Skift's Top 12 Travel Research Reports of 2023

27.12.2023 - 00:41 / skift.com / Seth Borko / Skift Research

Skift Research produces a wide range of reports, surveys, and data tools – we published more than 50 reports in 2023, a record for us.

Certain reports always stand out: Some were popular with readers, some highlight proprietary insights, and some are just hold a sweet spot in our analysts’ hearts.

We picked 12 of our best reports that highlight new technology, online travel, hotels, airlines, consumer insights, and data products.

Artificial intelligence is on everyone’s lips these days. We promise you: It will come up at least once with family over the holidays. This report was the first in our industry to examine what generative AI could mean for the business of travel. It offers several cases studies and estimates that altogether this tech could represent a $28 billion-plus opportunity for the travel industry.

Hopper has emerged seemingly overnight as the most disruptive booking platform in all of travel. Hopper is leading the way in online travel innovation and forcing everyone else to keep up. How does it do it? How big is it? Where is Hopper headed next? Based on our conversations with senior executives, much of the data and analysis presented in this report is not publicly available anywhere. This report lets you peek under the hood of the most exciting business in online travel.

We web-scraped 5,000 hotels across Google to understand the current state of the online distribution landscape in the U.S. Our analysis found that Google’s actions are allowing small OTAs, new entrants, and direct sites to compete head-on with the legacy players. Could this help weaken the duopolistic distribution power long-held by Booking Holdings and Expedia Group?

This report looks at how online travel booking habits changed during the pandemic and how these behaviors will continue to evolve in 2023 and beyond. We find that many pandemic-era booking habits are not sticking. In particular, the pendulum seems to be swinging back to third-party distribution channels after a strong COVID-era run of direct bookings. We also look at specific booking site market share shifts and investigate whether the trip planning process shifted.

Choice Hotel’s hostile takeover bid for Wyndham is the hot hotel drama to watch in 2024. That makes our report comparing the two from August 2023, before the acquisition offer, feel prescient. Use this easy to read 20-chart report to get up to speed on these businesses and learn why midscale hotels are such a popular market today.

We continued to build on our hotel sustainability work in 2023. This report covers the largest hotel companies, most of which have now set or submitted science-based targets to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. This is an improvement over just a few years ago,