What Earnings Season Reveals About Travel Right Now

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Artificial intelligence is reshaping every part of the travel booking journey, but human travel advisors may be benefiting the most.

In this episode of the Skift Travel Podcast, Sarah Kopit and Seth Borko discuss Fora’s new $1 billion valuation and what it says about the future of travel distribution. They also examine Amazon’s latest Alexa travel booking push, IHG’s AI-powered search experience, and how Google is becoming a bigger player in the booking funnel.

The conversation then shifts to earnings season. Sarah and Seth break down Hilton’s decision to cut franchise fees, why JetBlue investors are embracing the airline’s turnaround despite continued losses, and how geopolitical tensions are beginning to affect Royal Caribbean.

Together, the stories reveal an industry experimenting with new AI tools while traditional travel companies continue searching for profitable growth.

Watch This Episode

The number of the week is $1 billion. Yes, I maybe should try to like sound a little bit like Dr. Evil when I say that, but it is $1 billion.

That is the valuation of a travel company named Fora. It is a travel advisor platform, it just raised $60 million in financing. That gives it that $1 billion valuation and makes it our latest travel unicorn.

So that is what happened this week. We got a whole bunch of other stuff going along this week.

0:56

Beach Vacation Banter

You may notice, for those of you watching, I’m in a different location this week because I actually am on vacation. I actually am at the beach this week.

So Seth tells me there’s been a lot of stuff going on, but why don’t you inform both me and the people?

Yeah, Sarah. They let you take a vacation in the middle of earnings season, you’re allowed to do that. They did.

They did, yeah.

Yeah, they did.

That’s why we got a great team, right? Yeah, exactly. How is your vacation going, by the way?

It’s fantastic.

We have one. So this, as many of you have heard we talk about, this is my big birthday girls trip with all of my friends that I’ve had since I was in elementary school. So we have one more joiner today.

She’ll be the last one and then we’ll be a full group of 11. So it’s been great. Amazing.

Amazing.

Yeah, we’re in the Outer Banks.

I really want to go to the Outer Banks.

I’ve never been. I would love to go.

Yeah, it’s a big short-term rental territory.

Big short-term rental territory.

It is. We’re at one of our friends’ houses. This is where her house and yeah, it’s definitely, for anyone who’s been here, it’s definitely like Northeast Beach.

It’s very similar to the beautiful beaches in Delaware and New Jersey and even out on Long Island. But we saw some dolphins the other day, which made me comfortable to go in the water because whenever I see dolphins, I think, okay, there’s no sharks.

I only like to see sharks when I’m scuba diving. I don’t like them when I’m swimming, like in the murky surf. So anyway.

So that’s that. That’s my story. That’s how vacation is.

That’s a great story.

I love it. I love dolphins. I love to see dolphins.

It’s amazing.

2:40

Why Fora Matters

I did pick a lot of our stories this week and it actually is a genuinely very busy news week. I feel bad saying the word genuinely to just sidebar because it feels too AI, but I am saying that it’s genuinely busy news week.

That forest story is fascinating to me because I feel like we haven’t had a lot of travel startup unicorns lately. We had this moment and it feels like it really peaked. And in fact, the data shows it did peak during the pandemic.

When all of these startups and all this money and Airbnb really led that charge, then Airbnb went public and they’re doing great. We had a couple of others that went public that do so great, RIP, Sonder and some others.

And I feel like it’s been a little quiet on that front. And so I was really excited. And this actually this happened, I think it was announced a week or a week and a half ago, but our CEO, Rafat, just did some analysis on Fora.

3:31

AI Revives Travel Agents

Fora is a super interesting business because out of all of these, what is the most future thinking, forward looking sector to build a startup in?

Travel agents.

Travel agents, and they did it in travel agents, and these are not online travel agents. They are actual human travel, they prefer to be called advisors, travel advisors.

