The Skift Travel Podcast

Hotel earnings season has just ended, with public hotel companies reporting their end of 2022 performances. In the latest Skift Podcast, our team covers the highlights, reviews the 2023 outlook, and pinpoints one of the most critical metrics to watch.The conversation will also bring up  topics and themes we'll focus on more in-depth at our all-day Skift Future of Lodging event, happening in London on March 29. "Analyst guidance for 2023 was robust, even after accounting for a likely economic slowdown in the second half of the year," said Pranavi Agarwal, the London-based Senior Research Analyst for Skift Research, in her discussion with Sean O'Neill, the Washington, D.C.-based Senior Hospitality Editor.One key theme of the brief discussion between Agarwal and O'Neill was how hotel groups may see a divergence in their performance this year as certain trends tend to favor some kinds of hotel portfolios over others. "Portfolios skewed to APAC [Asia Pacific] and lux will see the biggest uplift in 2023," Agarwal said. "Hyatt should really do well, while Choice said its domestic RevPAR [revenue per available room, a key metric] will be just 2 percent year-over-year in 2023."

Today, we’re going to look at some of the future trends happening across hospitality and the big questions facing the sector as a preview for our Future of Lodging Forum happening in London on March 29th, 2023. Join Skift Head of Research Wouter Geerts and Skift Senior Hospitality Editor Sean O’Neill, in discussion with Skift Head of Programing Brian Quinn, as they preview the topics and themes on top of mind heading into this event.Learn more about the event at https://live.skift.com/skift-future-of-lodging-forum-2023/

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.For this episode of the Skift Travel Podcast, Skift Founder and CEO Rafat Ali is joined by Senior Research Analyst Varsha Arora and Asia Editor Peden Doma Bhutia, in a focused discussion on India's growth, the demographic and economic challenges before India could become as big a force as Chinese outbound travelers have become, what changes have come in the domestic tourism market during and post-covid, and what the global tourism community looking to attract Indian travelers has to keep in mind. This podcast builds off the discussion Ali and Senior Research Analyst Seth Borko had at the Skift Megatrends event earlier this month about the seminal moment of demographic switch about to happen this year, where India will become the world's most populous nation overtaking China, estimated some time this April.

For this bonus episode of the Skift Travel Podcast, we turn to our colleagues at Airline Weekly for perspective on Southwest Airlines.As most of the traveling public knows, the airline had a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad holiday season. The cancellation of 15,000-plus flights between Christmas and New Years will weigh on its fourth quarter results, but consumers' memories are short and the airline will survive. Edward Russell and Jay Shabat discuss. Plus, what European country does Eurocontrol's latest data show led the continent's air traffic recovery last year?Further Reading:European Airlines Could Face Steep Operational Challenges in 2023 by Jay ShabatSouthwest’s Meltdown Should Be a Technology Warning for Airlines by Justin Dawes

Marriott CEO Anthony Capuano took the stage at Skift Global Forum in September 2022 to discuss what the hotel giant had accomplished in 2022 and where it was headed in the coming year “I’m optimistic because we are a data driven company,” Marriott CEO Anthony Capuano told Skift’s Sean ONeill. “Not withstanding all the very real headwinds in terms of inflationary environment, rising interest rates, sociopolitical unrest. We’re just not seeing the impact yet in the data. We’ve had a great first two quarters of the year. When I look at the forward bookings through the end of the year, the resilience of travel is born out in that data.”It’s not just bookings by guests that make Capuano optimistic, its property partners give it reason as well. “We announced during our first quarter earnings call we had signed more transactions globally than in any first quarter in our history,” he told the audience. “Then we replicated that in the second quarter. In many ways, those votes by the wallet of our partners are the most telling indication of our owner community’s optimism about the pace of recovery.”Follow news about Marriott and the hotel business at https://skift.com/hotelsGet daily updates about hotels deals around the world at https://dailylodgingreport.com/subscribe/

