Southwest Airlines will get its first new CEO in nearly two decades next February when Gary Kelly passes the reins to Robert Jordan. On February 1, 2022, Jordan will become only the sixth CEO of the Dallas-based carrier , which celebrated its 50th anniversary earlier this month. He joined Southwest in 1988 and, after serving in multiple roles, is currently executive vice president of corporate...
Tripadvisor has released a preview for its upcoming 2024 study on the Experience of Travel, which showed that 67% of travelers surveyed across 7 key markets placed more value on experiences than things. It’s a drum the sector has been beating for a while. Tripadvisor’s study saw participation from 5,618 travelers from Australia, France, India, Japan, Spain, the UK, and the U.S. While all...
Oberoi Group — known for its luxury hotel brands Oberoi and Trident — is quietly developing new hotels close to nature, the company’s top boss revealed on Wednesday. “Some of those hotels will be … in beautiful locations with a strong sense of place,” said Vikram Oberoi, managing director and CEO. “These will be much smaller hotels.” The project to develop the hotels close to nature is known...
Kimberly Miles, the executive director of the Vacation Rental Management Association, acknowledges that there is a “new normal” for the sector this year as demand softens or over-supply takes hold in certain markets, but there is also a reset for the association in terms of unlikely allies and members. Miles, who marks her second anniversary leading the property manager-oriented VRMA this month...
Over 200 top companies plan to attend Skift Global Forum East in Dubai on December 12-14. This includes household names like Air Arabia, Auberge Resorts, Booking.com, Emirates, Hilton, Seera, and Shangri-La Group, just to name a few. View the companies attending: Last Year’s Numbers Don’t Miss Out Your ticket also includes access to an opening reception at Cloud 22, all conference sessions...
Scammers have been targeting Booking.com customers for years, and in the latest attempt to find victims, they have reportedly been placing ads on the dark web to obtain the passwords of Booking’s hotel partners. “Hackers are increasing their attacks on Booking.com customers by posting adverts on dark web forums asking for help finding victims,” the BBC reported last week. “Cyber-criminals are...
United Airlines is the only carrier that charges passengers for a carry-on when they fly basic economy for domestic routes. As other carriers have started including carry-ons into their basic economy fares, United chief commercial officer Andrew Nocella said the Chicago-based airline may reevaluate its policy in the future. Nocella said the main reason why United still charges for basic economy...
U.S. hotels have finally joined Europe and China in feeling a performance bite directly tied to the Omicron variant. Analysts were hesitant over the last few weeks to directly tie any performance dip seen around the world to Omicron due to the winter holidays. But U.S. hotel revenue per available room — the industry’s key performance metric — was down nearly 18 percent from the same week two...
In the first entry in our Fact from Fiction series on sustainability issues in tourism, we tackled the emergence of “regenerative tourism” and applied a critical lens that highlighted some of the opportunities and risks. We summarized it as a leap forward from sustainable tourism in that it seeks to maximize positive impacts rather than merely minimizing harms. That’s a common definition but one...
When your portfolio is lean in the part of the world that is performing relatively well through the pandemic, it might be time to panic. But Accor’s leaders have almost written off the idea of gaining more ground in the U.S. “We’re probably going to be nine months to 12 months late to the recovery cycle compared to pretty much everyone else,” Accor CEO Sebastien Bazin said this month at the...