Main theme for 2025
As every year, a main theme inspired by the current market environment will guide the show’s event programme. The aim is not to explore a trend, but to condense into a concept the special features and urgent issues faced by the sector in all its complexity.
AWAKE
TO A NEW ERA
THE THEME
The 2025 theme defines a moment of collective reawakening: we are in a new era.
Historians, sociologists, political scientists and intellectuals of various backgrounds agree that we can no longer use the old languages, paradigms and tools to explore the time we are living in, because it is a new era.
We are seeing geopolitical tensions redrawing world maps, economic and fiscal policies being rapidly updated, and AI starting to make its presence felt in production and decision-making processes. This context requires everyone - companies, institutions, regions - to be able to understand what is happening quickly and to adapt.
AWAKE originates from here: from the knowledge that we are no longer facing change, but that it has already happened. From this realisation, we can ask new questions and react to our new present: the question is no longer “what will happen?”, but “how do we decide to engage with what’s happening?”.
In this context, the ability to adapt is not an option, but a daily necessity for operating, deciding and building. Like many others, the tourism sector is caught up in this complexity: it must rethink its maps, redefine destinations, renegotiate the relationships between tourist flows, regions and communities: to measure its impact and respond with new visions.
THE AWAKE VISUAL
The visual chosen to represent AWAKE tells this whole story: a timeless and directionless landscape, purposefully reassuring. An image that invites us to face the unknown with a positive mindset, depicting the moment of awakening. It does not deny uncertainty, but makes it manageable.
This is how we represent the present: a time that can serve as fertile ground for profound transformation. An opportunity to rewrite the way we are, live, travel and do business.
AWAKE is the collective awareness of this new era. How we choose to experience it will make all the difference.
The pathway
With AWAKE – the theme of the 2025 Show – we wanted to highlight the importance of this particular historical and cultural moment and the need to read it in all its complexity and thereby transform it into the dawn of a new era.
In each edition, a theme is chosen that encapsulates the state of demand and outlines possible supply-side developments.
- In 2022, the UNBOUND theme highlighted the need to reopen the borders imposed by the pandemic, breaking down geographical and psychological barriers, in search of new business opportunities.
- UTOPIA, the theme of 2023, focused on rebuilding an equal dialogue with other living species, both animals and plants, and on rediscovering awe and wonder as an immediate source of happiness and new true well-being for tourists.
- In the year when AI exploded - 2024 - VERITAS focused on the need for truth, for companies to draw on hard data while being wary of sometimes inauthentic reviews, false information circulating online and artificially created storytelling.
- In 2025, a year of tremendous change worldwide, AWAKE urges people to treasure the awareness gained over the past five years and turn it into an opportunity for positive progress and transformation.