U.S. Hotel Giants Lead Travel Recovery: Skift Health Score

Hilton held onto its number one spot to remain the best scoring public company in travel for the Skift Health Score updated through July. Marriott, previously in fourth place, rose to be our second best travel stock. Intercontinental Hotels Group saw the largest gain among the top four, climbing seven spots to be the third best performing company in travel. Booking Holdings rounded out the top four, though dropping two spots from last quarter.

Skift Research’s Health Score is a proprietary metric that assesses the strengths of public travel companies. Our current version includes scores for 93 travel companies across hospitality, airline, cruise, and online travel and distribution sectors.

The Health Score ranges on a scale of 0–100, calculated by selecting and weighting 23 individual indicators that are core to a company’s overall strength. All the 23 indicators fall under three categories, each a crucial component for a company’s overall health.

• Survivability: how prepared each company is to weather the current Covid-19 crisis.
• Current Performance: how each company is operating at present.
• Future Prospects: how well-positioned each company is to return to growth in a post-coronavirus world.

Our July health scores, reflecting first quarter earnings and more recent market data points confirms that the U.S. travel recovery has begun in earnest and that optimism is high.

It’s not a coincidence that the top three spots went to some of the largest hospitality franchising giants in the U.S.. These companies all run high margin, asset light businesses that many expect to profit from the recovery of the U.S. travel economy.

Occupancy is rapidly recovering in America while these brands also stand to reap a long-term tailwind from conversion of independent properties.

Perhaps unsurprisingly then the key driver of improved health scores for the top travel companies for this July update was the future prospects score. This is the forward-looking component of our methodology and incorporates estimates for growth in revenue and earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) growth in 2021 and 2022 as well as Wall Street analyst expectations for future stock performance, over the next twelve months. These expectations are updated in real time and so reflect recent news and performance updates that have arisen since first quarter earnings were reported. It is expected that these trends will be confirmed as we get deeper into the 2Q earnings cycle.

You can find the top 10 healthiest travel companies in April as well as health scores and sub-category scores for 93 different travel companies by visiting our Skift Health Score site.

Skift Research Subscribers Have Access To

93 Company Coverage
Total health scores as well as sub-category scores for all 94 public travel companies we track.

Deeper Analysis Reports
We will provide regular reports diving into specific sectors, scores, or companies moving forward.

Monthly Data Updates
We will incorporate new available data and update the Health Score on a monthly basis.

Quarterly Highlight Reports
We will publish quarterly reports to highlight key changes and trends as they appear.

Easy Access
The full data set is available as data sheets in PDF format and in an interactive format on our Health Score home page.