Skift Research travel tips

Our newly released U.S. Travel Tracker: Q2 2023 Highlights report highlights a reversal of Covid-related changes in the travel landscape. Solo trips have decreased, and travel to urban centers has rebounded.

The Skift Travel Health Index indicates a bright tourism outlook this summer. The latest June 2023 Highlights Report shows global travel performance outpacing 2019 levels by 4 percentage points. The index now stands at 104, gaining 1 point over the previous month.

Good morning from Skift. It’s Thursday, July 20. Here’s what you need to know about the business of travel today.

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. 

Skift Research analysts held a LinkedIn Live session earlier this month that dove into the team’s annual State of Travel report. We’ve edited their presentation into a podcast-friendly version. You can watch a video of it here as well.

Once a hotbed of regional conflicts, the Middle East has steadily evolved. There’s more cooperation among countries and the business environment is more conducive to growth. The aviation industry has become a core contributor to local economies: It provides jobs and has drawn tourists and business to the region.

The new Skift Research report, India on the Move: A Traveler Survey, captures the spirit of a nation in motion, where its status as the world’s most populous country aligns with a surging desire among its people to explore new horizons. 

In September 2021, Google launched an advertising product called Google Things To Do, which lists not only the top attractions in a city but also options to book tickets via direct sites or online travel agencies. As we show in the screenshot below, though Google displays paid sponsored listings near the top of the site, its main organic booking list prioritizes the direct website over the sites of aggregators such as Viator, GetYourGuide and Musement, to name a few. 

The Americas became the first region to recover to pre-pandemic capacity in the first half of 2023. Airline capacity, measured in Available Seat Miles (ASMs), is the number of passenger seats available on any given route, and while it does not take load factors (occupied seats) into consideration, it’s a good indicator of expected demand by airlines. Owing to a substantial intra-regional rebound in capacity, both North and South America have recovered to pre-pandemic levels.