days, a full program, and hundreds people to talk to. Without a plan, you'll go home with a notebook you never open.
Let's get honest as a room: what's actually keeping us up at night right now, and what do each of us need to walk away with?
Let's make it count: Align → Learn → Build Momentum.
Come with your biggest problem. Leave knowing which sessions and which people will help you solve it.
Dr Thomas Siglar
The STRA industry has changed dramatically, and the next chapter is already taking shape. In this session, Dr Sigler traces how the sector has evolved and consolidated in response to changing regulatory settings across Australia. He'll unpack which types of properties are succeeding in different markets and why, then look ahead to the issues that will define the years to come, including ATO scrutiny and the future of secondary homes. It's essential viewing for anyone wanting to understand where the industry is heading and how to position their business for what's next.
Stop reacting and start planning. This session helps you set
up the building blocks for success on Booking.com and
beyond. Optimise your listings to attract the right guests,
secure bookings sooner for your new listings, and unlock
potential in your property portfolio to help grow the bottom line.
Beyond the now, this session helps position your business for
long term success
Moderator: Ethan Brown, Hospitable
Panel:
Frazer King, EvryStay
Murray Kennedy, ScaleGX
Julie George, Million Dollar Host
In a great hotel, nothing is accidental. The greeting, the timing, the recovery when something goes wrong. All designed, written down, trained.
Most of us do the opposite. We react. A guest complains, we fix it. That works at ten properties. It falls apart at a hundred.
This session looks at what the best hospitality operators do differently, then brings it back to the room: what transfers to short-term rental, and what it looks like at our scale.
Less firefighting. More design.
Angela Carrick, AirDesign Australia
David Harris, Aussie Chillout
Kerry Williams, The Accessible Group
Sharon Burnell, The Holiday Home Girls
Megan Whitten-Laird, Guest Group
This roundtable is all about designing a better guest experience, and it's built on conversation, not presentations. Work alongside other hosts to swap ideas, solve common challenges, and discover what really makes guests feel looked after. Guided by experienced table leaders, you'll explore what matters most to your guests and how to deliver it consistently. You'll walk away with fresh perspectives and one practical improvement to make in your own property.
Tim Mortimer, CEO & Founder Honey Homes, interviewed by Sarah Workman, GM ASTRA
Every property manager started the same way. A property or two, doing everything themselves, answering messages at midnight.
The jump from host to operator is the hardest one in this industry. It's where you hire someone for the first time, write down a process you've only ever carried in your head, and learn to let go of work you're better at than the person doing it.
A candid fireside conversation about that transition - the first hires that worked and the ones that didn't, the systems that made growth possible, and the things worth knowing before you're in the middle of it.
Bring your questions. This one's built for them.
Alvan Aiau Yong, Hometime
Daniel White, Canstay
Dom Maley, Honey Homes
Lisa Peterson, L'Abode Accommodation Specialist
Hiring people is one thing. Building leaders is another.
Most operators promote their best doer and hope for the best. No definition of what good leadership looks like, no standard to hold them to, no way to tell whether they're growing. Then we're surprised when it doesn't work.
This session is about the frameworks underneath a leadership team that holds up as you grow - what you expect of a leader, how you make those expectations explicit, and how you assess and develop people against them rather than relying on gut feel.
Practical, not theoretical. You'll leave with a clear picture of what to define, and where to start.
Regulation is the one thing that can change your business without you doing anything wrong.
Caps, registration schemes, levies, planning rules - the settings differ in every state and they keep moving. Most operators find out late, then scramble.
A quick read on where policy currently sits and what's likely coming, followed by an open discussion on what it means in practice: what to prepare for, what's worth pushing back on, and how the industry's advocacy actually works when decisions are being made.
Then the floor is yours. If something in your market has you worried, ask it here.
Hosts are the experts on guests once they make a booking,
but what actually drives guests to click that 'BOOK' button?
Booking.com hosts millions of customers on its platform each
day searching for the perfect accommodation - this session
leverages our expertise and data to help you understand what
guests want in the discovery phase, and how you can tap into
these trends to maximise your revenue potential. Make your
property the one that guests can't scroll past!
Who says partnerships can't have a little flair? Our partners take to the runway for the Here to Stay Merch Catwalk, bringing their best swag, boldest moves and plenty of personality. Cheer them on, then follow the parade straight into the Expo Hall for coffee and conversations with the businesses powering our industry.
Ben Willis, ScaleGX
A working session, not a talk. Hands on keyboards from the start.
Most of us are sitting on portfolio data we never really use, and pitching to owners on instinct instead of evidence. AI closes both gaps faster than you'd think.
We'll work through what's now possible: turning your own performance data into clear answers about which properties are underperforming and why, and turning that insight into marketing that makes you the obvious choice for the owners you want.
Bring your own device — laptop strongly preferred. Have your own performance data with you if you can; you'll get far more out of the session working on your portfolio than on a sample one.
You'll leave knowing what you can build, and well on the way to building it.
Murray Kennedy, ScaleGX
Listings, guest messages, automation - the work that eats your week.
This is a hands-on build session. In an hour you'll set up an AI co-host that drafts listing copy in your voice, handles the guest messages you answer twenty times a week, and takes the repetitive admin off your plate.
No coding. No prior AI experience. If you can write an instruction, you can build this.
Bring your own device — laptop strongly preferred. Have a listing or two and some real guest messages handy so you're building on your own properties, not a sample.
You'll walk out with something that works, and a clear sense of what to build next.
RACV Royal Pines, Ballroom
Friday 23 October - The Future of Hosting: Strategies for STR Success
Lisa Peterson, L'Abode Accommodation Specialist
Growth and profit aren't the same thing. Plenty of operators have added properties and gone backwards.
