Sales & Marketing

Welcome to 2020. Airbnb is part of the hospitality industry already. Get over it. I hope IPO cash might help them ease Expedia and Booking's oligopolistic power. I hope IPO cash might have them boost a faster global return to travel.

The Airbnb IPO is interesting but has nothing to do with the success (or failure) of their business. Airbnb is the game-changer in our industry. Their value reduction as stated above is representative and consistent with all publicly traded hotel companies.

A successful IPO will place Airbnb in a much stronger financial position so they can remove the high cost (at 11% interest) of their recent funding and prepare to operate profitably again. The threat of Airbnb will be felt by hotels that are perceived to be "risky" in terms of Covid-19 transmission prevention, eg.

Amazon has tried unsuccessfully to tackle the online travel space twice in the past. Back in 2013-2015, Amazon attempted to do this “organically” with its ill-conceived Amazon Local and Amazon Destinations. In 2019 Amazon launched a flight search and booking service in India, powered by online travel agency Cleartrip, buried deep into its Amazon Pay section.

Amazon is the world's #1 retailer. Period. There is no #2, with Walmart a distant #3 (perhaps). Walmart is expanding as fast as they can into the online space. Amazon needs to build revenue. They already sell pretty much every product on earth, so logically, the next frontier is services.

Amazon has to massively increase its top-line revenue if it is going to continue is share price growth. It gets more difficult to do that as it grows. What industries can it get into that can help deliver that? Travel will not be Amazon's number one choice but they will not ignore it either.

Venerable brands always have the potential for a renaissance. Of course, success hinges on forgiveness (forgetfulness?) of all those stranded travelers. And the continued focus on "fun in the sun" vacations is a smart way to maintain that differentiation and historical brand promise.

I am highly skeptical of Thomas Cook's resurrection as a B2C online travel player i.e. an OTA specializing in selling beach vacations and city breaks, and here is why: a) The traveling public does not know Thomas Cook as an OTA or B2C online vacation packager, hence the need for massive advertising spend to build relevant brand recognition.

I don't think there is a new TC. I think that this was the plan all along. I remember sitting in the UK in 2011/12 reading an article: Britain's Least Admired Companies of 2011 where TC was mentioned. It also let me to look at their share price and saw it tumbled to somewhat below 20c (which for me was surprising)...but then I saw they didn't have a CEO and no-one wanted to take the job since a few month....sinking ship comes to mind.

There are several major developments working against the bed banks sector: 1) Shrinkage of the brick-and-mortar distribution marketplace due to consumers shifting to online travel planning and booking. There are less than 7,500 travel agencies in the U.S.

In the non-US marketplace, bed banks continue to play an essential role, providing both offline and online intermediaries with a long tail of hotel inventory that would be impossible to source otherwise. Assuming historical bad behaviour regarding abuse of net rates can be controlled, newly consolidated and professionalised bed bank companies can have a long and happy future.

Bedbanks business may contract over time, however, they will remain a significant player in the online travel marketplace due to the large number of consumers who prefer to have their local travel agent make their travel arrangements.