The State of Travel Is Getting Harder to Control

0:23Seth Borko: The number of the week is 162. That is the number of slides in Skiff's brand new state-of-the-art state of travel report that Seth and his team, big round of applause, have published this week. We're going to talk all about it. We also have some fun internet moments, fun and, I don't know, some kind of odd internet moments to talk about this week that got a lot of attention. But Seth, first, just give us a little nibble on the state of travel.

0:56Sarah Kopit: Yeah, a little teaser.

0:58Seth Borko: Yeah, a little teaser. I mean, it's my favorite report of the year. Yeah.

1:02Sarah Kopit: An amuse-bouche palate cleanser. I mean, look, we do this. This is five years now. We do a state of travel report. Like you said, the number of leads, 162 slides. It's the longest report. I think it's the best designed report. It's the most fun report. And perhaps most importantly, it's the most free report. We have a sponsor, a core who helps us make it free. We do it every year. And it's supposed to be this comprehensive, I call it omnibus sometimes, which is a$10 word, all inclusive. Think of it like a resort. It's an all inclusive report where we just go through everything. We pretty much take all of the charts, slides, ideas from all of our research, as well as from stuff we've read on Skiff News, stuff we've read on other news sites, other data points, all the stuff that we think is interesting.

1:49Sarah Kopit: The entire research team contributes. We put it together. We hand it over to our design team. They design it. It looks beautiful. there's never any one through storyline but there's multiple storylines pretty much the goal is anything that you would want to know about the state of travel in 2026 we try to answer it uh we've we've switched up this year maybe i'll say that as a preview if you want to know how it's changed this year we have a new structure a new framework to think about the state of travel we have some slides and some new everything and i'm really excited of it and really proud of the team for

2:22Seth Borko: doing it and i love it because i mean not only is awesome but they're like it's like 150 charts and i just love i'm like a chart nerd um all charts and i so they're so good and because seth did them you know they're right we've seth and i have talked a lot about chart crime chart crimes there's some terrible charts out there in the world that get published but these are not that. These are good charts with good information and good data. So we're going to talk all about that a little bit later in the program today.

2:55Sarah Kopit: These are not chart criminals. They are upstanding chart citizens who contribute to their chart community.

3:01Seth Borko: There you go. You know, some other upstanding community members really took it to the internet this week. I will say, Not every week is like this week in travel, community, internet excitement, I should say, or virility, perhaps even, dare I say. So you've heard both Seth and I talk about our search for the ironing board while flying and traveling for business. And, you know, we were both just joyous when somebody else had a little bit of a YouTube freak out about the need for ironing boards, which was just so it was so lovely. It felt so, like, vindicating, I guess. Did you know that there's an amenity in your hotel room that is often overlooked, totally underappreciated, but will completely change the efficiency of your hotel room?

4:07Seth Borko: It's the ironing board. Get it out of the closet. Ironing board is four and a half feet more precious counter space. Really handy when you're sharing one room with your family and just running out of places to put things. Or, hey, maybe it's just you and you travel with a lot of stuff. The ironing board doesn't judge. But my absolute favorite use is to turn it into a desk, stand up desk or sit down. But I'm not staring at a wall. Instead, I've got natural sunlight and a really nice view. So yes, the ironing board. Who knew, right?

4:37Sarah Kopit: So I was scrolling as one does, you know, mindlessly scroll. And I came across this amazing use for ironing board. Use it as a desk. Use it for extra space. Use it for a change of scenery. and I had to send it to our Skiff Travel podcast, a little community chat, and I wanted to share it because we are another use for the great iron board. We talk about, you know, clothes, but another great use for the iron board. I love it.

5:00Seth Borko: You know, I will say I knew that one about the desk because I have this picture that is just so, like if you could just do a snapshot in time of me early COVID, we actually left New York City and went to Vermont. my family and I when they closed New York City public schools and I was doing I did a podcast from a closet and my mic was on the ironing board and my husband once opened the door and he took a picture of me with my mic and my laptop on the ironing board and like I suppose that was back when work from home was like early days we didn't have our dedicated you didn't do Yeah, exactly. Well, also, it was just unheard of to be recording at your house.

5:51Seth Borko: I'm home. I only recorded like when I was ever doing any voiceover or anything. It was always in a studio, in a booth, in a sound booth. And that's why I was in the closet. It was behind the scenes. Yes, it was the best like sound booth replica that I could find.

6:07Sarah Kopit: so when we were starting this podcast we had a long discussion about whether we needed a studio and me and you sarah we both thought we needed a recording studio yeah and uh our producer will and others said guys it's it's the it's you know it's post pandemic it's the modern world we can send you a mic and and don't worry this is how it's done now so a little behind the scenes if you i mean i still wish we had a studio i know i kind of want one too i know maybe maybe if you

6:35Seth Borko: listeners would tell your friends and share us on the internet, then maybe we could get our studio. So it's a call out to the community. Get Seth and Sarah their own studio. There you go.

