Analysis, primers, and briefings for travel analysts, investors, and operators. New writing every weekday.
Professional managers like Vacasa, Sykes, and Awning are buying up mom-and-pop hosts at the fastest rate in the industry's history. The implications for Airbnb, regulators, and the asset class are not yet reflected in public valuations.
Conversational booking is not killing the OTA — but Booking Holdings, Expedia, and Trip.com are quietly rebuilding around it. The next 18 months are a land grab on intent, not a UX project.
Marriott, Hilton, and IHG have spent two decades selling real estate and keeping the brand. The next leg of asset-light growth is harder, slower, and more dependent on capabilities they haven't historically built.
Most travel fintech narratives obsess over BNPL and virtual cards. The much larger pool of value is in cross-border payment economics — and it is being quietly reshaped by Adyen, Wise, and a handful of corridors-specific players.
Five years after COVID, the corporate travel industry has stopped waiting for a return to 2019. The structural baseline is roughly 75–85% of pre-pandemic — and it's a higher-margin 75–85% than the industry expected.
Saudi's tourism push is the largest deliberate destination-building project in modern history. The lessons it is teaching — about supply, marketing, and policy — are not the ones the Saudis intended.
Booking Holdings has spent two years rewiring itself around connected trip — flights, attractions, ground, payments — without saying very much about it. The market is still pricing the company as a hotel OTA.