This session looks under the bonnet at how a property management business actually makes money — where margin comes from, where it quietly leaks away, and why the standard commission model leaves so much on the table.
We'll work through how to restructure revenue for margin rather than volume: pricing and fee design, which services are worth charging for, and the difference between revenue that scales and revenue that just adds work.
Come with a rough sense of your own numbers. You'll look at them differently afterwards.
Moderator: Fiona Anne Britten
Hamish Smith, Experience Jervis Bay
Sarah Workman, ASTRA
The best thinking at any conference happens between the sessions. This one puts it on the program.
No panel, no slides. Real problems, worked on properly, by the people actually living them.
You'll move to a table of people you didn't arrive with. A question gets put to the room - the challenges we're all quietly wrestling with - and each table works it. Then a few tables report back, so everyone leaves with more than their own table's thinking.
Bring the problem you haven't solved. There are 350 operators here who've probably hit it before.
Moderator: Sam Steel, Resly
Jason Gillespie, Wingr Accountants
Cameron Wicking, Mike Phipps Finance
Craig McIntosh, HomHero
Every property you lose has to be replaced before you grow. Most operators are running hard just to stand still.
Retention is the cheapest growth there is, and it runs on trust. Owners stay when they understand what you're doing with their asset and their money - when the statement is clear, the reporting is honest, and nobody has to chase you for an answer.
This session covers both halves of that. The hard side: trust accounting done properly, clean money handling, and the compliance foundations that let you scale without the wheels falling off. And the human side: how you communicate performance, handle a bad month, and build the kind of relationship where an owner backs you instead of shopping around.
Grow your portfolio rather than replacing it.
Moderator: Fiona Anne Britten
Hamish Smith, Experience Jervis Bay
Sarah Workman, ASTRA
The best thinking at any conference happens between the sessions. This one puts it on the program.
No panel, no slides. Real problems, worked on properly, by the people actually living them.
You'll move to a table of people you didn't arrive with. A question gets put to the room - the challenges we're all quietly wrestling with - and each table works it. Then a few tables report back, so everyone leaves with more than their own table's thinking.
Bring the problem you haven't solved. There are 350 operators here who've probably hit it before.
Dr Aastha Gupta, ViCyber
We hold guest identity documents, owner bank details, payment card data and the keys to hundreds of homes. That makes us a target, and most of us are defending it with a password manager and good intentions.
The attacks are already happening. OTA phishing that looks exactly like the real message. Payment redirect fraud that catches the person doing their job properly. PMS accounts left open long after someone has left the business.
This session covers where operators are genuinely exposed - platforms, payments, communications, identity verification - and what it takes to close those gaps. It also covers cyber insurance, which almost nobody in this industry has looked at closely enough.
One incident can cost you an owner's trust permanently. This is the session you'll wish you'd been to.
Stop reacting and start planning. This session helps you set
up the building blocks for success on Booking.com and
beyond. Optimise your listings to attract the right guests,
secure bookings sooner for your new listings, and unlock
potential in your property portfolio to help grow the bottom line.
Beyond the now, this session helps position your business for
long term success
Most operators pull one lever — price — and wonder why occupancy won't move. The operators winning in 2026 are working all three: pricing, distribution and promotion, in sequence.
This fast-moving 30 minutes unpacks how dynamic pricing, a broader distribution footprint and OTA-specific promotional tools work together to lift both visibility and booking volume. We'll cover where rate strategy genuinely moves the needle and where it's simply chasing the market down, why connectivity and channel breadth are now a revenue decision rather than a software one, and how the promotional settings sitting inside your OTA extranets — the ones most operators never open — influence ranking, conversion and length of stay.
Hosts are the experts on guests once they make a booking,
but what actually drives guests to click that 'BOOK' button?
Booking.com hosts millions of customers on its platform each
day searching for the perfect accommodation - this session
leverages our expertise and data to help you understand what
guests want in the discovery phase, and how you can tap into
these trends to maximise your revenue potential. Make your
property the one that guests can't scroll past!
Nobody builds anything worthwhile on their own.
This industry runs on people who back themselves, but the ones who move fastest are the ones who stopped trying to work it out alone. A conversation with someone who has already been where you are is worth more than a year of trial and error.
We'll hear from people who took that step this year, and what it changed for them. Honest, unpolished, and closer to home than you'd think.
Moderator: William Crock, Hometime
Kevin Lu, Trip.com
Alonso Vargus, Smart Suites
Ben Willis, ScaleGX
Dominik Wilkowski, HomHero
For fifteen years, distribution has been a ranking problem — get higher on the page, get more bookings. That logic breaks when a guest stops searching and starts asking. An assistant doesn't return twenty results; it returns two or three, and the criteria it uses to choose are not the ones you've been optimising for.
This panel puts operators, platform and distribution voices in the same room to work out what actually makes a property selectable by AI — and what it changes for the three channels you rely on. For OTAs: does an assistant sitting in front of the OTA make it a cheaper shopfront or a harder one to escape? For direct bookings: is this the opening direct has been waiting for, or does it demand a level of data discipline most operators don't have? For brand visibility: what happens to a brand nobody ever sees, because the recommendation arrives without a logo attached?
You'll leave able to audit one of your own listings against what these systems actually read, and name the one thing worth changing before the 2027 season.
Aaron Taylor, Honey Homes
Danny Shannon, Homhero
Sarah Workman, ASTRA
We finish where it matters most - with the hard questions.
Sharp provocations about what has to change if this industry is going to thrive. Not a summary of the last three days. Real arguments, made plainly, designed to be pushed back on.
Then the floor opens to the room. Every operator, supplier and platform in the building, working through what we do next.
The conversations that usually happen in the car park happen here instead. It's the session that sets the tone for the next twelve months.