Airbnb’s Best Quarter and Other Top Stories This Week

Airbnb Posts Best Quarter Yet on Relentless Travel Demand: Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky says his company can thrive in boom and bust cycles if it keeps innovating. To meet that promise, his company will have to boost its pricing competitiveness and makes it easier for individuals to list properties. And make the case to Wall Street on unfair comparisons to 2021.

Working for the Weekend: 3 Charts Showing the New Face of Business Travel: It’s Saturday. Chances are that one of you, or maybe many of you, reading this are on a combined business and leisure trip right now because, hey, you can do that much more easily these days. Blended travel looks like it’s a real thing.

Booking Holdings Eyes Even More Tech Investment After Mobile App Successes: CEO Glenn Fogel is focused on making Booking Holdings apps easier for consumers to use. Apparently he’s doing something right.

BA’s Brilliant New Ads Prove It: The Promise of Travel Is Divorced From the Awfulness of Flying: Here’s the bad news, aka reality: the awfulness of flying these days has NOTHING do with the creative promise of travel described throughout the brilliant copy of this campaign.

Introducing a Middle East Newsletter for the World’s Hottest Region in Travel: The Middle East is evolving into one of the most interesting and dynamic stories in the global travel industry. That’s why you don’t want to miss out. Sign up today for our newly launched newsletter, Middle East Travel Roundup, and gain an edge with our insights from this critical region of the world.

Colorado Voters to Decide on Redirecting Tourism Marketing Dollars to Communities: Expect more Colorado communities to introduce ballot measures that will divert funding raised through hotel taxes away from tourism promotion and back into communities. Next time it won’t just be in the mountain communities.

Qatar’s World Cup Prep and the Quest for a Lasting Tourism Experience: Qatar has made strides since my last visit a year ago, with more of a cultural pulse, and less friction for guests as large-scale hospitality and infrastructure projects come online ahead of the World Cup. Officials are hoping once the players leave the pitch for a final time in December Qatar will have earned its credentials as a lasting tourism fixture in the region.

Trivago Tests How to Give Independent Hotels More Direct Bookings: The search platform is displaying free links to independent hotels to push more direct bookings their way, but how will it ultimately claw back revenue from them when the likes of Hilton and Marriott have far bigger marketing budgets?

The Bottom Line on Hotel Bottom Lines So Far: Overall, analysts at investment banks like what they hear from public hotel companies about their financial performance in the near term. But some are revising downward their forecasts for growth in 2024, given worries about the impact of economic storms.

Sabre’s Slow Recovery Gets Lift From Pandemic Booking Milestone: Business is still not close to where it was in 2019, but it’s getting there — slowly.