Jason Clampet travel tips

We are excited to introduce several new features to our chatbot, Ask Skift, that enhance its capabilities and improve the user experience. First, we have integrated OpenAI functions, allowing Ask Skift to query our content interactively and provide more accurate and comprehensive answers to user questions.

Buyout fund Cinven and Canadian pension fund CPPIB have hired Morgan Stanley and Evercore to prepare an initial public offering for Hotelbeds, Expansion newspaper reported on Friday citing unidentified market sources.

The number of foreign tourists visiting Portugal hit a record of more than 1.8 million in May, with visitors from the United States becoming the second-largest group, data from the National Statistics Institute (INE) showed on Friday.

Ryanair (RYA.I) flew a record 17.4 million passengers in June, its highest for a single month and a 9% increase from a year earlier, the low-cost carrier said on Tuesday.

It was a hotel-heavy week at Skift, with stories of Accor’s big investor day as well as reporting from the annual HITEC conference in Toronto. Travel tech reporter Justin Dawes was there to explain the current state of hotel technology, as well as question some of the future ideas.

This week Executive Editor Dennis Schaal followed up on a comment made by Tripadvisor’s CEO about his company’s position in the tours and activities space. After looking at the growth of Tripadvisor’s Viator brand against its rival GetYourGuide, Schaal concluded that it wasn’t really a competition as much as it was a tale of these two big online companies competing against much larger offline competition. Read on for the full story, as well as other headlines from this week.

If you are in a major tourist destination this summer you know that tourism’s post-pandemic recovery is doing just fine – at least on the ground. This week the Skift Research team took the anecdotal and checked it against the data to provide the best look at the current state of the travel industry, from crowded piazzas, to remote short-term rentals, and on to packed economy airline cabins.

It was the first big week of earnings this season, with numbers out of Accor, Google, Hilton, Southwest, Wyndham, and Royal Caribbean. They were, for the most part, upbeat – Hilton’s CEO said, “We had the best booking quarter in our history, ever.” One note: Google Travel was low on Google’s priorities.

How closely have you been following the news this week? Put your knowledge of the travel industry to the test with highlights from Skift’s editors and reporters’ coverage. Check it out below.

This week IHG took the covers off its new mid-market brand and it certainly Garner-ed (sorry) a lot of interest. IHG thinks it has a winner here for a few reasons, the big one being it’s easy for hotel owners to get on board with. As Sean O’Neill writes in his analysis, “Unlike new-build brands that take time to grow because of construction delays, conversion brands can expand quickly, especially as many independent hotel operators or owners of properties flagged with older brands seek a refresh.”

Test your knowledge of the travel industry with highlights from Skift’s editors and reporters’ coverage this week. How closely have you been following the news?