Travel metasearch company Trivago said on Tuesday that Johannes Thomas had become CEO and Managing Director, succeeding Axel Hefer, as the company struggles to return to its pre-IPO glory days.
Thomas began at Trivago as an intern and rose to become the company’s chief revenue officer, with a specialty in business operations and strategy.
Other executive changes include included Jasmine Ezz becoming chief marketing officer and Andrej Lehnert becoming chief product officer.
At $1.20 a share on Tuesday, Trivago is in danger of seeing its share price go below $1 and becoming de-listed if it doesn’t turn around its financial trajectory.
Virgin Atlantic is launching a new on-board activity pack and meal selection for its younger traveler’s this summer.
Younger guests departing from UK airports will receive their packs at the departure gate, and will include sunglasses, a sensory poppit toy, a holiday journal and an activity book with a selection of colored pencils, all created in partnership with RowType.
Credit: Virgin Atlantic
Furthermore, Virgin Atlantic will also be enhancing its catering offering for younger traveler’s.
The new menu will include a range of new healthy snacks, including an organic smoothie, giant cookie, cheese dippers, and fruit bowl. Additionally, chicken goujons, sweetcorn, and potato wedges will be added to the menu.
Credit: Virgin Atlantic
Paul Mills, head of inflight services at Virgin Atlantic said, “We’re incredibly pleased to announce our new kids’ pack and enhanced meal offering for children traveling with Virgin Atlantic. We love creating unique moments for all our customers onboard Virgin Atlantic, including our younger travelers.”
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Red Sea Global, a company fully owned by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, is exploring the possibility of a public market offering, with plans to launch as early as 2026.
The company is currently examining various options for a public market event, including an initial public offering or the establishment of a real estate investment trust (REIT), CEO of Red Sea Global, John Pagano, stated in an interview with Bloomberg.
Even as he did not provide specifics on advisers, banks, or valuation, Pagano said the company is currently holding preliminary discussions with banks and stakeholders.
He said the company plans to go public by 2026 or 2027, after the hotels have been in operation for around two years, with a proven record of occupancy, cash flow, and profitability. The priority for the company now is to create a revenue stream that supports its value.
Pagano said the concept of public real estate companies has mostly disappeared from a property markets standpoint on a global scale. Instead, real estate investment funds are becoming increasingly popular because of their tax efficiency and accessibility to a wider range of investors.
Flagship Projects for Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030
Red Sea Global was formed by merging two state-controlled developers by the Saudi sovereign wealth fund in 2021, where Amaala was taken over by the Red Sea Development Company.
Formerly known as The Red Sea Development Company, Saudi Arabia’s flagship tourism project developer rebranded to Red Sea Global last year.
Speaking to Skift earlier, Pagano had called the Red Sea Project and Amaala, the flagship projects for Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030. He said the developments would be instrumental in opening the country up to global visitors.
By 2030, the two projects are expected to create 120,000 jobs — 70,000 direct and 50,000 indirect.
Amaala is expected to span over 4,000 square kilometers and house 25 hotels and around 900 luxury residential villas, apartments, and estate homes upon its completion in 2027.
The first phase of development is anticipated to conclude in mid-2024 and offer over 1,300 hotel rooms across eight resorts.
During the Skift Global Forum East in Dubai last year, Nicholas King, the group chief development officer of Red Sea Global, had revealed that the first three hotels at the Red Sea Project would open in 2023, followed by the next 13 in 2024.
Marina Bay Sands Hotel has launched a series of new Smart Hotel features within its mobile app.
Singapore’s largest hotel, which boasts over 2,200 rooms and suites, is to offer its guests a raft of new services through the app, including the opportunity to bypass the conventional check-in process at the front desk and complete verification requirements remotely.
Credit: Marian Bay Sands Hotel
Guests will also be able to use their mobile phones as ‘digital keycards’ in order to access their rooms and the hotel lifts, as well as order in-room services, validate bills and make payments.
Available for both Android and Apple users, these new services are the first stage in a transformative initiative aimed to integrate digital experiences into the guest journey.
“Marina Bay Sands has always embraced technology in our constant pursuit to enhance service standards and convenience for our guests,” said Paul Town, chief operating officer at Marina Bay Sands.
“Our aim is to not only transform the conventional check-in experience, but to also allow guests to truly maximize their time and start discovering the property from the moment they arrive. We have big plans for our digital offerings and are investing heavily to enhance the overall customer journey across even more touch-points,” Town continued.
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Airbnb released a host of new upgrades and features in its summer release last week. Airbnb chief executive officer Brian Chesky has promised to work on more.
In a response to a suggestion from a user on Twitter, Chesky hinted at working on: lower cleaning fees, better search & filters, verified listings, better customer service, guest loyalty program, total price with taxes, better review system and lower prices.
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky has promised more features this summer. Source: Airbnb
“Millions of people have given us feedback on how to improve Airbnb. We’ve listened,” Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky said during the announcement. “Today, we’re introducing the most extensive set of updates ever. Our design-driven approach means we’re always making Airbnb better, and our over 50 new features and upgrades are just the beginning. We will never stop improving Airbnb.”
