Travel Earnings Analysis: 4 Trends that Dominated

Labor Day is in the rearview mirror but, believe it or not, travel companies have only just finished reporting their second quarter results.

How'd they do? We wanted to look at the the entire group – 200 publicly traded travel companies worth a combined $1 trillion-plus.

There’s no one easy way to track them all, so Skift Research is working on new indices and data tools. That’s still to come, but we’ve already dug into the second quarter numbers. Here’s what we found.

1: Travel Revenue Growth Drops Sharply, Remains Super Strong

Revenue for the travel industry grew 19% in the second quarter. That's blazing fast compared to the S&P 500, which posted just 1.1% revenue growth. However, it's a big drop from the 47% growth of the prior quarter and the 70%-plus gains of late-2022.

This is part of an ongoing trend towards normalization to more baseline growth rates. Travel has seen a whiplash effect: The revenue collapse in 2020 set up years of high growth from an artificially low base.

Those easy comparisons, along with strong pent-up demand, supported big gains but those twin tailwinds are fading.

2: Travel Operating Profit Hits a New Post-COVID Peak

It’s not just revenues that are n