Online Travel

Travel is back! While 2022 was all about bumper performances in some countries and sectors, and lagging performances in others, we can truly say that 2023 is the year that travel fully recovered. But we do need to be clear-eyed about persisting and upcoming challenges. This report hands you everything you need to know in one 250+ slide deck.

Hopper is the new kid on the block. Except it's not. Founded in 2007, it spent a decade building a huge database of flight information before selling its first flight booking in 2016. The time it spent on its cutting edge price prediction capabilities have paid dividends, leading to the launch of a suite of fintech products which have been fundamental in Hopper's disruption of the legacy OTAs.

Generative AI is poised to transform the travel industry. True, there’s plenty of hype out there with little substance to back it up. But even after Skift Research separates the chaff from the wheat, we find that a multi-billion dollar opportunity still remains.

Are the channel wars coming back? The pandemic brought a wave of direct bookings but our latest survey data suggests that this trend may not last. Plus, we find surprising shifts in booking site usage and share among American travelers.

The new year will give no rest to a weary travel industry. After years of work to dig out of the hole the pandemic put us in, travel in 2023 may find that the hardest part still lies ahead. The groundwork for growth is in place but achieving success will be no simple task.

Travel is back in full swing and Expedia Group and Booking Holdings are now fully recovered versus the pandemic. But under the hood, big changes are underway as these two booking sites revamp their strategies for the future.

So much has happened in the the travel industry in recent years. This new report by Skift Research puts perspective on those dizzying changes by providing definitive and data-driven insight into the current state of the travel industry, and the trends that will shape the future.

The metasearch wars are drawing to a close and Google is winning. The future of independent travel metasearch in the U.S. and Europe is at risk, in our view.

Around the world in 11 online travel agencies. Use our 2022 Online Travel Agency Factbook to compare the performance of booking sites from across five continents.

With 2022 on the horizon, the travel recovery has begun in earnest. Brands are competing to win returning consumers but may find that old habits and preferences have evolved.

Mobile is already the primary device for travel planning in the majority of the world. But for most of the travel sectors and companies, mobile bookings are yet to surpass desktop bookings in volume or value. Undoubtedly, the travel companies need to increase their mobile investment to capitalize on this shift, but, at the same time they need to have an overarching multi-device strategy in place to engage with the customer throughout.

Anyone seeking to understand leisure travel overlooks tour operators at their own risk. It is one of the last great offline sectors in the travel industry but that cannot last. Changing consumer behavior and new tech is driving disruption in these businesses, the effects of which have only been compounded by the significant impact of COVID-19.