Here are your top suggestions
1. Lower cleaning fees 2. Better search & filters 3. Verified listings 4. Better customer service 5. Guest loyalty program 6. Total price with taxes 7. Better review system 8. Lower prices
The company said that the summer release was a response to user and host feedback. At the center of this is Airbnb Rooms, which the company characterizes as “an all-new take on the original Airbnb.” There is now a rooms category with over 1 million listings, redesigned filters and added new privacy and other features.
For guests, the features include total price display — so guests can view the total price with fees, before taxes, across the entire app including in search results, price filter, maps, and listing pages. There is also now a “months” tab to look for hosts accommodating longer-term guests. For stays over three months, the guest service fee after the third month will be reduced.
ASTA elected Jackie Friedman, president of Nexion Travel Group, as its new chair. Source: Nexion Travel Group
Friedman replaced Marc Casto, who served as board chair for the past two years. Friedman’s post likewise has a two-year term.
“It’s an incredible honor to be the new chair for the ASTA Board of Directors,” said Friedman in a statement. “My sincere thanks go to Marc Casto for his leadership over the past two terms, and I am excited to work with this tremendous group of travel professionals.”
The changing of the guard took place at the trade group’s annual convention in Puerto Rico last week.
In a LinkedIn post, Casto, cited the growth of ASTA’s membership, as well as the passage of the Travel & Tourism Act, as among the the organization’s accomplishments during his tenure.
Casto was a long-time corporate travel executive, and currently is a senior vice president at Flight Centre.
“We have made extraordinary growth in our three goals of achieving 20,000 members by 2025, defining a path for net zero by 2030, and expanding ASTA’s influence and operations globally,” Casto wrote.
One challenge for travel agencies, many of which deal heavily with clients seeking luxury vacations, will be to see whether inflationary concerns weigh down their businesses. So far, by most accounts, the luxury space remains robust.
In addition to Friedman, ASTA elected the following officers, according to the group’s announcement:
The leisure and hospitality sector was among the largest job gainers in the U.S. in April, but the 31,000 jobs it added amounted to a deceleration from March, when it added 40,000 positions to the workforce.
Credit:L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon Miami
The vast majority of the additions in April were not in hotels, but in food service and drinking establishments, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics‘ monthly jobs report Friday.
“The average wage in the industry now averages $20 an hour, well above minimum wage — a key indicator that the H-2B program, on which many travel businesses rely, does not take jobs from U.S. workers,” said Tori Emerson Barnes, executive vice president of Public Affairs and Policy, U.S. Travel Association.
Leisure and hospitality, which employed 2.4 percent fewer workers in the U.S. in April than it did in pre-pandemic February 2020, grew at a considerably faster pace during the prior six months when it added 73,000 jobs per month on average.
There were 16.54 million people employed in leisure and hospitality in April. The unemployment rate in the sector was 5 percent, higher than the the 3.4 percent nationally for non-farm employees.
The air transportation sector in the U.S. added a modest 3,300 jobs, bringing its ranks to 537,400, the report found.
Travel arrangement and reservations services boosted its workforce by 800 jobs, bringing the entire roster of travel agents and similar roles to 179,400.
Travel arrangement and reservation services increased by 10,400 over the previous 12 months, and increased from 178,600 in March 2023 to 179,400 in April 2023.
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky was very open with me in the interview I did with him earlier this week, where he tantalizingly hinted at how Airbnb will change in the next year, much of it predicated on AI.
In it, here are the few long range things he talked about: “We’re going to launch a whole bunch of new things in the next couple years…Basically the short answer is next May you’re going to see a whole new Airbnb. AI’s going to be at the center of it…The real vision is what if there Airbnb app could be almost like the ultimate host, the ultimate concierge… Each thing is going to get bigger and bigger. November will be pretty big. A year from now will be huge, it’ll be really big.” He told me that in the short term, Airbnb will focus on improving customer service and summarizing reviews using AI, and by next year a conversational AI interface will come to the Airbnb app.
But what is coming beyond these somewhat obvious changes at Airbnb? Chesky elaborated on some of these in a podcast interview with Jason Calacanis on “This Week in Startups” including the hint that Airbnb is planning to move beyond its core of travel, in the next few years, though the timeline is fuzzy, at one time he said in the next year and later in the podcast he said next 3-5 years. Some extracts from the rough auto-transcript that leads me to believe the expansion of Airbnb beyond travel will be in the connection, matching and personalization realm, though exactly how is of course unclear for now.
“We have some big ideas coming. We have some really huge ideas that I think will expand Airbnb way beyond travel way beyond our core. It’s gonna launch next year…AI’s gonna unlock so many of them, but we don’t have permission to do new things things until people love our core service. So we’re gonna basically create a blueprint of every single thing people are complaining about.”
