by Pádraic Gilligan, Co-Founder, SoolNua Consulting & Head of Research & Consultancy, SITE

A Different Kind of Disruption

Let’s talk about acronyms.

Not the one you’re thinking of, though God knows we’ve talked about that enough. Every conference panel, every strategy deck, every cocktail conversation among agencies, hotels, DMOs and DMCs now orbits the same gravitational centre: AI. What will it do to our industry? How fast? Who adapts fastest? Who gets left behind?

These are real questions, urgent ones even. But while we’ve been staring so intently at the digital revolution, another transformation has been unfolding, one that’s arguably more intimate, more consequential, and far less discussed in our industry circles.

I’m talking about GLP-1.

If you don’t recognise the term, you absolutely recognise the brand names: Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro. The Saturday Financial Times (14 February) describes them as weight-loss drugs with the potential for “broader economic impacts beyond individual health.” What started as a diabetes medication has suddenly become one of the most culturally significant pharmaceutical interventions in a generation and it might have more to say about the future of incentive travel than ChatGPT ever will.

The Question We’re Not Asking

Here’s what caught my attention in the FT piece: the sheer scale of potential disruption these drugs represent, not just for individuals but for entire economic sectors. Airlines reconsidering seat configurations. Restaurants adjusting portion sizes. Theme parks rethinking ride parameters. Insurance actuaries recalibrating their models.

Everywhere you look, industries that designed themselves around certain assumptions about human bodies and appetites are suddenly confronting a world where those assumptions might not hold.

So here’s my question: have we, in incentive travel, given even five minutes of serious thought to what happens when a significant portion of our participants are on GLP-1 medications?

What Changes, Exactly?

Let me be clear about what I’m not saying. I’m not suggesting GLP-1 drugs are good or bad, miracle or menace. That’s not my swim lane and it’s not the point.

What I am suggesting is that these medications are already beginning to reshape behaviour, appetite and expectation in ways that touch directly on how we design and deliver incentive programs. And we’d be foolish not to pay attention.

Consider the fundamentals. Incentive travel has always been a fundamentally sensory and embodied experience. We fly people thousands of kilometres, yes, but what we’re really doing is offering an immersive encounter with place, culture and possibility. And food has been central to that equation. Not just as sustenance, but as spectacle, ritual, memory and experience.

The long lunch in Tuscany. The street food tour in Bangkok. The Michelin-starred finale in Paris. The craft beer tasting. The wine pairing. The elaborate closing gala where abundance signals success.

Now imagine a cohort where 20%, 30%, perhaps eventually 50% of participants are experiencing fundamentally altered relationships with food and alcohol. Not so much through willpower or discipline, but through pharmaceutical intervention that directly modulates appetite signals in the brain.

What happens to the incentive program when the centrepiece experience no longer centres people in the way it once did?

The Broader Shift

The FT article notes that GLP-1 drugs might affect everything from food production to hospitality to how we design cities. It quotes research suggesting these medications could reduce calorie intake significantly, create shifts in what foods people prefer, and even affect alcohol consumption.

If that’s true, and early data suggests it is, then incentive travel sits right at the intersection of all those forces. We’re in the business of creating peak experiences around travel, cuisine, celebration and reward. If the appetite mechanisms that make those experiences compelling are being chemically recalibrated for millions of people, that’s not background noise. That’s a structural shift.

What AI Gets Right (That We’re Missing About GLP-1)

Here’s where the comparison becomes useful. The reason our industry takes AI seriously is because we understand it as a paradigm shift, something that requires us to rethink assumptions, rebuild workflows and reimagine what’s possible.

We get that AI isn’t just a faster calculator. It’s a different kind of tool entirely, one that forces us to ask new questions about creativity, efficiency, authenticity and value.

GLP-1 deserves the same kind of attention, not because it’s equivalent to AI, but because it represents an equally fundamental shift in the conditions under which we operate.

On the Incentive Travel Index (2025), when incentive travel professionals are asked which programme activities are most important for a successful event, “Group Dining Experiences” ranks a close 2nd to “Group Cultural or Sightseeing Experiences”. If food becomes less central to how we create memorable experiences, what replaces it? If the long convivial dinner starts to feel awkward rather than celebratory because half the table isn’t really eating, do we redesign the format? If alcohol consumption drops sharply, does the evening gala still serve the same social function?

These aren’t hypothetical questions. They’re already playing out in programmes right now. We’re just not talking about them.

The Uncomfortable Parallel

There’s another angle here that makes me uneasy, and it’s worth naming directly. If GLP-1 medications become widespread, particularly in corporate and professional contexts, they risk creating a new kind of conformity, a pharmaceutical smoothing of human difference that could make incentive travel participants more homogenous, not less.

One of the things that makes great incentive programs work is the collision of different people, different appetites, different ways of being in the world. Some people live to eat. Others couldn’t care less. Some drink with gusto. Others abstain entirely. The best programs create space for all of that, tension and all.

But if everyone’s on the same medication, operating from the same chemically modulated baseline, do we lose something essential? Does the program flatten? Does the experience become less textured, less human?

I don’t know the answer. But I know it’s a question we should be asking.

So What Do We Do?

If you’ve read this far hoping for a tidy conclusion, I’m afraid I’ll disappoint. I don’t have a neat plan for the GLP-1 future of incentive travel. I barely understand the present, let alone the trajectory.

But I do know this: our industry has always prided itself on being responsive to human need, on designing around how people actually are rather than how we wish they’d be. And if GLP-1 represents a genuine shift in how millions of people experience appetite, satiety, food and celebration, then we owe it to ourselves and to our clients to engage with that reality seriously.

That might mean rethinking how we design F&B components. It might mean creating more varied program structures that don’t assume everyone engages with food the same way. It might mean having honest conversations with clients about what celebration looks like in a post-Ozempic world.

Or it might mean something else entirely. Something we haven’t thought of yet because we’re still too busy talking about AI.