But Fora is building this digital AI forward, AI first, dare I say AI native, I don’t like the word AI native, but dare I say it, travel platform to basically make it so that young people and part-time people and I won’t call it the uberification,

these people who wouldn’t otherwise have considered travel agency or travel advisory as a business, are able to do it and they don’t need to be trained on the global distribution system, the GDS, they’re building their own platform. It’s pretty

fascinating. This is like AI killing jobs. This is in some ways an AI reviving jobs, bringing jobs back from the dead. Any real travel agent or if they’re soluble will correctly tell me that it was never really a dead job.

Did you ever watch The Americans?

I loved The Americans.

Every time I hear about travel agents, I just always think of them.

For all of you listening who are travel agents or travel advisors, I also really secretly think that you’re Russian spies, so.

And a lot of, I mean, this 15,000 Russian spies, I think there are 15,000 employees at Fora.

Seth is working really hard to try to think of a transition out of that, but I gave him like an impossible task here. I will let you struggle. Continue.

Go for it. Let’s see what you can do.

5:26

Alexa Books Travel

Speaking of spies, Amazon’s Alexa device, which is a listening device that people put in their phones.

There you go.

There you go.

Alexa as spy. I love it.

Yes, he did it, ladies and gentlemen. He did it. Yeah, I know, right?

Alexa is here for all of us, listening all the time.

We have another Skift News story out this week, I think really fascinating and worth discussing about how Amazon is making a bet on conversational booking, conversational commerce writ large, but actually with travel really at the center of it, and

trying to embed Amazon Wallet and MCP, that’s model context protocol. For all you AI nerds out there, it’s basically how AI speak to or non-nerds out there, it’s how AI speak to one another.

Amazon is making a run at doing conversational travel partners. We report in Skift that the early partners are going to be Priceline, Vivator, Virgin Atlantic, Lyft, Brightline, my favorite, Flixbus and Greyhound.

So it’s a nice mix of planes, trains and automobiles, distributors and suppliers for this open-in launch. What’s your take on this one, Sarah? Conversational travel booking.

Well, first of all, it sounds like there’s some big players that are missing from that list, but we could talk about that in a minute.

But Alexa, the way that I think about any of the conversational, like natural language, AI bots, I mean, you just use them in your own life, right? Alexa is a pretty good one of all of them, I would say, of anyone who-

I very rarely yell at Alexa in frustration. Alexa seems to- I don’t know, maybe it’s just because Alexa listens all the time, so Alexa can hear my voice and knows my voice.

But I mean, yeah, look, if they can do it, if they can get the tech to work, or you can just have a conversational, natural language query or transaction with Alexa to actually book travel, I mean, that’s like the whole ball game, if it works.

It’s interesting.

7:53

Does Voice Really Work

I think conversational is one of the things that a lot of forward-thinking folks in tech are really excited about and talk a lot about, and I have to tell you, I’m not a skeptic per se, but it’s one of those things that has consistently fallen short,

and everyone always says, but Seth, mobile bookings eventually got there. That’s true, but there’s plenty of things that did not. Mobile succeeded where many, many, many, many, many technologies.

You’re a skeptic just because of that work, like if it works type thing, like it just doesn’t work all the time for everybody. I mean, I have a friend who is from Sri Lanka and who was educated by some Swiss nuns.

She has a very distinct accent, like when she speaks English, and she can’t talk to any computer, she said, it doesn’t work for her. It doesn’t understand her.

There’s not a lot of Swiss Sri Lankan nuns in the training data. Yeah.

But to be fair, when I listen to her, she speaks the Queen’s English to me. That’s what it sounds like to my ear.

Yeah. But I also think people really want options. One of the things that we’re finding in our research, and this is forthcoming, but I’ll give you a preview for our podcast listeners, is that as we give people more tools, it doesn’t get easier.

They get analysis paralysis. We’re giving people more tools, and what people are not doing is substituting AI search for Google search. What they’re doing is not an or equation, what they’re doing is an and equation.

