Pranavi Agarwal travel tips

After Hopper’s noisy breakups last year with Expedia Group and Booking.com, Hopper has a major hotel chain problem.

Good morning from Skift. It’s Thursday, April 25. Here’s what you need to know about the business of travel today.

The period after the Great Financial Crisis in 2008-2009 until 2019 was a golden decade for online travel agencies. Booking and Expedia benefitted from the shift to online bookings, a consolidation of the online distribution landscape, and share gains from hotels. They become the most powerful duopoly in online travel. 

CoStar Group, the real-estate data giant, was hit last week with a consumer class action lawsuit alleging it enabled several hotel operators, such as Marriott and Hilton, to artificially boost their hotel rates.

Last week, Skift Research published our Global Travel Outlook. The main takeaway was that 2024 will be a year of . 

In Part I of our series on Google Travel, we analyzed the hotel distribution landscape in the U.S. by web-scraping over 5,000 hotels and their respective distribution offerings across Google’s sponsored and organic auctions.

Choice Hotels dropped a bombshell earlier this week when it went public with a hostile takeover bid for Wyndham Hotels & Resorts. Clearly Choice likes the deal while Wyndham thinks it can do better on its own (or with someone else).

Good morning from Skift. It’s Thursday, October 19. Here’s what you need to know about the business of travel today.

This week Choice Hotels publicly offered to acquire Wyndham Hotels & Resorts following months of private discussions between the two companies. This was pretty exciting in itself, with the last major M&A deal in the hotel industry being the Starwood-Marriott merger in 2015. However, a few days later, more news broke that Wyndham rejected Choice’s offer and saw its stock being halted on the NYSE.

Skift Research conducted an extensive data-scraping of the Google Hotels platform to understand Google’s role in the hotel distribution landscape.

Our latest Skift Research report delves into the Google Hotels platform through extensive data scraping, using AI-powered Browse.ai and customized Python scripts to amass data from over 5,000 hotel listings in the U.S.

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.

Good morning from Skift. It’s Friday, January 27. Here’s what you need to know about the business of travel today.

Inspirato, the luxury hospitality subscription brand, has cited “ongoing macroeconomic uncertainty” as it made workforce cuts and scaled back its 2022 financial outlook, yet this is at odds with the bullish commentary from other travel companies, especially as regions like Asia reopen for international travel.

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.

Good morning from Skift. It’s Friday, March 10. Here’s what you need to know about the business of travel today.

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.

Property manager Sonder, received a notice of delisting from Nasdaq because the company failed to satisfy the minimum bid price listing rule as its common stock traded below $1.00 per share for 30 consecutive business days. 

In this episode of the Skift Travel Podcast, Ankur Randev, chief commercial officer of Highgate, discusses the current hospitality investment climate with Skift senior research analyst Pranavi Agarwal.

Skift Research has gained unprecedented access to one of the fastest growing online travel agencies (OTAs) in North America – Hopper. We interviewed senior executives across each of Hopper’s verticals, in addition to their co-founder and their CFO, to produce a deep dive analysis of Hopper’s rise in travel. Since being founded in 2007, Hopper has become a formidable disruptor of the OTA market, which for so long has been dominated by the duopoly of the legacy players. It has leveraged big data, machine learning algorithms and predictive analysis to launch an array of unique fintech products that have been fundamental in helping it become the third largest OTA in North America.

Good morning from Skift. It’s Wednesday, May 31. Here’s what you need to know about the business of travel today.