This Year travel tips

You’ll soon be able to fall asleep in Paris and wake up in Berlin thanks to the return of Austrian rail operator ÖBB’s night train service.

One of Manhattan’s most celebrated restaurants is reopening after a years long closure. Café Boulud is on its way back to Manhattan, with a new location in Midtown East. The original restaurant temporarily closed in early 2020 due to the pandemic and never reopened.

For the first time ever, United Airlines disappointed me.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said on Saturday it is investigating a near collision between a Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 and a Cessna Citation business jet in San Diego, the latest in a series of troubling U.S. aviation incidents.

High levels of inflation are contributing to a decline in Americans making travel plans for December holidays this year. Almost 43 percent of U.S. adults intend to travel for Christmas, Hanukkah or Kwanzaa, a 4 percentage point decrease from the figure recorded last year, according to a recent survey from travel industry website The Vacationer.

Travel is picking up in the U.S. In December, 55 percent of Americans traveled, 10 percentage points higher than the same time last year. However, the number of respondents who travelled decreased by 2 percentage points in December compared to September indicative of typical seasonality in travel with the winter season commencing.

Online travel agency Trip.com Group hopes that cross-border travel capacity for China will be back to normal by the third quarter of this year.

Last year, Skift debuted our first-ever Skift Future of Lodging Forum in New York City – focused on what Skift has called “The Great Merging” of how we live, work, and travel. 

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.

Exactly a year ago Skift reported private equity chasing investments in short-term rentals and vacation rentals. At the time though, a short-term rental real estate investment trust (REIT) seemed distant. 

Budget hotel chain operator Oyo has announced its intention to expand its UK presence with plans to increase its number of hotels to over 200 by the end of this year.

Executives at MGM Resorts International are hopeful that gaming may be approved by the United Arab Emirates, possibly as soon as this year.

Thanks to record booking revenue ahead of this year’s summer travel, German vacation rental marketplace HomeToGo is looking at breaking even in 2023.

Airfares in India have been soaring this year and a new report confirms the trend.

Palestinian pilgrim Abu Anas Abu Rahal was hoping to find cheaper lodgings for a week-long stay in Islam’s holiest sites in Saudi Arabia, as the minimum cost for the hajj pilgrimage climbed to 26,000 riyals ($7,000) this year. His options were limited.

Inspirato, which offers a luxury vacation home and hotel subscription service for affluent guests, layed off around 50 staffers, or some 6% of its workforce yesterday, Skift has learned.

The cost of business travel increased much more than expected in 2022, a new report from corporate travel agency CWT and the Global Business Travel Association (GBTA) shows.

Mondee is expanding further into corporate travel with its fourth acquisition of the year – it said Monday that it has acquired Skypass Travel for $15 million. 

Yep, that’s “billion” with a ‘b’.

A recent report released from travel marketing engine Sojern, analyzed travel trends from January 2015 to April 2016 and found the top international destinations for U.S. travelers as well as the top emerging and declining international spots.

The TSA is usually a traveler’s worst nightmare, but thanks to the @AskTSA Twitter account, the TSA it turns out can actually be funny. The customer-service Twitter account answers travelers most absurd questions (no, you cannot travel with liquid mercury) about what they can and cannot carry onto a plane. And while this article is all in good fun, some questions and responses are actually useful, especially when it comes to holiday travel—it prefers if you don’t wrap your gifts, by the way—and traveling with food, liquids, and electronics.