They’re doing the Google search, then they’re doing the AI search, and then they’re doing the social media search, and then they’re doing the review search, and then they’re doing the OTA search.

So, the process is only getting more complicated, and the power of voice and conversational is that it simplifies everything. That is the dream, and yet everything about travel seems to just that, well, I should be specific. It’s hard to simplify.

There are certain trips. You and I, if we had to go to Megatrends in London, Sarah, we could probably book that one with our voice, but to plan a girls trip to the Outer Banks, probably can’t be done in a voice conversation.

You probably want to have 100.

Nor would you want it to. That’s the other thing. I quibble with your phrasing about the have to go to Megatrends in London.

We get to go to Megatrends.

We get to go to Megatrends in London. I usually don’t get to go. You usually get to go.

I don’t.

I always get to go. Maybe we should allow Seth to come. It’s a good time.

But I would say one other thing.

10:40

Amazon Travel Déjà Vu

One of the interesting things here is this is a bit of a trip down memory lane for me, which is that one of the very first research reports I ever wrote when I joined Skift in 2018 was about Amazon trying to sell travel.

The idea was if Google doesn’t really sell better search, but if Google’s got a great platform and if the OTAs can do it, why can’t Amazon do it? They’ve launched. There is a whole history, me and Dennis can do a history of this.

They launched flights in India where you could book flights. It was Air India directly through Amazon in India. They’ve tried to have hotels and even short-term rentals integrated onto the platform before and every single time it’s flopped.

The conclusion was that it’s too difficult, it’s too high consideration of a purchase. There is a lot of expensive stuff that’s for sale on Amazon, but the thing was there was a cap and there was too many variables.

Amazon at some point and it actually might still be, I should double check myself, but there was a point where Amazon was trying to sell cars. I think it might still sell. Costco does that stuff too.

Although there are a variety of trims and model years and whatever, it’s still a fairly straightforward. The complexity of travel has really stymied Amazon and other third-party sellers.

The high price point, the high consideration, the high research burden slash joy, like it’s not always a half-trust and it’s fun to do research, has really prevented Amazon from succeeding where it has in other categories like everything else,

Yeah, like taking over the entire capitalist ecosystem.

So for me, this is a bit of a blast from the past in that Alexa and even Google Voice is not new, and there was a push to do voice travel and those all failed.

There was a push for Amazon itself to do first party, which is to sell travel and that failed.

12:40

Old Ideas Return

And now to I guess make another transition, this idea, this joke of AI is bringing these dead ideas back.

And again, not the travel agency, but with BORA to take AI has taken a travel advisory business, which is a 50 year old business model and making it hot sexy unicorn.

And now Amazon, empowered by AI, fuels the ability to try and resurrect an idea that died over a decade ago, or no, almost a decade, under a decade ago, and bring it back.

So I think that their context is also important for our listeners, that this is not the first time Amazon has tried to sell travel, and it’s not the first time, and they’ve certainly never succeeded before.

Well, you think about it, like so many of the great minds of any generation, really, they’re often ahead of their time, right?

So you have an idea and you try it and it fails, and then everything else has to catch up, and then maybe you try out that idea again. I mean, we’ve seen that since the dawn of humans using the tools, since the chimp with the bone.

And that is an absolutely great point. And like, you know, the dog of the first.com boom was quite literally a company called pets.com trying to sell pet food online.

And now there are multiple e-commerce businesses, including Amazon, that sell pet food online to great success.

I was going to say, why would you ever not order your pet food online? Kind of heavy, you know?

And so now, yeah, I mean, that’s also sort of the genius and the beauty of a company like Amazon. I’m not trying to be negative. I’m not anti-Amazon, I’m not trying to be a Debbie Downer and everything I say.

That’s the beauty of a company like Amazon that has such stay in power and such a bench of engineer in town is that you can have the idea, you can try it.