Skift founder Rafat Ali interviewed Hilton CEO Christopher Nassetta via hologram Wednesday at Skift Global Forum East in Dubai. Nassetta said Hilton expects to organically develop its own new brands rather than chase costly acquisitions in part because “we don’t want to have to fix other people’s problems.”He said Hilton’s brand portfolio more than doubled to 19 in the 15 years Nassetta has been at Hilton and they are all successful, although some are “a little bit early in gestation.”“We have designed these in a modern context around exactly what customers want and we built it out of the dust,” Nassetta said. “We built it with our own blood, sweat and tears rather than paying a big price. It’s been great for our shareholders, infinite yields effectively by creating these, and creating brands that really resonate with our customer base.”Learn more about hotels at Skift.com/hotels.Read more about Hilton at Skift.com/tag/hilton.

Something shifted in the last two weeks on the zeitgeist about the use of artificial intelligence in our daily personal and professional lives. The launch of the first large-scale, general purpose chatbot using OpenAI‘s GPT3 AI engine on November 30 has reenergized the whole tech industry all at once. Skift CEO Rafat Ali wrote a story about it, which will give you a good sense why.To get an understanding of why there is so much buzz about Generative AI — the sub-sector with larger AI world which includes creation of text, images, audio and video — and what this means for our daily lives, for the travel industry and even travelers, Ali talked to the best expert analyst and writer on it I know: David Mattin. He writes an excellent newsletter called New World Same Humans on trends, technology, and our shared future and has been doing a deep dive into Generative AI all this year with his writings.This is a fascinating conversation you would want to listen to from start to finish, to understand the implications of it for our industry and indeed our daily lived reality.

A lot of ground was covered during Peter Kern’s appearance at Skift Global Forum in New York City on September 21. The vice chairman and CEO of Expedia Group gave his take on technology, micro-services, mergers and acquisitions, and outlined why the online travel agencies still only control around 20 percent of a “multi-trillion dollar” travel market."There’s huge opportunity," Kern says. "You just have to innovate the products and innovate the business model over time."And of course he (delicately) responded to comments made earlier at the forum by Barry Diller, the chairman and senior executive of both Expedia Group and IAC, that working from home was “kind of stupid” and “a crock,”while in discussion with Skift founder and CEO Rafat Ali.Listen now for the full conversation of the “Democratizing the Travel Ecosystem” session.Read more about Expedia on Skift. Get weekly updates about online travel by subscribing to our online travel newsletter.

"I’m really excited about the quality of the brand portfolio," IHG CEO Keith Barr said at Skift Global Forum. Barr goes on to describe the current realities of the hotel business: it's a real estate business at the end of the day, after all. But IHG has been hyper-focused on its brands and its franchise partners. "It’s been great because there’re such clearly defined brands that enable us to work with a number of opportunities," he told Skift's Sean O'Neill.Two weeks after this conversation, IHG announced its deal to market all-inclusive resort giant Iberostar. You can listen to the full conversation in this podcast.Read full coverage of IHG at https://skift.com/tag/ihgRead full coverage of the hotel industry at https://skift.com/hotelsGet deeper insight into the business of hotels at https://dailylodgingreport.com

For this bonus episode of The Skift Travel Podcast, we turn to Dallas where we held our first in-person Skift Aviation Forum earlier this week. To begin the event, we invited American Airlines CEO Robert Isom to have a conversation conversation with Airline Weekly's Ned Russell about post-pandemic pattern changes and how his airline is preparing for the holiday season ahead."One of the things that we’re seeing though, is that demand is more spread out," Isom told the audience. "It’s just really high, and at least from an airline perspective, we don’t have the ability to actually peak and valley as much as we’ve had in the past."You can listen to the full conversation, below. You can also watch the interview on our YouTube channel.For more airline news, visit https://skift.com/airlinesFor deeper understanding of the aviation industry, subscribe to Airline Weekly.