6:48Sarah Kopit: So anyways, I do get a lot of travel. Obviously, business of travel, I get a lot of, and I love seeing the insider stuff for business of travel. But I do love watching consumer travel stuff. And I'll admit, I watch a lot of YouTube, and now my YouTube algorithm is a lot of travel people and i will also admit the negative stuff the negative headlines get me to click and i was scrolling in bed later than i care to admit you know putting off sleep and i saw this video about this guy that was a travel hotel influencer reviewer who says that he had had the cops called at him at an amman hotel which of course i know from which of course i know from skip from my work as like the greatest i mean the ultimate in hotel luxury so this can't be true what's going on here I clicked on it.

7:35Sarah Kopit: I said, this is a great, this is so into the guy. We'll talk about it. I said, this feels like I'm sure it's just funny. It's just YouTube. It's just whatever. And I show up to work the next day. And what do I see? But Sarah, your team has rightly so picked up on this and run with it as a story. And I think it is a great story. That's just my team.

7:54Seth Borko: I did. I wrote it.

7:56Sarah Kopit: Yeah.

7:56Seth Borko: I wrote that story.

7:58Sarah Kopit: Tell us about it, Sarah. Tell us about how you came to this story. because I came to it in the actual social media algorithm. How did you, what was your story here? Tell us more about what actually happened in the story as we reported on it.

8:10Seth Borko: Yeah, so, you know, it was one of those things where it just kind of kept getting bigger and bigger, I guess. You kind of, it's weird when you work for a kind of a niche publication as we do, there is a certain point where a story really jumps. It jumps to mainstream. It transcends the conversation around it is almost the story. And, you know, Virtuoso Travel Week is going on in Las Vegas. And the thing that was so interesting about this particular story, it's a travel reviewer named Ryan Walker.

8:46Sarah Kopit: Yeah, give us the details. Yeah. So here's Ryan Walker.

8:50Seth Borko: You're seeing a picture of him right now. So he is a travel reviewer. That's his thing. He uses YouTube mainly as his platform to get his reviews across. He pays his own way. And I would say, you know, in 2026 now, there are like three kind of distinct groups of humans that may do things like this. There are influencers, there's press like us, traditional media, and then there's creators. Now, Ryan Walker is a creator. I would say pretty like pretty squarely, he falls into the creator bucket. A lot of that is because he pays his own way.

9:30Sarah Kopit: As opposed to an influencer who would do a brand deal. Like the idea is that an influencer would do a brand deal. They would work with a sponsor to do it. A journalist would be similar to a creator in terms of editorial independence, but they have a huge or somewhat of a legitimate large media organization platform behind them. And a creator is this hybrid between the two where they are being independent or giving their own reviews, but they're not influencers in that they're not really marketing activations, but they're not media. They're usually a one man or one woman show. Correct? Yes, correct.

10:04Seth Borko: Absolutely. You got it. And so with Amon, I guess the thing that that I mean, for most people listening to this podcast, you will have heard of Amon. many people like my husband for example like when i told him about this story has never heard of amon why has he never heard of amon because we can't afford to stay at amon like it's not been in our like it's not been like the hotels we throw around when it's like where should we go on vacation this summer you know let's go stay at amon has not has not been on the list although i do say like i would really like to go stay at amangiri that is like my bucket list hotel anyway

10:42Sarah Kopit: Is it still your bucket list after this incident? Yeah, it is. What happens to poor Ryan next?

10:49Seth Borko: Yeah, so Ryan books a stay for, he said, like, I don't know, something like$6 ,000 a night. He shows up and drives two hours, you know, through the Mexican desert. Or it's probably not a desert. It's probably more like a rainforest. And it's in a pretty isolated area and on the west coast of Mexico. and so it's really interesting if you watch i've watched the video probably five six times now the the most interesting part to me is that he goes up he gives them he says hello and the guy who's meeting him at the gate says his name first he says he says ryan walker he's like he's like Ryan Walker yeah we don't have your reservation like before like they knew he was coming and they he had talked to them beforehand he did say that he got permission to film there as long this is according to him he got permission to film there as long as he didn't show any other guests and the reason why I'm gonna say this I'll just say it once all of this is coming from his perspective because Amon has not made a statement about this at all which we'll get to as well um

12:04Sarah Kopit: oh did they make a statement they gave me to send me to the wall street journal like i think a

12:08Seth Borko: couple of hours ago oh man breaking news okay i know i know okay so you'll have to tell me what that was i've been i've been busy doing other things listen to the skiffed playbook on on editorial that's what i've been doing but um so anyway he gets to the gate they say they do not have his reservation, although they did know him. They basically turned him away and the police, they said, a woman said a couple of times that they were going to call the police. His videographer posted on YouTube that they did meet a Mexican military vehicle on the way out. I was not able to confirm that. I did write to the Escobo's police department asking about this.