“The third, and this is more on the opportunity, is monthly stays. That’s a growing part of our business. People think of us as a travel company, but 20% of our businesses now housing and Airbnb, there’s a lot of problems with monthly stays.”
“And If you and I both ask ChatGPT a question, we mostly get the same answer and we mostly get the same answer because it doesn’t know who you or I am. And that’s great for some questions like what was the like, you know like how far is the moon from the sun or whatever. Like there’s one right answer, but if you ask like, where should I travel? Your answer and my answer are probably different. And so some problems are search problems, some problems are kind of matching and personalization preferences, problems….so what we wanna do is we wanna be one of the best companies for AI personalization. So we wanna develop really good tune models to do that. We have to change our business. And actually one of the questions that Johnny Ive told me when we brought him on the team is he said you need to switch from beyond “where and when.” Right now you ask where are you going and when are you going? And we need to shift to who and what. Who are you and what do you want? And that’s really the vision. And so who we wanna do is we want to build these robust profiles. I want to start to learn Jason, who you are, build really good rich customer information. And then I can understand and personalize like where do you want to go? And also what do you want in your life? Like you looking for inspiration, what are you, what are you looking for?”
“Do you like want to get healthy? Do you, you know, and you start to learn about people. And then we’re also pretty good interfaces and the application layer and I think that Airbnb, that’s where we’re really, really gonna focus. We’re gonna focus on the tuning of the models, the most personalized AI interface and then really good application interfaces. Now I think as far as interface, I don’t think they’re all gonna be just text-based…Like Charles Eames, one of the greatest in our 20th century said the role of designer is that of a thoughtful host anticipating needs of the guests. So that’s what we should do. And we understand who are you, what do you want, where do you want to go?”
AND this is the most interesting thing Chesky said: “And maybe it, we could even go beyond travel if we get there, right? And the part of that means you have to trust us to give us your personal information. It means we have to be a marriage of art and science. It means we have to understand a lot about like human psychology and know what you want. It’s not just a technical problem. We have to design unique AI interfaces that are probably richer than just text inputs because you know like, like you want to, you want to see and feel things, right? And, and and I think it’s much more immersive. So that’s where I think it goes. That’s like the long-term vision in the interim. And that’s probably long-term is in three to five years. I mean that’s not even that long term. Yeah. In the next year what we’re gonna do is three things.”
“You come to Airbnb and it looks the same as it did the last time you came. Yeah. And we’re like a marketplace and everything’s a transaction and we assume you’re like we don’t know anything about you and you just walked into a store and we got a bunch of stuff on a shelf. Yeah. And I think that’s a very 1990s, two thousands Amazon paradigm of commerce. And I think the future of commerce is more like somebody’s showing you around and they understand you deeply and you have so much more control and it’s significantly more personalized and everyone has a unique experience. And so that’s where I think it goes. And I think that we don’t have a search problem in the future. We have a matching problem. So we are gonna use AI to match you to whatever you want.”
“I think in the age of artificial intelligence, the other thing people want is authenticity. And authenticity is whatever’s real and whatever’s authenticated. So I think our brand is kind of authenticity. Like we’re not gonna ever be the most digitally immersive company that’s gonna be social media or entertainment. Our value is really the physical world. We get you online, offline with people different from you all over the world. And that comes with starting with knowing who you are, authenticating your identity.”
International inbound travelers spent nearly $16.8 billion on travel to, and tourism-related activities within, the U.S. in March, according to the National Travel and Tourism Office, up more than 49 percent year over year.
International traveler purchases of food, entertainment, gifts and other travel and tourism-related goods and services totaled $9.7 billion in March 2023, up nearly 77 percent year over year.
Americans traveling abroad spent a record $17.4 billion. Last month, Americans also spent a record $17.4 billion traveling abroad.
For the month of March, the U.S. experienced a travel trade deficit of $572 million. Out of seven of the last eleven months, the U.S. has run a travel trade deficit, according to the National Travel and Tourism Office. Prior to July 2021, the U.S. never recorded a monthly travel trade deficit.
To date this year, international travelers have spent nearly $49.1 billion on U.S. travel and tourism-related goods and services, up 61 percent year over year. International visitors have injected, on average, more than $545 million a day into the U.S. economy year to date.
As preparations continue for the coronation of HM The King Charles III on May 6, The Dorchester London has transformed its famous façade with a modern reinterpretation of the decorations used for the coronation of his mother, Queen Elizabeth II in 1953.
The original decorations, which were designed by British stage set designer Oliver Messe, featured draping along the hotel’s curved balconies to create the impression of a theatre stage, and the 2023 iteration is no different, with the Union Jack coloured drapery setting the stage for the celebrations to come.
In addition to the decorations, the hotel will offer an array of themed treats throughout the coronation weekend, including a royal-inspired afternoon tea curated by the hotel’s executive pastry chef Michael Kwan, as well as a serving of the newly created ‘Sovereign Martini’, inspired by The King’s favourite drink.
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