If it doesn’t work, you don’t go out of business, you just try it again when the technology evolves. And that is certainly what they’re doing. So pretty exciting stuff.

What else happened this week, Seth?

14:39

2018 Report Flashback

Wait, can I share something real fast?

Yeah, I’m going to share my screen. This was a report that I published in May of 2018 called Amazon Lessons, Threats and Opportunities for Travel. And if we scroll down, what do we find?

But an analysis of, what else? Voice recognition technology and voice software, and the role of smart voice devices in the future of travel. And it’s talking about Alexa and could Amazon could use voice search.

And we talked about adoption of voice technology, speaker-enabled use and as a potential future. Now, we wrote that in 2018.

And obviously, the voice recognition technology was going to be better there, and was still nowhere near the level needed to have a confidence to travel. AI is a step function improvement of that.

So I think it’s also worth highlighting, maybe not as like they’ve done this before and it’s a dumb idea, but also worth highlighting of one of the things we’ve heard at our data and AI summits time and time again is that we are overestimating how

much can be done in a year, and underestimating how much can be done in a decade. This is an example of us talking about it and saying, well, here’s this voice, could Amazon use Alexa to use voice to sell travels from out in 2018 and here we are in

2026, and they’ve got a live pilot that they’re testing out. So there you go.

We should go back and see what else you talked about in 2018, Seth.

16:06

IHG Conversational Search

So our final big, we have three big AI stories this week.

We had Fora, the AI-powered travel advisory becoming a unicorn. We had Amazon using AI-powered MCPs to sell travel bookings via voice and Alexa.

And the final one we had is quite exciting, and it really does take us back into the world of hotels, which is a world we love, which is IHG. IHG group launched literally yesterday.

They just announced it, or by the time you listen to it, it will be earlier this week, a beta of conversational AI search on ihg.com. So I’m told not everyone has it. They’re rolling it out across the website and the app.

But by the time you check, you should see that you should be able to have a bit of a chat thought AI interface.

Instead of doing keyword search, you should be able to have a conversational search where you talk with IHG about what kind of trip you want, where you want to stay, what kind of hotels you want, and it gives you the answer back in a conversational

format. So our boss, Rafa, has talked about the tyranny of the search box. We at Skift Research have talked about moving from search-led to curation-led, from search-scroll-to-ask-and-decide, and this is part of that slow but steady transformation.

What’s your take on this new tech launch from IHG, Sarah?

The tyranny of the search bar. I kind of love it. I mean, again, the thing that strikes me is just how similar the two stories are with Alexa and Search and Google and IHG being just conversational voice search.

I mean, it’s just one of those things where it seems like so much innovation, even if you have things like trade secrets and walls and like between different companies, it’s just people do come up with the, like they get there at the same time a lot

of times. It’s not an accident that all of this is coming.

So I think that when you hear these stories taken together, it just seems like to me, my read is, okay, there’s going to just be now an avalanche of these type of, you know, in ones that probably work.

Because they’ve all, they’ve been around for a long time. I mean, it’s not like this is like new, new. It’s just that it hasn’t worked very well, and it’s super annoying, and people don’t like to use it.

We’d rather type it because you get a better experience. But if, you know, the big boys are putting big money behind this now is probably a pretty good chance that it works pretty well.

Yeah, and this IHG, it follows similar kind of chatbot tools that have been launched by Marriott and Hilton as well. And so now IHG, Hilton, and Marriott all have these sort of conversational search chatbots on their homepages.

Alexa has the conversational voice search, and Fora has the humans, who I’m told you can also have a conversation with a human. I haven’t had one in forever, but I’m told it can happen.

19:26

No Single Front Door

And so we are very much moving my takeaway from all of these stories, that all came out either this week or in the last 10 days or so.

But all point to this idea, and I just know that I was talking about with some of my partners that we work with at McKinsey in their travel practice, and I’ll give them a shout out. I think some of them are listeners, hopefully.

But they’ve been talking, we have this idea, we’ve been talking to them about, about there’s no longer a single front door.