12:55Seth Borko: They did knock it back to me. So part of this story really is like, like if this were a Hampton Inn, I don't know, but this is a Mon, like this is an ultra luxury property known for being an ultra luxury property. What ultra luxury means a lot of times is communication. It means customer service. It means, it means a whole lot of things. Unless you've experienced it yourself, it's hard to really put into words like what type of experience those properties give their customers and paying guests when they get there. Well, that was not obviously not the experience that that Ryan Walker got. It just and then it just like spiraled.

13:40Seth Borko: It went downhill from there. He had a live stream planned for, I believe, the next day. The U.S. consulate got involved, told me I'd stop the live stream, went the next day after I published the story. At that point, Amon had not made any comments. And so let's see, what's today? Wednesday. So we're recording on a Wednesday. This happened like a week ago. And so it took them a week to make a comment. So do tell me, what did they say to the Wall Street Journal stuff?

14:08Sarah Kopit: An Amon spokesman told the Wall Street Journal, quote, the deceptively edited video created by someone unauthorized to be on our property does not reflect the circumstances of the incident accurately, end quote. I think that's the only direct quote they have on the record from Amman, but they do, the Wall Street Journal does report, and you actually were just doing this playbook about the difference between what's a quote and a paraphrase and when we do this. The Wall Street Journal goes on to say, the Amman spokesman says the resort refunded Walker's book in full, pledged to cover additional travel and cancellation costs, and offered to help him rebook his stay.

14:45Sarah Kopit: Walker says he received the refund, but didn't take Amon up on other reimbursements. A spokesperson for Amon also said, but not in quotes, but a spokesperson for Amon also said they sent Walker a WhatsApp message about the cancellation. Walker says he did not see the WhatsApp message until the journal asked him about it. So that's the additional context, a few additional pieces of background. I think that's what we would called in the industry and the business of background provided by a spokesperson and a quote effectively saying the video was deceptively edited. Although I will say, obviously, you know, there is plenty of ways to deceptively edit a video, but the video was also pretty clear.

15:28Sarah Kopit: He clearly made a reservation and he was clearly denied that reservation. That does seem to be an undisputed fact. The real debate is over when that reservation was canceled, how it was canceled, how it was communicated, and how he was received at the property. That seems to be the point of contention. But what clearly happened was Amman didn't want a reviewer that was outside of the traditional media lens on their property at opening. And how much of an actual communication breakdown was there how much of it was intentional ignorance by this ryan walker to create a good video how much of it was portrayed how much of it was this without the other you know we may never know the full truth here but the bigger story is i mean i think really you know i think and for many online the dam and evidence will just be the fact that amand did not want a reviewer an independent reviewer on their property, you know, take out all the other stuff, when it was canceled, how it was canceled, how it was communicated, when it was communicated.

16:36Sarah Kopit: The story does seem to be, and they both seem to agree on the facts, that he made a reservation, he wanted to come, they asked him not to come because they didn't want a review made. See, I don't think that's the story. See, even that, okay, okay, see, wow, so there's a lot to talk about here.

16:53Seth Borko: So I think the story is the bungled response by Amon.

17:00Sarah Kopit: And by bungled, you mean how he was greeted, how he was responding in person? Or you mean that they took a week to comment on a viral fiasco that was going on a life of its own? And they gave one quote to The Wall Street Journal, which is an old school legacy media publication.

17:17Seth Borko: That's what I think the story is. And I think for all of our marketers out there, for all of our comms people out there who are listening. I mean, think about how you would have handled that situation. If it were your property, your airline, regardless of what, you know, regardless of what area of the travel industry you're in, if that, like, it all goes bad. You know what? Sometimes it goes bad. Like, shit happens. It, for all of us, right? And I think that, you know, I would love to hear from some of the folks who are experts in crisis comms, how you react to that, like, quote unquote, bad thing.

17:59Seth Borko: I mean, I am not an expert in crisis comms, but one would think if Amon would have commented and I don't know, even a mea culpa, like what or not, like whatever it would have may have been, they would have like taken down the temperature. Instead, they let everyone, everyone talk about it because it because it's a, you know, it's an interesting, unusual story.

18:27Sarah Kopit: Right. The fact that it's being reported again in the Wall Street Journal, the fact that the Wall Street Journal thinks that there is a story here means that this has gotten out of control from a crisis perspective. Right. Correct. If it's a couple of trade or if it's a couple of people switching to me, the fact that, I mean, even if it's Skiff writing about it, that sucks. The fact that the journal is doing a full story on it, I'm like, oh, this is mainstream now. And now it's going to be, it already has been open season. So I think it's a big miss. And I think it speaks to weakness. If you were really confident in the price point that you were charging, you would say, show up, come on over.

