Are your bags packed for the 2026 GBTA Workforce Mobility & Travel Summit? Then congrats, Houston is waiting. This guide comes from ITILITE, one of your fellow attendees, and it's here to make your two days at Hotel ZaZa easier.

Inside: who you'll meet, which sessions to plan around, where to stay now that the room block has closed, and where to eat once the sessions wrap.

What to Know About the GBTA Workforce Mobility & Travel Summit

GBTA built this summit for a corner of travel that rarely gets its own stage: crews, teams and project staff who travel together and often stay for weeks. It takes place November 9 to 10, 2026 at Hotel ZaZa Houston Museum District, opening with a Monday evening reception and running a full program on Tuesday. 

This year's theme, "From Movement to Management," pushes past the booking itself to what happens after a crew lands. Expect workshops, live polls and scenario exercises more than panels, and you'll leave with 6 GTP recertification credits. 

Who You'll Meet at the Workforce Mobility & Travel Summit

Look around the room and you'll see two kinds of people: buyers who run group and project travel for their organizations, and the suppliers who want their business. The buyer side is unusually varied, because crew travel shows up in industries that rarely share a conference:

• Sports: professional, collegiate and amateur teams
• Media and entertainment: concert, film and dance crews on tour
• Energy, resources and marine: including offshore crew rotations
• Construction and utilities: field crews moving between jobsites
• Airlines: flight crew travel
• Project and consulting firms: staff on extended project work
• Non-profit and emergency management: foundations, missionary and religious groups, and response teams

Across the supplier tables, you'll find airlines, hotels and meeting venues, ground transport and mobility providers, risk and security firms, and payment and reporting technology.

A tour manager moving a film crew and an ops lead moving a field crew fight the same rooming-list battles, and this is one of the few rooms where they compare fixes. If you sit on the construction side, the construction travel management guide is worth a read on the flight in.

Key Topics on the Workforce Mobility Summit Agenda

The Tuesday agenda opens with an 8:00 AM networking breakfast and wraps at 4:30 PM, with four working sessions and supplier showcase breaks in between. Every session is built around a real crew travel headache, so pick the ones that match your own to-do list.

Keynote: The VUCA Era (9:00 AM)

Liz Yovich Pan, Director of Global Engagement and Employee Benefits at WBN (Worldwide Broker Network), kicks off Tuesday with "The VUCA Era: Challenges, Change, and Opportunity." VUCA is shorthand for volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity, which is a fair description of any week spent rebooking a crew around weather or a site delay.

Modern Payments for Project, Crew and Team Travel (9:30 AM)

Two GBTA committees, Project, Crew and Team Travel (PCTT) and Payment and Expense, co-host this workshop: "Project, Crew and Team Travel 2030: Reimagining the Journey Through Modern Payments." Sit in if your crew leads still put hotel deposits on their own cards, or if receipts reach finance long after the job has closed.

Invisible Duty of Care Risks (11:15 AM)

"Beyond the Itinerary: The Invisible Duty of Care Risks in Large-Scale Workforce Mobility" uses live polling and scenarios to work through seven risks that rarely show up on a booking record. Anyone who has moved a crew knows the pattern: the plan on paper and the people on the ground drift apart fast. For a refresher before the session, the duty of care in business travel guide lays out what employers owe the people they send.

What's Still Too Manual? (1:15 PM)

"There Has to Be a Better Way: What's Still Too Manual?" is an open-floor conversation about the crew travel work still done by spreadsheet, email and phone. Think rooming lists rebuilt after every roster change, or a coordinator texting 20 people to confirm who's on which flight. If locating travelers is on your list, read the travel tracking system guide before you go.

Afternoon Activity and Close (2:45 PM)

The 2:45 PM slot is an afternoon activity GBTA hasn't announced yet, and the day closes with a 4:00 PM wrap-up. GBTA also lists extended-stay lodging, crew management, supplier partnerships, risk management and traveler visibility among the summit's topics, so expect them to come up throughout the day. 

Workforce Mobility Summit Registration Costs

Registration is free for GBTA buyer members, no matter when you sign up. For everyone else, prices step up on October 28 and once more on November 6. 

Need to make the case to your manager first? GBTA has a ready-made justify-your-attendance template you can edit and send. 

Before You Fly: Workforce Mobility Summit Checklist

Hotel ZaZa's room block closed on October 16, so a room is the first thing to sort out. Everything else on this list takes a few minutes, and each item saves you a headache in Houston.

• Lock in a room this week: The $199 group rate is no longer available, and GBTA says the venue tends to sell out. Look at ZaZa's public rate, then work down the hotel list below.
• Register before the October 28 price step: Non-member fees go up $100 on October 28 and another $100 on November 6.
• Fly into Hobby if you can: Hobby (HOU) sits about 11 miles from the venue, roughly 20 to 25 minutes by car, and Bush Intercontinental (IAH) is about 20 miles out, roughly 35 to 40 minutes. Getting from the airport is up to you, so line up a rideshare or rental.
• Plan for valet: Hotel ZaZa has no self-parking. Valet runs $15 for the day or $59 overnight.
• Land on Monday: The welcome reception is Monday evening and registration opens at 7:00 AM Tuesday, so arriving Monday spares you a pre-dawn airport run. Check-in starts at 4:00 PM, and checkout is at noon.
• Look up the Houston per diem: Pull the GSA lodging rate for Houston before you book anything outside the block, so you know how much room you have under policy. 
• Agree on the cost code up front: Settle with finance whether this trip counts as training, vendor research or business development before anything gets booked, so nobody is guessing when the card statement lands.

Meet ITILITE at the Workforce Mobility & Travel Summit

The ITILITE team will be in Houston for the summit too, so if you spot them, come say hi. Group and project travel is the part of the program most teams still run on spreadsheets and goodwill, and swapping notes on it is half the reason to be at this summit.

ITILITE is travel, expense and card software for organizations that send people out in groups. Crew trips get booked in one place with policy checked as the booking happens, project and job codes are attached before anyone leaves, and single-use virtual cards pay for each hotel stay and shut off once the crew checks out. For field teams, the duty of care guide for construction companies and the travel and expense cards for construction companies page walk through how that plays out on a jobsite.

Stop by and talk crew travel with the team, or grab a 30-minute walkthrough to see what your group and project trips really cost.

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