Combine one of New York’s top bars, an adventurous distillery and a famous troupe of three men painted in blue and you wind up with the bedlam of Mindcluck II — an interactive cocktail + theater experience where the drinks are part of the story.
25.08.2023 - 13:23 / skift.com / Brian Egan
Executives in the short-term rental industry believe their customers possess a unique level of flexibility: Consumers may go low-budget hiking in Albania one week, then stay at a 5-star Italian getaway the next.
Awaze Group CEO Henrik Kjellberg and Evolve Co-founder and CEO Brian Egan spoke in detail about their customers to Skift Short-Term Rental Reporter Srivdya Kalyanaraman at the 2023 Short-Term Rental Summit.
In their discussion, Kjellberg and Egan explored the implications of catering to the ever-increasing demands of both their users and property owners. They emphasized the importance of focusing on specific markets and building a strong presence within those markets, rather than expanding into new geographical regions.
You can watch a full video of their discussion as well as read a transcript of it below.
Srividya Kalyanaraman: So, we have the largest suppliers in Europe and U.S. here. Awaze, we have over 110 properties in the portfolio and 30,000 properties. So it’s very intentional to have both of you here on stage today to basically ask why don’t we have you playing in each other’s markets, or why don’t we have anybody kind of crossing over and merging continents?
Brain Egan: I’m happy to take a swing at it, and then I’ll let Henrik. So I would say, first of all, it’s a difficult business, and when you talk about the domestic market, the U.S. domestic for us, it’s a much less mature market than in Europe. So I think you’re talking about a bit of apples and oranges in terms of the maturity of the relative markets and the types of companies; I mean, you have a brand that’s 75 years old or something within your portfolio, whereas everybody playing at scale in the U.S. has been built roughly in the last ten years. So I think that’s one thing. The other would be, and this is just from my perspective, really interested to hear what Henrik has to say, is for us, the U.S. is the largest greenfield opportunity in the world right now.
There are nine million vacation properties there are. There’s about two million; two and a half (people debate the number) that are rented out on a short-term basis every year, and the two or three, or four largest players in the whole space, included, have less than a hundred thousand of those properties under management. So, we see this as a very early-stage game right now, and we think there’s a lot of room to grow here. So for us to overcome the barrier of wanting to go cross-border and take on all the operational complexity of that, we’d have to weigh that against further growth and getting more market share in the U.S.
Henrik Kjellberg: Very, very similar for us. I mean, I believe in going deep as opposed to going wide. Somebody mentioned a vanity metric
Combine one of New York’s top bars, an adventurous distillery and a famous troupe of three men painted in blue and you wind up with the bedlam of Mindcluck II — an interactive cocktail + theater experience where the drinks are part of the story.
Can airlines reduce the total hydrocarbons they burn? Aviation plays a role in the climate emergency, contributing an estimated 3 percent of the world’s carbon emissions a year.
Accor, the Paris-based hotel giant, said on Tuesday that Omer Acar will head its brands Raffles & Orient Express as of March 1. Acar will join Accor’s other brand CEOs in its luxury and lifestyle group (Fairmont, Sofitel & MGallery, and Ennismore) — all of whom report directly to group CEO Sébastian Bazin.
Executives from two new airlines, Connect Airlines and Breeze Airways, shared their strategies at the Skift Aviation Forum in Dallas for starting up and pushing forward.
“I’m really excited about the quality of the brand portfolio,” IHG CEO Keith Barr said at Skift Global Forum. Barr goes on to describe the current realities of the hotel business: it’s a real estate business at the end of the day, after all. But IHG has been hyper-focused on its brands and its franchise partners. “It’s been great because there’re such clearly defined brands that enable us to work with a number of opportunities,” he told Skift’s Sean O’Neill.
The inaugural Skift Aviation Forum welcomed Robert Isom, the CEO of American Airlines, as its first speaker at the Statler Hotel in downtown Dallas. During the interview he shared how the world’s biggest airline was prepared for the upcoming Thanksgiving vacation, and already looking ahead to the future with a focus on recruiting and training pilots, and staffing the carrier back up.
Azul Brazilian Airlines doesn’t expect any ultra-low cost carriers to enter Brazil any time soon. The low cost carrier has 165 aircraft that fly to 170 destinations in Brazil and will flies just under 1000 flights a day next month.
Linda Jojo, chief customer officer for United Airlines, described a slew of ways the major airline is changing the customer experience during the Skift Aviation Forum in Dallas.
The dynamics of ancillary travel product distribution for airlines is continuously changing. Brand loyal customers are the order of the day. Yet in symbiotic ecosystems where airlines use online travel giants like Expedia to tailor their travel packages, competition for loyal customers is unavoidable.
Sun Country Airlines CEO Jude Bricker believes it’s premature to draw firm conclusions about the emergence of new travel patterns seven months into the travel industry’s recovery. But Bricker said at the recent Skift Aviation Forum that surging airfares are changing travelers’ behaviors, including driving more consumers to fly on Tuesdays instead of the weekend.
Steven Udvar-Házy, the co-founder and executive chairman of lessor Air Lease Corporation, believes the airline industry will likely see more consolidation, especially in Europe. Udvar-Házy said at the recent Skift Aviation Forum in Dallas that while he doubts the continent’s low-cost carriers will be involved in any mergers, he sees Italy’s ITA and TAP Air Portugal as takeover targets.
Sean Donohue, the CEO of Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, has seen his airport make a significant rebound from the pandemic, becoming the world’s No. 2 in terms of passenger count.