19:05Sarah Kopit: I mean, what's the worst that he could say? you're charging$5 ,000 a night it's gonna be a great experience come on or at least let the people like I feel this way like I watch sometimes these airline YouTube reviewers and they always talk about how terrible you know an airline is or a service is and I always look at and I say yeah dude you booked an economy ticket on like a weird flight like of course like it didn't seem that bad to me like I think like I'm a big believer that you know sunlight's the ultimate disinfectant i doubt that this property would have done anything so bad that even if this guy left a review that people watching would have said oh come on you

19:45Seth Borko: know what i mean yeah i i mean yes so even outside just the comms snafu afterwards just like how like even a meh review like how would we be talking about it no no well and i think i think there's

20:04Sarah Kopit: a certain it it presents a certain level of dare i say also arrogance that our customer base is not going to um watch youtube and i also think that's a big mistake i think there's a lot of billionaires who are addicted to youtube i mean i know the richest man in the world squirrels twitter all day long and so i think that like there's a lot more of that than they realize yeah so i mean

20:27Seth Borko: look i i'll give a little plug to our you know we're doing a creator summit even this year at around Skiff Global Forum because creators have become such a massive force within this industry. Like, it's time for everyone to, like, understand how it works, take it seriously, like, think about how they can both use it in their business, protect themselves against this extravaganza that happened. So it's a really interesting thing that's going on right now that didn't used to.

21:05Sarah Kopit: And I want to segue and talk about our state of travel. But I do just before we do that, I want to address a comment. Hopefully, Will doesn't mind me calling him out by name. I like to engage with Will, our producer, who's in our chat as we're talking. Will is our producer. Yeah.

21:17Seth Borko: Yes.

21:18Sarah Kopit: And Will left a note here and he says that this influencer, Ryan Walker, trashed Four Seasons yacht launch, ruined their rep, and lost revenue. Amon saw that and doesn't want him to trash their hotel on opening weekend. Well, I would say, first of all, as a researcher, Will, and I don't doubt you, but how do we know that Four Seasons... I question whether they really lost that much revenue. But I would just say, I love all this sort of stuff. I watch a lot YouTube and social media and luxury travel and this sort of stuff. I watch these guys who do these, like, Michelin star reviews and all this stuff.

21:54Sarah Kopit: And Will saying, yeah, that video got me. The video trashing. He's saying the video trashing Four Seasons yacht got millions of views. Let me tell you something. I didn't see it once. I didn't even hear about it. I didn't have friends. I heard nothing about it. And yet the one time that Amon bars him, somehow it's everywhere. It's in the Wall Street Journal. I think it's a real lesson in this sort of thing where it's like, yeah, he can leave a bad review. Yeah, maybe it impacts our launch. Maybe there's an issue on the revenue ramp. By the way, if you work for Four Seasons and you want to give us the inside scoop on that revenue, whether it's true or not, I would love to hear it.

22:27Sarah Kopit: But the point is, as someone who considers themselves pretty plugged in to travel and luxury travel, both as a professional and as a social media scroller, I had never heard of this guy before. I had never read anything about it. I hadn't heard anything other than rave reviews about the Four Seasons yacht, which I had actually heard in person from people who had been on this Four Seasons yacht before. All I knew about it was great stuff. And the Amon, which wasn't even a bad review, it was just that I wasn't allowed to review, has gone so much more viral. I think that says something about the dynamics at play here.

23:02I think the calling the cops thing part is a big part of it too.

23:07Sarah Kopit: Which Amon denies that they called the cops, but who knows?

23:11Seth Borko: So I will say, going back to the playbook, which you all should watch, it'll be recorded and linked somewhere. you know when Lex and I I think on Ryan Walker's video I think the title of it was and I don't have it up here so you know whatever but it was like Amon called the cops on me or something like that and I had and when I was writing it I had put it somehow in my story using like his language and Lex my trusty managing editor was like we saw her saying she was going to call the police but we don't know if she actually like we actually called called them i'm like good point how about threatened true we saw it you know like so it's by the way we're saying how much we love creators this is a

23:59Sarah Kopit: great difference between institutional meeting creators the youtube the youtube video is called aman called the police on me i'm on varry called the police on me and the skiff news headline is called aman threatened to call the police on a creator and as we now know aman denies calling on the police you reached out to the the baja california police department for a comment you reached out to a mom for that while we are saying the power of creators what we're saying how important they are and what how great they can be it's also another great example of the difference between an actual institutional newsroom and a one man or one woman creator show and the checks and balances that although it feels subtle called the cops threatened to call the cops i would argue

24:40Seth Borko: really that salty matters yeah it matters a lot all right so let's talk about the state of travel which is awesome travel which is awesome let's talk about it yep it's awesome i just love it so much uh this year uh bea are did bea lead the creative on this yes she did and it shows it's

25:00Sarah Kopit: absolutely amazing let's let's pull it up let's look at this cover so bea did such a good job she

25:06Seth Borko: always does like I mean our whole creative team is just a bang up group but this year she really outdid herself so one of my favorite things to do is like it's almost like like as a as a storyteller I consider myself a storyteller Seth the more serious the topic the more whimsical I think you can get with the creative assuming it's appropriate of course right so like you know I'm I am not saying that the facts, figures, and charts in the state of travel are dry. I'm not.

