PERTH, Australia — The term “normalization” has increasingly been used to describe the slowdown of travel growth from the highs the industry experienced as the pandemic began to ebb.
And while several members of the travel industry on stage at the World Travel & Tourism Council’s Global Summit took note of travel’s pullback, others said it was still going gangbusters — and growing.
Greg O’Hara, founder and a senior managing director of Certares and chair of the WTTC, was among the industry leaders who said travel growth had normalized, albeit to a still-enviable level.
“That growth could never keep pace,” O’Hara said of the boom. “There aren’t even enough hotel rooms and plane slots to keep that growth going. It’s been normalized to what most industries would consider an enviable level.”
He added, “In 2024, our sector is forecast to be 10% of the global economy and employ one in 10 people on Earth.”
When the panel moderator, Travel Weekly editor in chief Arnie Weissmann, said the most common expression he’d heard during quarterly earnings calls this year was that “travel companies had normalized,” Audrey Hendley, president of American Express Travel, said that she didn’t think travel had “slowed down, per se.”
For example, she said that the American Express Hotel Collection had to add 300 properties this year alone, “which is many more than we would add in any given year just based on sheer demand and changes in customer behaviors.
“I think what’s happened is we’ve all probably slotted into a lane, and we figured out how to best serve our individual customers,” she said. “For us, it’s trying to understand the newer customers: Our fastest-growing segments are millennials and Gen Zers, and that has been the case over the last few years. And that kind of pushed us into a new space.”
During the same panel, James Thornton, CEO of Intrepid Travel, also suggested that business growth has yet to start slowing.
He said many travelers value Intrepid’s focus on sustainability, and that it has been a factor in Intrepid’s record-setting revenue coming out of the pandemic.
“We’re in a very, very lucky space in that people want experiences, and they seem to want to buy from companies that are truly sustainable,” he said. “So we’re trying to work really, really hard with our partners on having a limited impact on the environment and also trying to benefit the local communities. If you’ve got that approach, then I think the runway to growth is really significant, and that’s what we’re experiencing.”
During a presentation on worldwide travel demand, ForwardKeys director of intelligence and marketing Olivier Ponti said that while growth in the U.S. is slowing, it’s still very strong and “fueling travel demand across the world.”
“It is not indefinite, but the U.S. market is so big that we think that this demand will remain sustained,” he said.
But it has tempered.
“It’s slowing down,” he said. “Yes, it’s still growing, but it’s not the same level of growth that we could see in the early stages of post-Covid travel.”
Ponti said that even the upcoming U.S. election had not produced any notable travel blips from the U.S.
“The U.S. has been in growth mode for a while now,” he said. “If you are betting on the U.S. and Canadian market, it’s going to pay off.”
