Expedia Group, the online booking conglomerate that owns the travel agencies Expedia, Hotwire.com, Orbitz and Travelocity, has announced a $25 million initiative aimed at leveraging the brand’s media and advertising platform to help travel-related business weather the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. Announced today, the initiative will see Expedia match a portion of ads placed…
?altibar??iai is not a dish you’re likely to see very often outside of Lithuania, and, unless you’re a linguist, you’re not to likely to have much luck pronouncing it either-but the Baltic state is betting on it to help lure in more tourists, even if it does leave them tongue-tied. ?altibar??iai (pronounced “shull-tee-barsh-chay”) is a…
Splash Mountain, one of Disney’s problematic theme park attractions, will be “completely reimagined” from its current theme, which has its roots in Song of the South, a Disney movie the company has long disavowed. The official Disney Parks blog broke the news today with a first-look rendering of the new theme for the ride, which…
With “zero marketing whatsoever,” Airbnb is seeing travelers come back to the home-sharing platform, with levels equivalent to 2019 in a pre-pandemic world. “People are saying they want to get out of the house,” Airbnb CEO and founder Brian Chesky told CNBC, which was first to report the news. “Although our business has not recovered,…
Tripadvisor, the online review and booking site, has added filters to let travelers search destinations based on safety and sanitization. The filters allow business owners (who advertise on the platform) the ability to add their own safety measures and sanitization procedures, like whether mask policies are enforced, and ask travelers to validate their own personal…
Carnival Cruise Line announced this morning that it will continue its “operational pause” until at least Sept. 30. That’s 15 days longer than the guidance offered Friday afternoon by the industry’s trade group, Cruise Lines International Association, which extended its voluntary suspension of service until at least Sept. 15. But if Covid-19 cases continue to…
When Virgin Voyages first sets sail this October, it’ll be doing so with fewer people than originally anticipated–and that’s intentional. Announced this morning, Richard Branson’s new wilder, adults-only cruise line will be capping its capacity for its “soft opening” to help ease travelers’ concerns amid the Covid-19 pandemic. Specific numbers weren’t shared, but the company…
Long before Covid-19, it was the seasonal flu that people feared, and the 2017 flu season was a bad one. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 45 million people got sick that year, over 800,000 bad enough to be hospitalized, and 61,000 died. Of course, most Americans didn’t think about statistics like…
It’s not up to Arnold Donald, the CEO and president of the world’s largest cruise line, Carnival Corporation, to decide when his ships are back in the water. It’s a decision that consumers will make. “When society has decided at what level of risk it’s willing to live with this particular virus, then we can…
In an effort to cater to the interests of travelers just beginning to crawl out of lockdown, Airbnb has made changes to its homepage and app in an effort to get people out in their own metaphorical backyards. The campaign, “Go Near,” was one of several announcements made this morning as the home-sharing platform said…
Investors and consumers are regaining confidence in the travel industry. Last week, full-service property management company Vacasa announced a $108 million investment round, a bit of good news for the travel and hospitality world, which has been devastated by the Covid-19 pandemic, from airlines to hotels and vacation rental services such as Airbnb and Vrbo,…
The famous neon lights of The Strip are back on in Sin City in the latest ad enticing visitors to return to Las Vegas. In the spot, a tuxedo-clad man flips a master switch that is (magically) connected to every major casino on The Strip, which come to life one after the other, including the…
Although recent reports of a recovering travel industry have offered a glimmer of hope, more than half of Americans have already canceled their summer vacation plans after weathering the initial outbreak of Covid-19. According to a survey of 1,500 Americans taken by FinanceBuzz in early May, 56% of Americans had already canceled their summer travel…
Travel brands big and small are seeing a modest uptick in interest, an optimistic sign that the leisure and hospitality industry is on the road to recovery. Booking.com, one of the world’s largest travel metasearch engines, is seeing more activity from what CMO Arjan Dijk called “dreamers,” which are travelers searching and planning a vacation…
Led by gains in the leisure and hospitality industry, the U.S. gained 2.5 million jobs in May, an about-face that stunned economists and financial experts, many of whom predicted U.S. unemployment would reach 20% as the Covid-19 pandemic continues. Instead, the rate declined from a historic high for 14.7% in April to 13.3% last month….
The coronavirus pandemic is ongoing, but some people are finding the urge to hop on a plane–despite the risks–to be irresistible. American Airlines’ numbers in April had tanked amid the coronavirus outbreak, subsequent lockdowns and restrictive policies–the airline only served an average 32,000 daily customers on a domestic flight schedule reduced by 65%. But in…
When it comes to their safety and well-being, travelers are more willing to listen to a government agency than the private sector. Surveying just over 1,000 people, PwC found that just 10% of travelers trust private companies when it comes to whether they can travel safely, while 59% rely on information from the Centers for…
How many Americans would travel to Las Vegas in the middle of a pandemic if their flight was paid for? Evidently, at least 2,000. With social distancing still the recommended course of action in the U.S., travel remains at a low. While some airlines have noted a small uptick in travel, Memorial Day traffic was…
Thirty-five million Americans have never left the state in which they were born–and as the Covid-19 pandemic continues to suppress travel across the country, that number likely won’t drop in the near future. But in a show of aspirational advertising, Hyundai is helping some of those 35 million Americans cross their state lines in a…
The thought of traveling anywhere outside of the safe perimeter of your own backyard may seem daunting–maybe even impossible–in the midst of a pandemic, but Visit Florida and Outside Magazine are hoping to stir up wanderlust for a time when vacationing in prehistoric caverns and rare coral reefs is feasible again. To unveil the Sunshine…
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