25:39Sarah Kopit: No, of course.

25:40Seth Borko: But they are very, you know, business first. Like, they're all business, Seth. And to give a little bit of oomph in the creative presentation is just delightful. It is delightful. What was your, so the state of travel, like, well, first of all, let's talk a little bit about how it's different this year. You went with a bit of a different framework. So just talk, talk, talk our listeners a little bit through that.

26:06Sarah Kopit: Yeah. So the traditional way we would do the state of travel is basically just go sector by sector. So we'd say like, what's happening in airlines, in hotels, in short term rentals, in, you know, keep going, list them all. And that was great. I mean, it was comprehensive. We would always find someone with like a specific sector who would be like, well, how come the submarine tourism sector isn't covered in state of travel? And you'd be like, well, that's amazing. Well, I don't know if that's its own sector. I don't know if that counts. But anyways, I digress. A small pet peeve of mine. But we would go sector by sector by sector.

26:41Sarah Kopit: This year, we are trying to do something different. And we're trying to introduce frameworks. We've actually got a new framework that we launched this year. And we're calling it the Travel Stack. So I think of it like tech. We have a development stack where you have various different tools and components that all stack on top of each other to create a working piece of software. Well, it's the same idea in travel, that there are layers to the travel industry that all stack on top of each other and build on top of each other. We start with the consumers, then we have a commerce stack, then we have operations, and finally we have experiences.

27:21Sarah Kopit: And I think it's a fun way to think about it. There are some companies, just like in the coding world, there are some companies that are full stack companies that have to deal with everything from the consumers to the commerce to the operations experience there are some that are specialists just like you would have a back-end developer or a front-end developer there are probably front-end travel companies that are focused on consumers and commerce and there are back-end travel organizations many of them in like the destination space that are strictly focused on the experience but at any rate the way that we cover the industry i think this is a very comprehensive way of thinking about the industry consumers and it also goes back to this very classic uh newsroom like uh who what how why where when but i cut where and when but like consumers who is traveling commerce how do they book operations what is being offered and experiences which is the why why do you travel in the first place and so for each of these different layers of the travel stack, we then go ahead and we have a bunch of slides and we ask the questions, what makes up the travel consumer?

28:31Sarah Kopit: You know, we broke it down in this case, travel consumer into demographics, you know, and psychographics, demographics, psychographics, economics, and markets. So there's the descriptive information about them. How old are they? You know, gender, age, those sorts of things. And there's the psychographics. How do they think? How do they behave? And there's the economics. How much money do they have? And there's the markets. Where do they live and where do they want to go? And within each of these, we try and identify what's changing, what's the strategic implication of what is changing, and then what decisions do you need to make to stay on top of this, right?

29:08Sarah Kopit: And so within, you know, state of travel consumers, now we have demographics. What's changing? Well, Gen Z is entering the workforce. we've talked a lot about Gen Z. Millennials, they're becoming parents. Boomers and Gen X, even Gen X are retiring. Many boomers are already retired. It's actually the Gen Xs who are starting to retire. The population in general is aging. So your customer base is changing on the psychographics front, experiences over things, live tourism, shorter attention spans, anxiety and loneliness, mental health and wellness. What does all these things that are changing mean?

29:43Sarah Kopit: And then what's the decisions you have. So the strategic implications is your customer base is changing. They are different types of people. They are getting older. They have different priorities. They want different experiences than what you've offered in the past. And the decision you need to ask yourself is, should you be developing new products? Should you chase a decline market? If you have a product that is great for boomers, do you chase that market, which will inevitably be declining? Or do you need to reinvent yourself? How do you measure your relevancy? And how do you decide what KPIs and metrics and what part of that consumer segment you want to go across and build against.

30:17Sarah Kopit: But the North Star for all consumers at all times is really remaining relevant to a fast changing audience. I just walked you through the consumer framework, but we have that similar framework, breaking down each of these layers into its components, identifying what's changing, the decisions you need to make, and the North Star that's going to always remain true. backed up. Each of these gets them backed up with charts. So then our charts speak to demographics, our charts speak to psychographics, our charts speak to economics and markets, and so on and so forth at the commerce layer, at the operations level, and at the experiences layer.