There used to be one front door, and that front door was a company called Google, and the vehicle for that front door was that search bar.

Now, what we’re seeing is that front door can be a human travel advisor powered by AI, that front door can be a voice search through Amazon or another third party, that front door can be a conversational search on directbrand.com.

And so I think that’s what’s the theme besides AI, which is an obvious theme, but the theme that ties all these stories together and we see this trend sort of conversion is that there’s no longer a single front door, whether it’s a type of search or

a place to search. And increasingly, how people are gonna decide, book, search, discover, learn, research, whatever, is gonna happen across multiple formats and across multiple locations.

I wonder how that, to bring back the like decision paralysis or choice paralysis, I wonder how that were, I mean, for like you and I, that sounds fine, like that sounds great.

Like, you know, it doesn’t phase me so much, but I think, you know, I’m not like a typical traveler, neither are you.

And so I think about like what that’s gonna be like for, I don’t know, like our parents or people who are not so, like, it’s taken 20 years to get Google, like into their workflows.

Like, how is, I don’t know, I think about it for them and other people who just, they’re like, I don’t want all this stuff. I just want it to work. I just want to know how to do it.

I mean, I think, well, that’s also why I would not count out a player like Google.

21:32

Google Still In Play

There was actually a small piece of Google News about Google, actually as part of this IHG launch, Google integrating IHG as its first hotel partner into what they call, I think it’s called their Direct Offers Program, what is going to surface hotel

promotions inside AI assisted trip planning conversations. I read them, I know it’s a lot of big words, $10 words in my news, but it’s going to do something to that effect. I think that’s why everyone’s like, oh, Google quad, perplexity, open AI.

There’s going to be some question of, what I would say to the gist of what you’re saying, which is that if people are trying to use Google, and you can take one of these models and plug it into Google, why wouldn’t I just use the model on Google?

Because increasingly, I don’t have a choice. When I go to Google, I get AI answers and I’m increasingly getting AI mode.

So the thought about the boomers, or not even the boomers, but just people who are not seeking out AI tools, increasingly the AI tools will seek them out, if that makes any sense. That’s one of these big good beef, which is.

A lot of times, they don’t even know they’re using them.

That’s right. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

That’s scary.

22:41

AI vs Travel Giants

That’s one of these questions too, which is like bulking.com, expedia.com, these major brands, people think they’re going to get disintermediated by AI.

They think that Claude and Chachripti is a threat to Expedia, and Glenn Fogel is out there at every chance he can get. Maybe he’s right. He’s a smart guy saying, no, they’re going to come to us, and we’re going to use the AI when they come to us.

Not that they’re going to go, because they already come to us, and they know to come to us, they know to work with us, and we’ll buy the AI tools, and then they’ll come to us, and we’ll bring the AI to them.

As opposed to the customer leapfrogging them to get to Claude or whatever. So what you’ve just said is a great debate, and it won’t be over in a year.

As that old research goes, it’s going to be a decade before we even get close to knowing the answer.

Yeah. So there’s a lot of things going on. We had earnings season this week, as you noted.

I mean, as we said last week, we’re big earnings season fans.

I don’t have my EBITDA mug, I just have a regular mug.

Do you have an EBITDA mug?

It’s an aspirational mug. I’ve bought it, I’ve lost in the move. I got to buy a new one.

I got to buy a new one.

Of course you do. Sorry. Carry on.

24:06

Hilton Fee Cut

No.

I know you’ve been on vacation, so I won’t put too much on the spot, but have you had a chance to look at Hilton’s earnings? I think you might find it incredibly dedicated.

I did. I haven’t stopped smiling since. I don’t know.

I mean, so basically Hilton, I mean, now keep me honest here, but Hilton cut one of their franchise fees for the first time.

Yes.

So this is something that we’ve been talking about for a while this year. I’ve been writing a lot about it and just about the squeeze that the hotel owners are under. Hilton and the big brands are all making gazillions of dollars.

