Coronavirus and Travel

One company's decision to quiz people when booking same-day travel shows yet again how the pandemic will influence future behaviors.

Lifestyle hotels come in many forms, with some focused more on the hip and trendy while, others like Hilton see it as an opportunity to scale up more experiential and food-focused properties around the world. Long story short: we still don't have a textbook definition for what a lifestyle hotel actually is.

The relative stability found in the U.S. will help companies in the online travel agency and vacation rental orbit fuel growth for the next few years — but don’t completely write off Asia and Europe. Most major hotel companies see those regions as the way to continue adding thousands of hotels to their portfolios.

It's a question of when, not if, business travel returns for Barry Diller. Booking data from the likes of Marriott and Alaska Airlines back his claim.

Travel companies increasingly looked to go public via SPACs this year, but the exuberance might be short-lived as a slowdown is likely in the U.S. Regulators are already looking into the explosion of activity.

Vacation rental companies want to mimic hotel companies with brand standards around cleaning and other operations, but they're also facing similar problems as hotels when it comes to labor.

Accor doesn't want to own real estate, but it does want to throttle ahead with growth in the lifestyle hotel sector — where many of the remaining independent operators own their real estate. A SPAC can help Accor balance this kind of conflict in future acquisitions.

Look (and learn) before you leap into a new trip was the mantra of the late Anthony Bourdain. That kind of thoughtful travel can prevent a lot of headaches this summer as the world gears up to exercise its pent-up vacation demand.

Providing Covid-19 updates and other advice became big business during the crisis, and looks set to become even more important as governments experiment with reopening their borders.

Rather than guessing how people will compare flights and shop in the future, it's going to focus on giving travel agencies and other channels the right airline data via its next generation storefront, and let them figure it out. It makes perfect sense in today's unpredictable world.