Kayak CEO Steve Hafner Predicts China to Fully Reopen After Travel Search Surge

After damage from heavy rains prompted its closure to travelers in April 2022, northern Peru’s Llaqta de Kuélap ruins—one of the largest ancient monuments in the Americas—has reopened to visitors, with limits in place.

Skyscanner’s leading flight search and comparison capabilities now live in beta in Chat GPT plug-in.

Good morning from Skift. It’s Friday, November 18. Here’s what you need to know about the business of travel today.

Searches on Chinese travel sites surged and social media platforms were flooded with delight and relief on Wednesday as the public cheered the biggest loosening of some of the world’s strictest Covid policies.

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. 

Good morning from Skift. It’s Monday, December 19, and we are headed back from a successful Skift Forum in Dubai. Here’s what you need to know about the business of travel today.

This has been a year of growing optimism around the travel industry’s recovery, as well as growing pessimism about rising inflation, sky high rates, and a possible recession. Here are some of the highs and lows of the past year, in the form of 11 charts produced by the Skift Research team. 

Chinese people, cut off from the rest of the world for three years by stringent COVID-19 curbs, flocked to travel sites on Tuesday ahead of borders reopening next month, even as rising infections strained the health system and roiled the economy.

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.

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.

Chinese airlines will be the early winners of the country’s international reopening, analysts say, having kept most widebody planes and staff ready while foreign carriers struggle with capacity constraints after previous border openings.

U.S. and European airlines will benefit from pent-up demand for travel to China after its recent border reopening, but route approvals, fresh Covid-19 testing rules and not enough large aircraft remain barriers to rising sales, analysts and industry officials say.