Hopper's Disruption of the Legacy Travel Industry: New Skift Research

In the world of short-term rentals, there are many ways people can book a stay. Offline bookings continue to make up a significant chunk of the market, albeit a declining one, and there are many niche online booking platforms, as highlighted in our Skift Short-Term Rental 250 map.

In its annual outlook for the travel industry, Skift Research has created 2023 global revenue forecasts for airlines, hotels, short-term rentals, cruise lines, and online travel agencies. Skift also built an estimate for international cross-border travel from 2023–2025. This outlook is meant as a companion piece to our recent State of Travel report that offers in-depth coverage of all travel segments.

Skift Research produces a wide range of reports and data tools. The big trends in the industry guide us in choosing the topics we cover, and our readers, through their reading and feedback, tell us which reports and topics hit the mark in 2022. 

In Skift Research’s latest report check in on the current state of Expedia Group and Booking Holdings, the big two online travel agencies in the U.S. and Europe, as they recover from the Covid-19 pandemic. 

Travel’s performance dropped in November from 84 to 81 points, according to Skift Research’s latest analysis in the Skift Travel Health Index: November 2022 Highlights report.

Good morning from Skift. Somehow it’s already Friday, January 20. Here’s what you need to know about the business of travel today.

Skift Research has been tracking the performance of the travel industry since the start of the pandemic, and we have analyzed all the peaks and troughs, highs and lows for three years now. The last months of 2022 saw little movement in the global Index score as continued growth in demand in some areas was counterbalanced by increased worries about the broader economy.

The Skift Travel Health Index is up to 89 points in January 2023, falling only short 11 percentage points from January 2019 travel performance levels. The January score is the highest achieved since the onset of the pandemic. With growing travel demand, we expect 2023 to be a powerful year for the travel sector.

Skift Research’s latest report looks at hotel performance by chain scale in times of crisis and recession in the U.S., as well as the comparison of unit growth strategies of major hotel brands post the 2008/9 Great Financial Crisis versus their current pipelines.

Global travel recovery doesn’t seem too far. The Skift Travel Health Index witnessed a month-on-month uptick of 4 percentage points (pp) in February 2023 and now stands at 93. We anticipate this year to bring recovery and growth to the travel industry.

Recent breakthroughs in Generative AI have had an electrifying effect on the tech world in recent weeks. Many have compared these first artificial intelligence tools, which create new content, such as images or text from simple prompts, to the early days of smartphones or the internet. With the potential for such wholesale disruption, what does generative AI mean for the travel industry? And how do we separate the hype around this new tech from the reality of what it will look like in use by travel companies.Skift Research’s latest report will attempt to tackle those questions by diving into Generative AI’s impact on the travel industry. This report will focus specifically on large language models and their use cases within the travel business.We examine seven different cases for how AI will be used across travel, including its implications for chatbots, operational efficiency, and search. Across most of these scenarios, we see multi-billion dollar markets being created. Skift Research estimates that altogether generative AI poses a $28 billion-plus opportunity for the travel industry.

Over the past decades, the booking pendulum has swung back and forth between online travel agents’ (OTAs) growing booking share, and hotels clawing back some direct bookings. Hoteliers have been complaining about high commissions paid to third-party travel websites, and increasingly invest in driving more direct bookings. The evolving hotel tech stack has website builders, booking engines, and direct-booking tools offering to aid this cause.