Asia Pacific travel tips

Middle-income consumers paid premiums for hotel rooms as pent-up demand and savings boosted people’s taste for travel post-pandemic. Wyndham Hotels & Resorts, the world’s largest hotel franchisor — whose brands mostly target these consumers — enjoyed quarter-after-quarter of room rate gains throughout 2022.

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.

Meliá Hotels International is Spain’s largest hotel and resort operator, aiming to grow its portfolio across the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, and Asia Pacific by 40 percent in the next three years. The Mallorca-based company, controlled by the Escarrer family, is open to selling a stake to a world player like Hyatt or Marriott. But its strategy in recent years could set it up to go it alone for much longer.

Travel search volume in the Asia Pacific region rose over 50 percent year over year in the fourth quarter last year, according to Expedia Group. The region’s strong performance led global travel search volume, which rose by 10 percent year over year.

As Radisson Hotels Group continues to expand internationally through its existing brands, its strategy is to focus on service quality and consistency. For Federico González, CEO of the hotel group, having nine big global brands is better than chasing a mass of weak brands.

What percentage of tech employees at Booking Holdings are women? How has the company’s total return compared over the last five years to its internet peers? Booking detailed information about these issues and others in a half dozen charts in its recent annual financial disclosure.

India could rank among the top three markets for outbound travel in the coming years, according to Omri Morgenshtern, CEO of online travel platform Agoda said while speaking to media in India during his recent visit to the country. Indian travellers are increasingly becoming more important to many countries and will become second to China in terms of spending in Asia, he said. An earlier Skift article had reported how the time is ripe for India — which already ticks most of the boxes as a suitable candidate to take over from China as the largest travel source market — to enter the dragon’s space. In India, online travel booking is growing at a faster pace after the pandemic in comparison to other global markets, outpacing the Asia Pacific market, said Morgenshtern. The total transaction value in travel almost hit pre-Covid levels in 2022. “Since 2019, the rank of importance of Indian tourists for Thailand for example has risen from 10th to 6th. I expect it to become more important in the coming years, not only to Thailand but to many countries in APAC,” he added. Morgenshtern also sees a lot of potential for inbound tourism in India. While India’s inbound is growing slower than outbound travel, he believes it is going to see fast growth in the coming years.

Attracting and developing talent is arguably the most critical factor needed for the travel industry to make a complete recovery. Although women represent approximately 55 percent of the travel industry’s workforce, the vast majority of them, however, occupy lower-level positions. They were also among the workers most impacted by the pandemic.

I wanted an update on BWH Hotel Group, the parent company of Best Western Hotels & Resorts. So I spoke with Larry Cuculic, president and CEO since late 2021.

Accor plans to broaden its subscription cards to be more global, granting members discounts and perks worldwide instead of regionally, the Paris-based hotel giant said Tuesday.

American Airlines’ restructuring of its global sales team will involve the departure of three experienced senior leaders, Skift has learned.

Dubai welcomed 1.47 million overnight visitors in January as Russia went on to be the second largest tourism source market for the emirate. Registering a 63 percent increase over 2022, for the emirate, 115,000 Russians visited Dubai for tourism. The highest number of international guests were from India at 186,000, while the third-biggest source market was Saudi Arabia with 98,000 visitors. Skift had earlier mentioned in an article how Dubai has proved to be a safe haven for sanction-hit Russians wanting to flee the country. During the year following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, air traffic between Moscow and Dubai grew at a whopping 228 percent compared to pre-pandemic, according to travel analytics firm ForwardKeys. While Dubai’s 1.47 million overnight visitors in January is lower compared to 2019’s 1.6 million, it is 50 percent above January 2022’s 980,000 visitors.

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.

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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.

Move over Mark Zuckerberg and your metaverse vision: Travelzoo said it will be launching its own metaverse shortly.

Marking the debut of Hilton’s luxury brand Waldorf Astoria in India, Chris Nassetta, president and CEO of Hilton, announced on Wednesday that Jaipur would be the first destination for the brand.

On September 26-28, we will be hosting our TENTH annual Skift Global Forum – a.k.a. the top travel industry conference – and we can hardly believe it. It’s crazy and exciting to see how far we have come and how many talented and insightful travel industry leaders we have welcomed onto our stage.

Japan is having trouble servicing tourists arriving from abroad due to staffing shortages, amid surging demand for its historically popular cherry blossom season.

Hilton hopes to have 1,000 hotels operating in Asia Pacific by 2025 and sees opportunity at all tiers, but particularly in luxury brands and entry-level hotels.

Last week three international hotel chains announced the debut of their luxury brands in India. Hilton’s Waldorf Astoria and Minor Hotels’ Anantara brand are set to make their India debut in Jaipur, while Radisson has picked Hyderabad for the launch of itsRadisson Collection brand. Marriott International CEO Anthony Capuano said last week that the hotel group has a lot of room for growth in the luxury segment in India. Speaking at the Hotel Investment Conference — South Asia in Bengaluru last week, Capuano said Marriott is still in the early stages of developing its luxury industry portfolio in India and will continue to concentrate in this area in the future.