30:50Sarah Kopit: That's how we've organized it this year. I think it's a much more holistic and storytelling way. So you said storytellers, it's a much more holistic way of thinking about the state of travel. I think it's a much stronger framework as opposed to just, well, let's just take a stroll down sector lane and see what's happening in airline world and what's happening in hotel world

31:11Seth Borko: so did do you have a favorite slide like a favorite chart or a fate or a favorite like

31:16Sarah Kopit: data point yes i mean i do i have a i have a couple of favorites let's see what we can pull some up i this one this one's a favorite of mine i've shown this one before uh we'll pull up the slide right now as I'm sharing my screen. It's about travel as a lifestyle priority. We asked about travelers, how important is travel to over a lifestyle? And the percentage of travelers who answered extremely or very important. Almost two thirds of all global consumers said that travel is extremely or very important to their lifestyle. But what's interesting about this chart is that we have, I think, almost 11 different countries.

31:55Sarah Kopit: We have Morocco, Saudi Arabia, UAE, China, India, Japan, France, Germany, Spain, UK, and the US. We asked basically the same question to all these different markets. Let me tell you something. There are very few things that the US, Spain, and Saudi Arabia all have in common, and India all have in common. But travel is one of those. That's one of my favorite slides.

32:18Seth Borko: Is this the same slide as the one that we talked that we talked about a lot from last year are the same set of metrics. Yeah, it's the same set of metrics. Was there a divergence between last year and this year?

32:33Sarah Kopit: No. I mean, if anything got stronger. Yeah. What's interesting, this is a different question about resources and budgeting, is do we waste money asking the same question when we already know the answer? I don't know. Or is it useful?

32:48Seth Borko: That was my first question, is like what is directionally how are we you know how's the industry moving that's what i was trying

32:56Sarah Kopit: to you know to get at yeah the ultimate answer we came up with is it's worth spending the money to ask the same question twice because we get that time series directionality and that confidence that this remains strong another one i really like is um is this one here uh travel comfort with booking channels direct with supplier the most comfortable ai chatbot the least comfortable and some really interesting things in between. Like people telling us that they're more comfortable with loyalty portals like Chase and Amex than they are with online travel agencies. That's crazy.

33:30Seth Borko: That doesn't surprise me.

33:32Sarah Kopit: It shocks me.

33:33Seth Borko: It doesn't surprise me at all.

33:34Sarah Kopit: Really?

33:35Seth Borko: Nope. Just because like I, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, OTAs. Like I don't use you because I always just book direct just because if something goes wrong or I have to change it. That's what I always do. But I think that, I guess that level of protection, because your credit card is the next place that you go to for protection. I would kind of think just naturally, even though I don't typically use them either. But OTAs, I think, have a very poor reputation. When it works great, it works great. But when there's a problem, I think OTAs, it's a challenge. and I don't think the OTAs would be surprised to hear me say that either.

34:24Seth Borko: So it doesn't, so I don't know. So that doesn't shock me all that.

34:27Sarah Kopit: I guess maybe I'm calling, I do use online travel agencies to book. By the way, I think there are some that have some real customer, I mean, yeah, customer service is a general weakness among them, but if you think of, there's some online travel agencies that have a huge amount of trust. You know, I mean, well, whatever. I was surprised to see that. another one I liked if I can show you a couple more I just like the matrix with the green talkers

34:55Seth Borko: the green that that the green talkers was my favorite part of the whole I thought it was funny

35:00Sarah Kopit: which one is that where was that so I have to find it yeah it's it's it's like it's very similar to

35:08Seth Borko: the matrix the travel matrix that that I did I just I just I don't know my brain my brain somehow I don't know how things in Matrix is. I just, it's a really, like, cool, it's a fun way for my brain to think about things. I love a good Matrix. Yeah, and so... Love a good Matrix.

35:25Sarah Kopit: Let's pull this one up. I've got it. I've got it now.

35:28Seth Borko: Okay. The green talkers, I chuckled. But it all, this, so this chart, I loved this one. This was my favorite. And so it's basically, it's like greenwashing, but people who, you know, talk a good game who, but just don't actually...

35:43Sarah Kopit: Varsha and Sonia came up with that. So kudos to them. We looked at, and this is when we talked, so this is under our experiences layer. It was the fourth layer. And we said, you know, what are the components of experiences? I think we put status as one of them in terms of what is considered a high status or a low status experience when Google actually want to get. We talked about infrastructure and actual accessibility. You know, there's been, we you've reported on this, Sarah, like Greenland and infrastructure and open up new airports, you know, making those experiences accessible. And the final thing we talked about with experiences was, of course, over tourism and sustainability and how those things are coming together.

