If you’ve ever sat through a conference keynote that felt longer than a long-haul delay, you’ll understand the importance of getting the opening act right. TravelManagers clearly does.
The home-based network has announced that Lisa O’Neill will kick off its 2026 National Conference in Hobart, and mercifully, she’s not known for reading slides in a monotone.
O’Neill, a self-described maximalist, has spent more than two decades telling audiences what they probably need to hear rather than what they’d prefer. Her central thesis is simple enough: “magnificent lives are lived by people who love themselves and the life that they lead.” In lesser hands, that might drift into motivational wallpaper. In hers, it often lands with a laugh, occasionally with a sting.
She’s built a following the old-fashioned way: by showing up, speaking plainly and leaving people with something useful rattling around in their heads. Seven books, crowds of over 5,000, and corporate clients including Ray White, Foodstuffs, and L’Oréal suggest she’s doing something right.
For TravelManagers, the choice feels deliberate.
Executive General Manager Michael Gazal didn’t overcook it, describing O’Neill as “a fantastic fit for our network, our conference, and its theme of ‘connection.’ She’s just the person we were looking for to set the tone for the exciting event that we’re creating.”
Translation: expect a bit of spark, a bit of substance, and if O’Neill is on form, the occasional uncomfortable truth delivered with a grin.
The conference itself will run from 18–20 August 2026 in Hobart, drawing around 500 delegates, including personal travel managers (PTMs), supplier partners, media, and the National Partnership Office. It’s a respectable turnout, though hardly surprising for a network that has made a virtue of blending independence with a sense of collective muscle.
And that’s where this keynote starts to make sense.
“Connection” isn’t just a theme you print on a lanyard and forget about. For a dispersed network of business owners, it’s the glue and occasionally the missing ingredient. O’Neill’s brand of straight-talking optimism is, at the very least, an attempt to sharpen that edge.
There’s also a broader point worth noting. The travel industry, for all its resilience, has developed a fondness for safe messaging, plenty of optimism, and not always enough candour. Speakers like O’Neill tend to upset that balance in useful ways. They remind people that growth is rarely comfortable and that progress usually begins with a slightly awkward moment of honesty.
Whether that lands in Hobart remains to be seen. Conference audiences can be a tough crowd, seasoned, time-poor and not easily impressed.
But if TravelManagers was looking to avoid another politely applauded, quickly forgotten opener, this is at least a step in the right direction.
And in this business, that’s often half the journey.
by Bridget Gomez – (c) 2026.
Read Time: 2 minutes.
About the Author.
Bridget has never been built for stillness. Of Portuguese heritage, she began as a nurse, tending veterans at the Repatriation Hospital, listening to stories as colourful as the life she was yet to live. It was worthy, steady work, but wanderlust, as always, proved louder than routine.
So, she traded starch for a backpack and disappeared for a year, chasing trains, sunsets and the occasional regrettable glass of wine. She wrote everything down: the dust, the laughter, the missteps, the magic. Those notebooks became a travel blog, then a habit, then a calling.
Eventually, she found Global Travel Media, or perhaps it found her.
Today, Bridget writes with heart, humour and a dash of mischief, still travelling, just now with words.
