Jason Clampet travel tips

In our weekend roundup, we delve into the pros and cons of Google’s latest foray into the tours and activities industry, providing insights into how online travel agencies might stand to benefit. We also catch up with IHG’s new CEO Elie Maalouf and his ambitious plans for the brand’s future. From AI’s influence on the travel sector to the latest controversies in short-term rentals, keep reading for a comprehensive look at the most pressing issues in today’s travel landscape.

Expedia Group announced after its fourth quarter 2023 earnings call that Ariane Gorin would become the online travel agency’s CEO on May 13, succeeding current CEO Peter Kern. Gorin will join the board of directors, where Kern will remain. Barry Diller will continue in his roles as Expedia Group’s senior executive and chairman.

STR reported that China hotel RevPAR was up 36.9% in the week ending July 22nd. That was up against a drop of -15.7% in the year-ago week. Versus the week in 2019, RevPAR was up 5.4%. The South China Morning Post published an article on how cash-rich investors are looking to buy hotels in Hong Kong, taking advantage of discounts of as much as 30%.

Last week ended with some Hopper news, and this week was filled with it. Read below for the latest on one of the most-love consumer travel apps and its challenges and changes with partners, consumers, and more. 

While we are focused on delivering the best global travel event this week, we also have a job to do delivering the essential travel news. So we did, and we also delivered something new: a comprehensive travel stock index that captures the breadth and the impact of the global travel industry. But no stock index currently does this because they are each split along categories that don’t serve the industry.

Spain’s Tourism, Trade and Industry Minister Reyes Maroto will quit to run for mayor of Madrid, triggering a cabinet reshuffle, she said on Monday.

“I’m going to bring you behind the tent, tell you what we’re doing,” JetBlue Airways COO Joanna Geraghty said at Skift Global Forum earlier this fall.

Google is one of the undisputed heavyweights in online travel. So when one of the key masterminds behind all of its travel platforms and products talks about where the search giant is heading, it’s worth paying attention to.

The vice chairman and CEO of Expedia Group, Peter Kern, covered a lot of ground during his session at Skift Global Forum in New York City in September. Kern gave his perspective on mergers and acquisitions, technology, and micro-services.

“I’m really excited about the quality of the brand portfolio,” IHG CEO Keith Barr said at Skift Global Forum. Barr goes on to describe the current realities of the hotel business: it’s a real estate business at the end of the day, after all. But IHG has been hyper-focused on its brands and its franchise partners. “It’s been great because there’re such clearly defined brands that enable us to work with a number of opportunities,” he told Skift’s Sean O’Neill.

At at time when the travel industry is still grappling with a labor shortage, you have to think some companies in the sector are “labor hoarding,” hanging on to workers that might have otherwise been downsized for costs savings or seasonality reasons, simply because of the fear of not being able to fill roles later.

For this bonus episode of The Skift Travel Podcast, we turn to Dallas where we held our first in-person Skift Aviation Forum earlier this week. To begin the event, we invited American Airlines CEO Robert Isom to have a conversation conversation with Airline Weekly’s Ned Russell about post-pandemic pattern changes and how his airline is preparing for the holiday season ahead.

Marriott CEO Anthony Capuano took the stage at Skift Global Forum in September 2022 to discuss what the hotel giant had accomplished in 2022 and where it was headed in the coming year

Skift founder Rafat Ali interviewed Hilton CEO Christopher Nassetta via hologram Wednesday at Skift Global Forum East in Dubai. Nassetta said Hilton expects to organically develop its own new brands rather than chase costly acquisitions in part because “we don’t want to have to fix other people’s problems.”

As other sectors deal with post-epidemic corrections, travel brands continue to grow as they make up for lost ground over the last three years. Earnings season continued this week and both Meta’s and Google’s results showed the strength of travel brands during the last quarter. Read on.

It was a big week for hotel and short-term rental earnings, with a few record quarters from Marriott, Hyatt, Airbnb, Choice, and Wyndham. Overall, the outlook for 2023 is better now than the already positive forecasts from late last year.

Earlier this week we did our first event on LinkedIn live, and we think it went pretty well. You can watch a recap of the discussion about what travel marketers should expect in 2023 on LI or back on Skift, too.

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.

This week Executive Editor Dennis Schaal stepped back from the earnings buzzsaw that has been the last month and took a longer look at three brands he covers a lot: Airbnb, Expedia, and Booking. In the case of Airbnb, he looked at what it and Booking may do with their piles of cash, as well as what it should expect from Expedia’s Vrbo. These are two stories that would not have been possible to write this time last year when Airbnb didn’t have a year behind it as a public company.

Hotel leaders from around the world gathered in London this week for the Skift Future of Lodging Forum. Senior Hospitality Editor Sean O’Neill wrote an excellent summary of the event earlier this week where he shared slides from speakers, quotes from attendees, and a Paris Hilton TikTok.

On Wednesday, we published a deep dive into Chinese outbound tourism by Asia Editor Peden Doma Bhutia. The spark of the story came from a discussion she had in December with Trip.com Chief Operating Officer Schubert Lou at Skift Global Forum East. “The article is an attempt to cut the clutter and talk about how the Chinese tourist has changed and how destinations should approach this change,” Bhutia told me this week. “Also, call it perfect timing, the deep dive came out the day China removed its final Covid-induced hurdle for travel and resumed issuing tourist visas.”