They’re doing really well. Their stock prices are all-time highs. The owners are feeling the pinch.

Everything’s more expensive. It’s harder for them to make money. So that’s the squeeze.

Hilton came out and said, we’re going to do a little something, like we’re going to cut the fee. They have done some more ancillary things around the edges to attempt to make things easier for the owners.

But this seems like a much larger jump, like a bigger acknowledgement that this is a real problem that they have to fix.

You know what surprised me? Again, I want your reaction to this. They did it so publicly.

Yeah.

Look, I think they had to, they wanted to. This is a bad look for them. Say what you will about, we talk about fiduciary duties and responsibility to make money for shareholders and all of this stuff.

But at the end of the day, hotel owners for the most part are small business owners. It’s like a David and Goliath kind of thing. Goliath is winning like hand over fist.

I think it’s a bad look and I think that they’re trying to do some.

Do you think there’s a chance it could be also a competitive move?

In the perfect world, in the perfect economics world, if this is not working, capitalism, they should be cut in prices to attract more hoteliers to their flags to earn more franchise revenue in the long run and undercut their competitors.

So I wonder too, you said that not only do they have to, they want to. I kind of think they wanted to advertise this.

I think this is a big somewhat of an advertising message of this is out there in the zeitgeist, Sarah Kopit and Skift are making it, are putting it out there. And we are the response, which is join Hilton.

Yeah, I think that is absolutely right.

And, you know, they have all, you know, Chris DeSetta has said before that he knows that their future, that they, meaning the Royal, they, their company, Hilton, and Hilton’s, you know, success is inextricably linked.

I believe those are the exact words he said that their success is inextricably linked to that of their owners.

And so, you know, I think that back when he said that, which was a couple, it was either the last quarter or the quarter before, you know, they hadn’t come out with this type of program yet. But I think that, you know, here we are.

I think when, when you have that knowledge, you know, it’s only a matter of time before, you know, if things continue to go down the path that they have, it’s only a matter of time until…

Yeah.

until you’ve got to make a change.

I have a lot of respect for Hilton and for Nyseta too, and I have a lot of respect for the competitors as well.

27:50

Incentives and RevPAR

But I think one of the things I saw in this story is that they are discounting fees for hotels that score well on guest experience.

So I think that’s a really smart way to structure it too, where it’s not just about giving hoteliers a break, it’s also about giving hoteliers an incentive. And I like, I think it’s a very smart structure.

At that same earnings report, they raised their RevPAR revenue per available room guidance. So they upped their guidance. They called it a big turnaround.

They had non-luxury RevPAR grew, luxury RevPAR continues to be strong, even business RevPAR grew. So they raised their full year guidance. They saw a contribution from the world.

Top, I don’t know, pretty good quarter, damn good quarter.

I mean, as it has been lately, like it always has old. So, yeah.

28:42

JetBlue Turnaround Plan

Slightly more mixed quarter at JetBlue, our airline friend, one of our New York hometown airline.

They continue to lose money. They continue to be one of the least profitable airlines in the country and they are still unprofitable, whereas many of their peers are struggling with not making enough profit. They are actively losing money.

That can’t be a comfortable place to be sitting.

But the stock price is up and the stock price is up because they announced a pretty major restructuring and turnaround plan, which is I think significant because again, we try to play too many favorites or whatever on this podcast, but I should say

although JetBlue is definitely struggling, I am rooting for them as someone who spends a lot of time in New York City and Long Island City specifically, we’re rooting for them. I don’t want to see them go out of business.

So they have reorganized and restructured their fare.

In addition to a bunch of other stuff, they’re moving terminals, they’re buying up spirits old slots, they’re taking advantage of that consolidation, they’re cutting routes, they’re investing in the routes they think are most profitable.

It’s Florida. They’ve done a new fare structure too, and they’re going to start offering much more domestic first class and also more different branding and more ancillary selling of their seats. They’re really pushing.

