Skift Future of Lodging Forum: Last Year Vs. This Year

Labor Day is behind us, which means it’s time to unpack the cozy sweaters, warm mittens, and oversized scarves and start plotting out those leaf-peeping adventures. But before you book, you may want to hear about AccuWeather’s fall foliage forecast because it’s listing some rather surprising must-see destinations for this season's leaves.

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.

Last year, Skift debuted its Future of Lodging Forum in New York City – focused on what Skift has called The Great Merging of how we live, work, and travel. This year, we are bringing this event and a wide cross-section of hospitality leaders together in London on March 29th, 2023.

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.

More than 71 million international tourists visited Spain in 2022, spending on average more money and time in the country than before the COVID-19 pandemic, Tourism Minister Reyes Maroto said on Wednesday.

We have already kicked off 2023 with our most popular event, Megatrends, in New York City, London and online January 10 and 11 for its tenth year. Take a look back at Megatrends here. 

Dubai received 14.36 million international overnight visitors in 2022, growing 97 percent year-on-year from the 7.28 million tourist arrivals in 2021, according to the latest data published by Dubai’s Department of Economy and Tourism. In 2019, the city had welcomed a record 16.73 million international overnight visitors. The strong performance in 2022 features some noteworthy spikes in Dubai’s traditional key markets and strong growth across emerging markets. Dubai remained a first-choice safe travel destination for visitors from the city’s stronghold markets. Western Europe and Gulf regions each accounted for a 21 percent share of arrivals. The Gulf region in particular saw an exponential increase in their share of arrivals from 13 percent in 2021 to 21 percent last year. South Asia contributed 17 percent of total volumes while the Middle East and North Africa region contributed 12 percent, further reinforcing Dubai’s continued appeal to travelers from proximity markets. The Americas accounted for seven percent of arrivals while North Asia, Southeast Asia and Africa each contributed five percent and Australasia accounted for two percent.