Sonder's New Stock Market Challenges

Buoyed by the strong recovery in India’s domestic travel demand, online travel company Yatra.com plans to launch its Indian initial public offering by March next year.

Hyatt just lapped the one-year anniversary of acquiring the all-inclusive resort company Apple Leisure Group in a $2.7 billion deal. The Chicago, Illinois-based hotel group is now looking to expand its hotel presence in European cities that could help feed its all-inclusives, according to comments executives made as they reported its earnings.

Marketers beware: Prior ways of marketing to Chinese consumers, including travelers, won’t work as well today because their preferences changed during the pandemic.

China’s latest loosening of its stringent zero-Covid policy, mostly for domestic tourism, comes across as too little too late, at a time when the rest of the world is living with the virus. 

A job opening for a hotel wanting an “organic chef” or someone who can handle “procurement and environmental, social, and corporate governance,” underlines the importance of sustainability as a value proposition helping them with talent acquisition and retention.

Indian online travel agency EaseMyTrip announced this week that it has acquired a 55 percent stake in hotel booking marketplace cheQin, owned by Gleego Innovations, for around $370,000.

Fly91, a new Indian airline named after the country’s telephone code, is aiming to take advantage of India’s rising middle class by focusing its services on second and third-tier cities.

Accor, the Paris-based hotel giant, will reveal on Thursday a new global “soft” brand, Handwritten Collection, featuring so-called lifestyle hotels. These mid-priced properties have funky furniture and buzzy restaurants and bars but don’t offer the full services of a premium boutique.

Here are some excerpts from Daily Lodging Report from the past week. If you’re not a subscriber, you should be. Get news on hotel deals, development, stocks, and career moves. Sign up here, now.

India is expected to overtake Germany to become the world’s third most powerful travel and tourism market by 2032, according to World Travel and Tourism Council’s Economic Impact Research.

Despite a sluggish international travel market, the pace of recovery in the Middle East aviation market accelerated throughout 2022 and is expected to take off over the next 10 years with the region’s share of the global fleet set to expand. In its “Global Fleet and MRO Market Forecast 2023-2033,” global management consulting firm Oliver Wyman noted that the Middle East remains among the fastest-growing aviation markets in the world, with the regional fleet set to expand 5.1 percent annually over the next decade. The report further noted that the Middle East’s share of global fleet will grow over the decade from 4.9 percent in 2023 to 6 percent in 2033.  Meanwhile, the global fleet is projected to expand one-third by 2033, to well over 36,000 aircraft, with Oliver Wyman also anticipating a record number of aircraft deliveries over the next 10 years (despite current supply chain constraints). The Middle East fleet’s growth over the next decade will primarily be driven by the addition of narrow bodies. Historically, the Middle Eastern fleet has been primarily made up of widebodies. But moving forward, the report observed that narrow bodies will increase to 48 percent of the fleet from 39 percent, while wide bodies will decline to 48 percent from 56 percent.

Dubai welcomed 1.47 million overnight visitors in January as Russia went on to be the second largest tourism source market for the emirate. Registering a 63 percent increase over 2022, for the emirate, 115,000 Russians visited Dubai for tourism. The highest number of international guests were from India at 186,000, while the third-biggest source market was Saudi Arabia with 98,000 visitors. Skift had earlier mentioned in an article how Dubai has proved to be a safe haven for sanction-hit Russians wanting to flee the country. During the year following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, air traffic between Moscow and Dubai grew at a whopping 228 percent compared to pre-pandemic, according to travel analytics firm ForwardKeys. While Dubai’s 1.47 million overnight visitors in January is lower compared to 2019’s 1.6 million, it is 50 percent above January 2022’s 980,000 visitors.