More Indians are taking personal loans to travel and meet vacation-related expenses, according to Madhavan Menon, executive chairman of Thomas Cook India.
25.08.2023 - 13:29 / skift.com / Rashaad Jorden / Sean Oneill / Peden Doma Bhutia / Patrick Pacious / Pieter Elbers / Indigo Ceo
Good morning from Skift. It’s Friday, June 2. Here’s what you need to know about the business of travel today.
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The short-term rental industry has seen an enormous boom over the last decade. And ahead of Skift’s Short-Term Rental Summit in New York next week, Skift Research has unveiled the Skift Short-Term Rental 250, a list of the 250 most prominent companies in the industry.
Head of Skift Research Wouter Geerts writes the detailed look at the sector comes four years after its seminal report on the short-term rental ecosystem. He adds that Skift Research divided the 250 companies into three distinct sectors. The new report also delves into Airbnb’s dominance of the short-term rental industry.
Next, India-based low-cost carrier Indigo had a banner financial year, flying over 86 million passengers, a 72 percent year-over-year jump. And the company believes an enhanced loyalty program will attract more customers, reports Asia Editor Peden Doma Bhutia.
Indigo CEO Pieter Elbers said in an interview with Skift that the Indian market is ready for a loyalty system unlike 10 ten years ago. However, he added the company isn’t sure what features its planned loyalty program will include. Indigo had introduced in 2019 the Ka-Ching card in 2019, a cashback system that Elbers had described as a form of loyalty without classical tiers.
Bhutia adds that international expansion is on the horizon for Indigo. It’s the world’s sixth largest carrier in terms of market size despite its low presence outside of India. Roughly 90 percent of its passengers are domestic travelers. The company is looking to fly into Nairobi and Jakarta among other destinations with its current fleet.
We end today with a look at the hotel industry’s highest paid CEOs in 2022. Most major hotel CEOs actually ended the year with less overall compensation than they originally expected, reports Senior Hospitality Editor Sean O’Neill.
Rob Goldstein at the Las Vegas Sands Corp. was 2022’s highest paid public hotel company CEO, taking home $40 million. He was immediately followed by Choice Hotels International CEO Patrick Pacious, who received $27 million in total compensation. However, O’Neill writes those figures weren’t the most noteworthy detail in hotel CEO pay. A new rule requires U.S. companies to more clearly state the equity awards that represent the pay packages for top executives. That new disclosure showed CEOs took home less money than anticipated.
O’Neill adds European-based hotel companies weren’t required to disclose compensation in the same manner as U.S. companies. The CEOs of IHG and Accor received less compensation on average than their U.S.-based counterparts.
More Indians are taking personal loans to travel and meet vacation-related expenses, according to Madhavan Menon, executive chairman of Thomas Cook India.
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Silkhaus, a United Arab Emirates-based platform for short-term rentals, announced on Tuesday that it has raised $7.75 million in a seed funding round.
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.
Good morning from Skift. It’s Monday, December 12. Here’s what you need to know about the business of travel today.
A pent-up surge in consumer demand for travel gave many hotel companies pricing power in 2022. But hoteliers charged the highest rates the market could support for more than just one-off circumstantial reasons. A critical ingredient in the formula was that hoteliers developed a newfound pricing discipline during the pandemic recovery — even when business travel was historically weak and international tourism was slow to recover in many markets.
The top boss of Marriott International used an on-stage interview on Thursday as a platform to call on the U.S. federal government to do more to cut the wait times for interviews for first-time visitor visa applicants, which he said was leading to lost revenue because of reduced U.S. inbound tourism.
Indian Hotels Company (IHCL) plans to reach a portfolio of 300 hotels by 2025, it said on Tuesday when reporting its earnings.
India is projected to surpass a rapidly aging China as the world’s most populous country this year, a development that Skift founder and CEO Rafat Ali and Senior Research Analyst Seth Borko said would have enormous implications for the travel industry during the Skift Megatrends event in New York City on January 10.
India is projected to surpass China as the world’s most populous country later this year, as China begins to decline and India’s population growth shows no sign of slowing until 2064. That shift carries huge implications for travel across the globe, and has the potential to rewire the race for attracting global tourists around the world. Skift addressed this in its Megatrends 2023 package in the story India Becoming the New China in the Reordering of Asia Travel.
A listing in India, where the market is now more receptive to e-commerce platforms, is still on the agenda for MakeMyTrip, even as the online travel agency said it is not looking at any fundraising immediately.