Think about it, new routes, new gates, new fare classes. What more is there to new lounges? What more is there to an airline than all of those things?

It’s almost a new airline at that point other than the planes themselves and the pilots.

Just having watched how impactful it was to lose spirit, I can’t imagine if we lost JetBlue too.

It’s on the table. There’s no doubt about it. I agree with them.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

30:40

Low Cost Carrier Squeeze

From a pure play competition perspective, how many low cost carriers do we have? Black, Southwest, Frontier, I mean in the US anyway.

JetBlue. Southwest, which is moving upscale. JetBlue, which is moving upscale.

Frontier, Allegiant, which is merging with Sun Country.

Oh yeah, I forget. I’ve never slowed them. I kind of forget about them.

Because I’m over here. Yeah, we’re over here.

I think it’s arguable whether of the Alaska-Hawaiian combination deserves to be called a low cost carrier or not. Alaska has some legacy as a low cost. But arguably, that’s it.

I mean, arguably, I’m sure I miss this one. We want to hear from you. Give me an angry email if I miss it.

Tell us.

Yeah.

You got Delta and United doing great at the top. You’ve got American Airlines, which is certainly not a low cost carrier, but being squeezed, maybe the least profitable of them.

You’ve got these in-between folks who are trying to figure out what their model is going to be. That’s Alaska, which as a reminder, owns the former Virgin and Hawaiian.

You’ve got JetBlue and Southwest, we’re going to squeeze in the middle, and then you’ve got these more low cost, allegiant and allegiance on country and frontier, who are hanging around but not having a great time.

Then you’ve got Breeze, our friend David Nealman. My friend David.

Breeze, which has actually been a very successful low cost car, but they’re still very small, and their whole strategy is, I’m paraphrasing, I’m paraphrasing their strategy and I’m also paraphrasing Peter Thiel, who said competition is for suckers,

and their strategy is specifically not to compete in markets that are not served by other airlines, which defeats the whole purpose of having low cost competition, which the beauty of what JetBlue does, the beauty of what Frontier does is they go

Yeah.

Just a shout out to Frontier. Your livery makes me happy every time I see it from the window.

The animals?

My airplanes.

Yes. Yes. Oh, like the animals too.

Yes, the animals.

Yes, I have my favorite.

33:00

LaGuardia Marine Terminal

One of the things that make me happy, JetBlue’s new LaGuardia Terminal.

Ah, yeah, the Marine Terminal, our favorite. Yeah, I can’t wait to see what they do with it.

If our listeners don’t know what it is, explain to our listeners what the Marine Air Terminal is.

So for one thing, for those of you who have not had the privilege to fly into LaGuardia recently since COVID, you should just because LaGuardia used to be, I mean, I can’t, or I won’t say online what here live, what LaGuardia used to be like.

It was not good. And now it’s absolutely beautiful and amazing. It was a phoenix.

It rose from the ashes of COVID and is now just a wonderful place. But those are the main terminals. But at LaGuardia, they have this funky little, it used to be the commuter terminal from New York to Boston, I believe, and then Spirit took it over.

And it is an art deco building. It is the tiniest thing. The reason why it’s so unusual is because for a New York City airport, you feel like you are going through the Traverse City Airport in Northern Michigan, right?

It’s like there’s just this little teeny weeny little place. Like, there can’t even be a long line for security. There’s no where to have set line.

It’s that small. But the building is cool and there’s only, I don’t know, if I had to guess, I would say there’s four gates in it, if I had to guess.

Yeah, if that, I mean, and I think it’s just a gem. And it’s been this like hidden gem, hidden secret in LaGuardia because there’s always a short line. There’s not a lot going on.

And all the crowds. No, it’s not your modern, like, I mean, like a Singapore or an Abu Dhabi. It’s Art Deco.

Yeah.

