Here’s a more polished and culturally attuned edit for an English-speaking readership with a strong interest in travel, design and hospitality journalism:

Guests at Meet the World 2025 included 117 exhibitors and 110 leading travel agencies from around the world.

Preparations are already underway for the fourth edition of Meet the World, the Venice-based gathering that brings together more than one hundred hoteliers and travel professionals with an equal number of top-tier travel advisors. The next edition will take place from 8 to 10 December 2026 at the Hilton Molino Stucky on Giudecca Island. It may sound distant, but in the world of travel, that is effectively tomorrow.

Meet the World was conceived to consolidate a community around the Italian DMC I.D.I. Travel — a member of major networks including Virtuoso, Internova, Travel Leaders, Ensemble and Signature. Over the years, the company has expanded its expertise beyond Italy into France and Morocco, championing small-scale, independent and often family-run properties capable of shaping journeys rooted in the authenticity of place.

The driving force behind the project is Filippo Curinga, a Piedmont native based in Treviso, in the Veneto, whose work is fuelled by constant travel: discovering new destinations, identifying the experiences that reveal them best, and cultivating an increasingly international network of relationships. It is this accumulated knowledge and human capital that takes form — and is shared — over the three days of Meet the World.

“The event serves several purposes,” says Curinga. “Naturally, it creates opportunities for hoteliers and travel advisors to meet. But it is also intended to spark conversations around contemporary issues in tourism, to offer unusual ways of experiencing Venice at an unexpected time of year, and to open doors that rarely open without the guidance of a true genius loci.”

During the most recent edition, in December 2025, participants visited the Doge’s Palace after public opening hours, accompanied by an art historian. They were also granted a preview tour — hard hats and work boots included — of the construction site of Airelles Palladio, the new ultra-luxury hotel that has since opened on Giudecca, just a short walk from the Molino Stucky.

Journalists, meanwhile, were invited to explore the Carlo Scarpa wing of the Fondazione Querini Stampalia before attending lunch in the former home of architects Valeriano and Michelina Pastor, both pupils of Scarpa, who died in 2023. Their apartment, a remarkable time capsule of 1980s Italian design, has now been partially opened to the public by their children through a programme of cultural initiatives and, by reservation, a home restaurant where their twenty-something grandchildren prepare Japanese lunches using ingredients sourced from the Venetian lagoon.

The visit was organised by Sybille Righetti, co-founder of Edipo Re, a sustainable local project that also arranges lagoon excursions aboard a historic sailing vessel.

Beyond one-to-one meetings and cultural encounters, Meet the World is equally about conviviality: private dinners in extraordinary Venetian palazzi, informal conversations, and the pleasure of inhabiting Venice socially rather than merely visiting it. A city imagined by almost everyone, yet often difficult to access beyond its surface.

In a landscape crowded with industry events built around increasingly interchangeable formulas, what distinguishes Meet the World is its non-profit ethos. “Covering costs is enough for us,” says Curinga. “That allows even smaller properties, without substantial marketing budgets, to connect with the world’s leading travel agencies and become part of a community based on shared values rather than solely on commercial interests.”

It is a rare position, particularly in the sphere of luxury travel. The same philosophy informed the award introduced during the previous edition, dedicated to the core values of hospitality: authenticity, innovation and regenerative impact.

The prize was awarded to three independent hotels with compelling stories behind them: Fiermontina Ocean in Morocco, Palazzo Petrus in Orvieto and Palazzo Seneca in Norcia — properties actively engaged in projects that support local regeneration, community life and cultural continuity within their territories.