Raiders of the Lost Growth
Good morning, readers. You surely caught the Indiana Jones reference in our subject line, yes? I just watched the final installment of the series the other day and couldn't help but think that Indy would've made a great travel blogger. He was definitely a globetrotter, had a thing for maps and was super knowledgable about local customs. Anyway, Airbnb and Booking.com are - like Indy - back again. We've also got an AI travel tech update and a message from Sri Lanka. On the itinerary today:
Booking.com, Airbnb look to branch out
Accor, Cathay tout their latest AI initiatives
Sri Lanka rolls out new tourism campaign
Who's Coming to Dubai?
Skift Global Forum East in Dubai is just around the corner - take a look at who is planning to attend and add your company's name to the list.
Today's Calendar
World Research Summit for Hospitality and Tourism in Orlando, Florida
U.S. non-farm payrolls for November due at 8:30am
Raiders of the Lost Growth
We’ve had a lot of Booking.com and Airbnb news this week, so why not finish up with a bit more. This time, the story is about how the two companies are raiding each other's territories in search of growth.
How so you might ask? You’d have to understand each one’s origin story to know, but the short version is: Booking.com needs to grow short-term rentals in the U.S. while Airbnb seeks to expand in Europe and elsewhere internationally.
Booking Holdings CFO David Goulden spoke at an investor conference earlier this week, as we mentioned a few days ago. During those comments, he highlighted the disparity between its European and U.S. short-term rental business, noting the former still reigns supreme.
“The main reason is that we’ve been doing alternative accommodations in Europe for 15-plus years, and we are several years behind that in terms of just time of evolution in the U.S.,” Goulden said. “So we’re probably seven or eight years behind that in terms of when we started building out one versus the other.”
Goulden doesn’t expect Booking.com’s U.S. short-term rental business to take another seven or eight years to catch up because it now has more experience.
Airbnb meanwhile is at that self-professed “inflection point” and looking to international markets for growth. Hence the previously discussed elevation of CFO Dave Stephenson to chief business officer.
CEO Brian Chesky said one of his main roles will be “driving international expansion, growing global host supply (across existing and new businesses), and leading all business and corporate development activities at Airbnb.”
How Accor’s Mercure Brand Is Leaning Into 50 Years of Locally Inspired Hospitality
The relatively recent popularization of local and authentic experiences is nothing new to Accor’s midscale Mercure brand, which is celebrating five decades of championing local communities and cultures with a bucket list of some of the world’s best food and beverage experiences.
More New AI Travel Tools
Amazon Web Services recently had a weeklong conference where it shared updates to services that travel companies are using to build tools powered by generative AI. Among the projects highlighted were efforts from Delta, IHG, and Choice Hotels. But there were also developments from a wide range of travel companies, including Accor Hotels, Cathay Pacific Airways, and Booking.com. Let’s take a look.
Accor Hotels said it is releasing a new AI trip planning assistant powered by generative AI, with plans to integrate it into the company’s booking platform, ALL.com.
The chatbot is meant to help users find rooms based on unique prompts. Beyond recommending rooms, Accor said the tool will also make special offers and make recommendations for other parts of a trip, like ticketed activities, wellness experiences, and food and beverage options.
Cathay Pacific, which named AWS as its “strategic cloud provider,” plans to establish the Cathay Machine Learning Innovation Hub to develop technologies to enhance certain operations. The company said it has hundreds of ideas for AI and is already trialing more than 50 of them.
So far, those projects have included a tool to predict demand for inflight meals, meant to help minimize food waste. The company is already working on a tool to automate the classification of customer feedback from online and offline channels, meant to improve service speed and response.
Booking.com in July shared that it would be releasing an AI trip planner chatbot starting for users in the U.S. Rob Francis, chief technology officer of Booking.com, shared more details about the project during a session at the AWS conference.
The trip planner is meant to make personalized recommendations, bookable through the Booking.com app, based on natural language prompts. Francis has been talking about the potential of AI capturing a user’s “intent” since shortly after the first generative AI models were released.
Sri Lanka Touts New Tourism Campaign
Sri Lanka is rolling out a new global tourism marketing campaign for the first time since 2007, urging tourists “You’ll Come Back For More.”
Skift had earlier highlighted the country’s 16-year gap in robust tourism promotion. The country had developed a comprehensive consumer campaign in 2021, which had then been shelved.
The new campaign is set to unfold in phases, initially focusing on communicating the restoration of stability in the country and its readiness to welcome tourists. Subsequent stages will elaborate on the central theme of “You’ll come back for more,” targeting key source markets of Sri Lanka Tourism.
Ogilvy, the creative agency behind the campaign, based its strategy on insights revealing that over 30% of tourists visiting Sri Lanka are repeat travelers.
The government has also urged the private sector to play a pivotal role in attracting tourists, with Tourism Minister Harin Fernando emphasizing that the government’s responsibility was restricted to ensure an enabling environment.
This year’s target for tourist arrivals in Sri Lanka is 1.5 million, a goal viewed by some as modest given the destination’s capacity and potential. The country plans to welcome 2.5 million tourists next year.
According to the latest tourism data, Sri Lanka had welcomed 1.3 million tourists by November, with India leading as the largest contributor with almost 260,000 arrivals, followed by Russia with 168,000 tourists.
More From Skift
New York City Needs ‘Affordable Tourism’ to Reach Young Travelers
Middle East Led World in Tourism Recovery Before Israel-Gaza War: 7 Facts
Modern Airline Retailing and the Evolution of Airline Distribution
IDEAS: Anantara Announces Tented Safari Experience in Zambia
Skift Travel 200: Top Movers
Avis Budget gained 1% on Thursday and 4% since Tuesday's close. Before the market opened on Wednesday it annouced a special cash dividend of $10 a share.
Source: The Skift Travel 200 (ST200) combines the financial performance of nearly 200 travel companies worth more than a trillion dollars into a single number. Go to the Skift Travel 200. Stock data as of market close.