I was just gonna say, there’s no fancy glass waterfalls or shopping malls or caviar bumps, but it is a beautiful Art Deco masterpiece that was built by Pan American Airlines, which is another great, speaking of defunct airlines, but a great airline.

And I’m very glad to see it. Yes.

So JetBlue.

Yeah. Hopefully JetBlue gets it in the Spirit Bank group scene. Yeah, exactly.

It does something great with it.

Yeah.

35:25

Winners and Losers

Sarah, you’ve got a vacation to get back to.

Should we do Winners and Losers real fast?

Let us do Winners and Losers real fast. And then, yeah, I got to go to the beach. I got to go to the beach.

I’ve got a loser.

You got a winner?

I do have a winner. Let me, yes, I do have a winner.

We learned our lesson. I’ll do my loser first. Okay.

You do it.

35:45

Royal Caribbean Fuel Hit

My loser, and I’m sorry to say this, it’s Royal Caribbean.

This is another earnings story we did. They missed earnings. Well, actually, they beat earnings, but they trimmed their growth forecast and their fuel costs were up and they blamed it on the Iran War.

And fair enough, I understand, you’re not a loser at your core. This was outside of your control, but temporarily hamstrung by the Iran War. And we joked about how Delta reported earnings and said, Iran War?

What Iran War? Well, the Iran War is back in the news headlines. It’s back in oil price markets.

And it’s so funny, we were talking about airlines, but there is another company, another sector of travel that relies very heavily on fuel to get you from one place to the other.

And that is cruise companies and Royal Caribbean seems to be a bit of a victim to this. And so you’re not fundamentally a loser, Royal Caribbean, but you are. That’s tough.

That sucks. And now you’re in control, too. That’s a tough week, yeah.

36:47

Space Licensing and Tourism

So my winner this week is the Space People.

And I will tell you why.

The Space People.

I kind of consider myself a space person or a space, a wannabe space person. I’m just a fan girl. I’m a Space People fan girl.

So Secretary Duffy announced this, like, new streamlining process for commercial space licensing. So what, yep. So what, you know, it, you know, as everything, it’s complex, it’s more complex.

But what they, what the Trump administration ended up doing is kind of backtracking on a lot of environmental protections and rules that had been instituted in order to expedite commercial space licensing, which hopefully for, like, the goal of the

Do you think would you will get space tourism?

We’ll get that.

So, I mean, this is, of course, my, my, this is, of course, my dream is like, you know, I always, I always like talking about this stuff, but space tourism, I don’t know, I feel like it, I feel, you know what I think happens first is space business

travel. Like that’s like, that’s what I think is first.

I think that like, if, if, like, if Skift is going to start writing about space, the reason why it’s going to be for, from a business travel perspective, not from a tourist perspective, because I think that, because that’s what’s happening first.

Like you’ve got to build that, you know, you’re going to build the infrastructure, you’re going to build, if you’re going to build mines and, you know, you’re going to put mines on the moon and all of that stuff, you are going to send people to do

it. So that’s what I think comes first. But no, I mean, I think it’s a no-brainer. I think that human beings want to explore, and like once that infrastructure is set up, I think people are going to want to go to space as tourists.

I agree.

And I think too, I don’t want to say like people soft these days, but we take for granted how safe everything is. There’s people traveled a lot in the age of steamships, when those ships could sink and you would still take vacation.

39:29

Long Term Outlook Farewell

So I think that, and for business. And so I suspect you, I appreciate your long term.

One of the themes, it wasn’t written out in our notes, but one of the themes of this episode is clearly long-term thinking and overestimated in one year, underestimated in 10 years. And a lot fits into that. All right, space people win this week.

I love it, Sarah.

Space people. All right, well, I’m going to go to the beach. Say hi to everybody in the office.

Enjoy.

Yeah. I will say hi to the folks. You enjoy the beach.

And if you’re listening, we’ll see you next week on The Skift Travel Podcast.

See you next week, everybody. Bye.