Corporate and International Travel Drove Earnings This Quarter

17.05.2024 - 19:39 / skift.com / Rashaad Jorden / Sean Oneill / Seth Borko / Sarah Kopit

The recent earnings seasons provided a glimpse into how the largest publicly traded travel companies are faring.

So what are the main takeaways from earnings season? And which companies emerged as big winners? Senior Hospitality Editor Sean O’Neill and Airlines Reporter Meghna Maharishi joined Editor-in-Chief Sarah Kopit and Head of Research Seth Borko to discuss the results of earnings in this week’s Skift Travel Podcast.

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Sarah Kopit: Welcome back to the Skift Travel Podcast. I’m Skift’s Editor-in-Chief Sarah Kopit here as always with our Head of Research, Seth Borko. So here at Skift, we are all about the business of travel. But today, we are all business as we talk about bottom lines. It is the tail end of earnings season, and we’re here to parse through the financials of the most important companies in travel.

Specifically, we’ll be talking about two of travel’s largest sectors — airlines and hospitality. So here to help, we are joined by Meghna Maharishi, Skift’s airlines reporter, and Senior Hospitality Editor Sean O’Neill.

Seth Borko: We are so excited to have Sean and Meghna here to give us a look into earnings season.

This is one of my favorite times of the year. It’s when we finally get down to brass tacks and we get a look inside the inner workings of these travel businesses. How much money are they making? How fast are they growing? How did they do? It’s kind of like going to your doctor for an annual checkup, but we get to do it four times a year with all these different travel businesses. And we’ve got no one better to to do it with.

I want to start off this conversation just at the top. We have a Skift Travel 200 Index of the 200 largest publicly traded companies out there. And I pulled together some numbers around how fast we are growing overall in this industry. So the travel industry grew — revenue that’s top line — by 10% year-over-year this quarter. So that’s a pretty strong figure.

And that’s sort of our benchmark for how we want to think about what growth looks like — a very impressive 19% margin on EBITDA. So for every dollar that the travel industry made, $0.19 of it came in terms of came in terms of profit. The fastest growing sectors were the cruise lines, the tour operators and the slowest growing sector — we’ll talk to Sean about this — was the accommodations sector overall.

Borko: We’re really pleased to have you both here to talk about your areas of expertise, especially the airlines and the hotel sectors. I think, Meghna, why don’t we jump into it from you? You cover the airlines for us. How did the airlines look this earnings season?

Meghna Maharishi: So I feel like what’s happening is