36:23Sarah Kopit: This was a slide in this section. We're talking about sustainability over tourism. And yeah, this is from our survey data. This is a really fun one. We always collect psychographic information about our travelers. And so we ask

36:35Seth Borko: readers, just give them, give us, give our listeners a bit of a definition of what that

36:40Sarah Kopit: means what is psychographic okay so a psych okay so a psychographic is a demographic for how you think so a demographic is something that's pretty like physical or observable about you so it could be um age it could be race it could be gender it could be your zip code it could be your income um so it's the more outward facing observable measurable traits about who you are how much money do you make? Where do you live? What do you look like? How old are you? Did you go to college or not? You're used to a lot of other standard demographics. A psychographic is about asking about your personality.

37:20Sarah Kopit: How do you think? What do you value? What do you find interesting? What do you aspire to? What do you want to get out of this? So these are things that are more internal to the person. They're a little less external, but they're also really interesting things to still measure people on. So, you know, a simple example would be, you know, asking people how they feel about interacting with others and then imputing something about introverted or extroverted. And instead of doing a crosstab where we say high income travelers do X and low income travelers do Y, you'd want to say a psychographic would be extroverted travelers do Y and introverted travelers do, you know, X.

37:58Sarah Kopit: So it's the same idea of slicing people and consumers by higher characteristics and traits, but a demographic is a more observable trait and a psychographic is a more a trait that exists in your head. Does that make sense?

38:12Seth Borko: It totally does. I would say more interesting. More interesting. It's more interesting. Yeah.

38:18Sarah Kopit: So we ask people about to basically agree or disagree with or rate a couple of statements about the types of trips that they enjoy, the things they find most interesting, the statements whether they would agree with or disagree with. And we use that to group them into psychographics. So let's pull this slide back up and you'll see, and I'll talk to it for our audio only listeners. We've got a bunch of bubbles here and the bubbles include a mix of actually psychographics and demographics. So we have solo travelers who are people who are self-reported taking a trip by themselves, but we have also spontaneous travelers, people who agreed with a statement.

38:54Sarah Kopit: I don't know the exact statement. I don't have what's on my head, but it's something along the lines of like, I don't like making a plan. I like playing it by ear when I'm in a destination. Will you become a spontaneous traveler, right? We have cultural travelers, people who agree with a statement like the most important reason why I travel is to understand and learn about other, right? Like budget travelers, I care a lot about how much money I spend on a trip. A budget traveler is not the same thing as a high income traveler. You can be high income and have a budget mindset, right? So what we did was we looked at a bunch of these traveler styles and traveler profiles and we asked them about their intent to pay for sustainability do you intend when you take your next trip will you um pay more for a green option then you know later on we said by the way on your most recent trip and it's a long story people forget they're not internally consistent he said by the way um have you actually ever paid more than 100 bucks for a green thing while you travel and turns out you would expect those things should be perfectly correlated they generally are but turns out they're not exactly the same and so we created this framework of people who when we asked it's trying to measure this say do gap in sustainability when we asked them hey do you actually want to um pay more for sustainability um versus you actually there were very few people uh mostly family travelers who actually said my intent is not really sustainability but actually who had wound up paying more when push came to shove we call those quiet buyers there were sustainability champions people who both reported high intent and had actually ponied up and put up some money which is exactly what you would theoretically expect the people in that category were ironically well interestingly not ironically interestingly cruisers um eco-conscious makes sense luxury they got the money to spend leisure travelers.

40:48Sarah Kopit: We had what we called the tough crowd, who are people who both said they do not intend to pay for sustainability and in fact did not pay for sustainability. Budget travelers, solo travelers, spontaneous travelers also kind of make sense. And then we had the category that you said you really liked, which was the green talkers, who are the people who told us that they absolutely intended to pay more for sustainability. And then when asked later on in the same survey, had you actually paid 100 bucks or more for sustainability, told us, well, not really and that was cultural travelers adventure travelers and wellness travelers and so we put this together it's very it's very rich you know yeah i don't know i just i like a vision like

41:33Seth Borko: popped into my head of who a green talk like what a green talker looks like like i see it very clearly in my mind. Yeah.

41:43Sarah Kopit: Yeah. I, yeah. So, well, anyways, that's a great one. And thank you for highlighting that one that maybe would not have been my favorites, but it's a great one. And it gives you an example. These are the kind of charts that are in this report. We try and put a lot of thought into it. And it's 160 slides. And almost every single one of these slides has some layer, like this is a single slide. We just spent 10 minutes talking about one slide. I got 160 of them. organized into this really interesting framework that I think collectively speaks to the full travel framework experience booking cycle.

