Many of the major hotels and online travel agencies have reported financial results for the first half of the year. The common message: Demand for travel remains robust, even as there is worry about an uncertain global economy and recession fears.
25.08.2023 - 13:06 / skift.com / Pranavi Agarwal / Skift Research
The market for tours, activities, and experiences represents one of the most opportunistic and untapped prospects within the travel industry. It is highly fragmented, with a long tail of small suppliers, and it is rapidly shifting online. That makes it an attractive space for online intermediaries to consolidate market share from small offline players.
Google, not one to miss the party, has also entered the space with its “Things To Do” tool. As it does with other travel verticals, Google acts as both friend and foe to the online travel agents (OTAs).
Skift Research’s proprietary web scraping analysis of Google’s “Things To Do” shows that whilst many OTAs list on Google, taking advantage of its vast scale and power as a search engine, Google persistently prioritizes the direct option over third party OTA sites.
Could Google potentially dis-intermediate the OTAs and give power to the direct sites, similar to the practices conducted by Google Hotels? Or does the highly fragmented and largely unsophisticated nature of the industry demand a strong aggregator, with direct bookings less likely to gain traction?
We look to answer these questions in this report, as well as provide an overview of the tours, activities & experiences market, comparing it to other verticals within the travel industry – showing how it is the last outpost of travel in today’s distribution landscape.
The tours, activities, and experiences market is a lucrative and underexplored opportunity in the travel industry. Its high fragmentation, influx of small suppliers, and rapid shift from offline to online makes it a goldmine for online intermediaries to gain market share from traditional offline players.
Many of the major hotels and online travel agencies have reported financial results for the first half of the year. The common message: Demand for travel remains robust, even as there is worry about an uncertain global economy and recession fears.
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.
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 how online travel booking habits changed during the pandemic and how these behaviors will continue to evolve. Since February 2020, Skift has been regularly surveying 1,000-plus Americans about their travel behaviors first on a monthly, and then a bi-monthly basis. The topline results of these surveys are published as our U.S. Travel Tracker. However, we ask more granular travel questions that have not been published previously.
While the tech sector faces the blues, the travel sector is still moving in a positive direction. You can see this in the last month of earnings reports, as well as from exclusive Skift Research surveys. Although not fully recovered completely, the travel industry gained substantial momentum at the start of the year. All regions have almost recovered from the pandemic blues, Asia Pacific being the only exception. But with loosening travel restrictions and China reopening, we expect a stronger travel industry to be less uneven this year.
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.
Skift’s Senior Research Analyst Pranavi Agarwal and Senior Hospitality Editor Sean O’Neill went live this week on LinkedIn to discuss Skift Research’s latest report that looks at hotel performance and unit growth by chain scale in times of crisis and recession in the U.S.