42:20Sarah Kopit: I think anyone would find it useful no matter where you sit in travel. And yes, we actually did include some sector by sector stuff at the end, too. So if you really just want our old school sector stuff, we put that in there, too. So my favorite report of the year, it is is free to download. You do have to give us your email information and you should expect that we will reach out to you and ask you to hey if you love this maybe you should consider being a research subscriber it is probably the single best opportunity for you to try before you buy skiff research so i encourage you if you hear me on this podcast every week talking about our research or research or research and you're like i don't i don't know what he's talking about i don't ever see it what is this isn't it expensive isn't i mean it's a little expensive i gotta eat but this is your first this is your this is your best chance to really get a look at what the actual in-depth data-driven research capabilities of Skift are.

43:15Sarah Kopit: And if you find it useful, if you find it helpful, if you find it interesting, if you find this podcast interesting, we don't do this. We do love travel. We don't do this out of the goodness of our hearts. We got to put food on the table somehow.

43:27Seth Borko: We got to pay those bills.

43:28Sarah Kopit: And if you find it interesting, consider becoming a subscriber or at least reach out so we can talk about it more and help you think through the costs and benefits. That's my spiel. That's what I got. All right. The webpage. Can I give you a URL?

43:43Seth Borko: Absolutely.

43:45Sarah Kopit: It is skift.com forward slash insights forward slash state hyphen of hyphen travel. So it's state of travel separated by hyphens. skiff.com forward slash insight forward slash state of travel hyphenated um or just search skiff state of travel we do pretty good with our seo hopefully we're doing good with our geo as well and it will uh it will show up or if you're watching on youtube hopefully maybe there's going to be a link in the description if you're watching somewhere else maybe there's gonna be a description somewhere i'm not a good creator i'm not a luxury creator just yet i don't know how it

44:24Seth Borko: works but you can find us yeah you can just send us an email too you know what else was kind of fun this week and i know we're running very long on time but remember when we talked about the black toilet seat yes i do at the hotel that i went to in san francisco well either great minds think alike between that experience and the new york times wire cutter i believe the headline was something like change your life change your toilet seat and it was proposing everyone get a black toilet seat and you know what i did i actually bought it that day it's downstairs in my building

45:03Sarah Kopit: right now i'm going to install it let's go tonight go so excited love it taking the initiative

45:09Seth Borko: changing your life one one small purchase of time i've i've only got one bathroom here in brooklyn people you know it is what it is okay shall we do winners and losers this week i i think i'm gonna do the loser my loser is a mon clearly i have to go read this statement clearly we've already talked about it but do you have a winner other than just your entire research team the

45:33Sarah Kopit: entire research team is a winner and it's not really me it's actually everyone else but me on the research team who really made it happen um my other winner outside of this world of state of travel is all of our aspiring astronomers over in Europe. We're experiencing the eclipse today.

45:49Seth Borko: You know, did you get the alert from New York city about the eclipse?

45:54Sarah Kopit: No, I didn't.

45:55Seth Borko: I was, I was shocked. So yeah. So there's going to be a total eclipse, a full totality in Spain and Iceland. I think it's probably going on like right now or it's going to move.

46:08Sarah Kopit: Yeah. I mean, soon. Yeah.

46:09Seth Borko: Yeah. Yeah. And so, although I think it would have been maybe a little bit over because it was supposed to be during daylight hours. Obviously, it's kind of late there now. But anyway, yeah, so they got they got the same thing we did a couple of years ago. But yeah, I was just really surprised that I got an eclipse alert from New York City today.

46:29Sarah Kopit: And I've had a lot of I mean, and the other winner. So the winner is obviously eclipse lovers, astronomers. The winner is also short-term rental hosts and owners along the Eclipse path. As we reported for the U.S., the path is somewhat random. And if you have a hotel in the path of the Eclipse, good for you. That's really exciting. But because it sometimes passes through rural areas, it's a particularly strong opportunity for short-term rentals who are in these weirder, nichier markets where there just happens to be a full eclipse, a totality, I think they call it. Yep. and uh and the final winner on top of it all the final one on top of it all is sarah copet and the skiff news team who have been covering this story for i think almost two years now and yes all my friends all my friends sent me articles saying have you seen this thing about eclipse tourism and i said have i seen it i knew about it yeah my co-host reported it first

47:28Seth Borko: I just I loved our eclipse a couple of years ago I hope we have another one but we're not having another one for like I don't know not in my lifetime but I digress shall we shall we not talk about my impending death let us let us just say goodbye let us just say goodbye everyone I'm gonna go downstairs get my toilet seat and enjoy and enjoy the news and the eclipse

47:53Sarah Kopit: and check out the state of travel. I would really appreciate it. And I would love your feedback. Specifically, if you're a podcast listener and maybe you haven't seen this before, I would love to know what you think about it. Your feedback will genuinely influence the next edition. Let me know. Thanks, everyone.

48:10Seth Borko: Awesome. See you next week.

48:11Sarah Kopit: Bye.