Welcome to Travel Again presents the weekly travel Roundup, covering the headwinds and tailwinds impacting the business of travel. Please welcome our hosts, Mike McCormick and Ed Silver. Hello Mike, nice to see you as always. Good to see you, Ed. Welcome to episode four of season 2. I can’t believe it; we are just chewing through these episodes this season. The podcast is on fire. We’re back again this week. While things in Western North Carolina are not back to normal, Mike, we continue to press on with the business of our podcast and our advisory work. I am, as you can see, at a different Airbnb this week until we get services turned back on at our home in Asheville.
Our continued wishes and support go out to everybody that’s been affected. We continue to ask everyone to donate to the Red Cross if they can and do whatever you can to help support everyone. Clearly the devastation will take a long time to recover from, but every day is progress. Hopefully we can begin the long road to recovery. What we can do as a family right now, what is best for Asheville, is for us to stay away so that we’re not a burden on the resources there. FEMA is there, there’s National Guard there, everybody’s there helping out. But if you can donate to the Red Cross, please consider doing that and thank you.
Okay Mike, let’s get rolling with episode four. Onto the news. I chose a bunch of airline articles and one surprise for you this week just to keep things spicy and it goes well with our upcoming guest. The first article is about Spirit Airlines. Spirit Airlines explores bankruptcy filings. They’ve been in discussions with bond holders over the terms of a potential bankruptcy filing in the wake of its failed merger with JetBlue Airlines, according to people familiar with the matter. This article is from The Wall Street Journal. We talked about this on an episode with Brett Snyder of the Cranky Flyer. This happened after that episode, so what do we take away from this?
Clearly the financial health of Spirit is a concern. They have a huge debt load and the stock price has plummeted another 40%. It’s down to a buck sixty something. This is not great news for the airline. I go back to the failed merger. When the merger between JetBlue and Spirit was in play and essentially not happening, it really felt that those situations should be encouraged. We need more competition, but we need healthy competition with enough scale to survive. Here is another situation where it didn’t move forward and it’s just kind of frustrating because we say we need more competition, yet the environment and the government should be trying to support those combinations. Look at Alaska Hawaiian; that is being viewed very positively. Why not here? It puzzles me. Now Spirit is going to be in a tough situation. The fact that it leaked out that they’re investigating this or having the conversations further hurts their financial position. It’s not good for the industry. I had family members call and ask if they should cancel flights they’ve got on Spirit or if they should not book on Spirit. That’s what happens when these things leak out. Obviously if it’s Chapter 11 they’ll reorganize and who knows what’ll happen, but it further impacts their ability to stay viable.
Article two: we have talked a lot about American Airlines on this podcast, but this article says American rebuilds sales staff, trying to win back agencies and corporates. American Airlines is fighting to regain corporate and travel agency generated market share and has reestablished its Global sales division. The carrier will also resume a popular corporate perk on October 10th and said it has extended an incentive program for NDC enabled sales through the end of the year. We have talked to former American Airlines sales staff on this podcast and they’re no longer former.
Jim Carter, who was part of season one when the news broke about American’s change in direction and the victory for ASTA, has been hired back as an adviser to the process. Hank Benedetti, who’s another key executive there, went on and is now in a position with Foxy. But you look at that and go, what a shame. The costs are tremendous. The cost of rebuilding this whole sales team, the cost of losing customers and having to win them back is a tough road to go down. This is a cautionary tale of what happens when you lose sight of who your customers are and the value that was being brought by your partners. Change is good; we all need to move ahead, new technology needs to be adapted, and new ways of retailing are important. But it’s also the way you do it and how you bring the industry along with you. Time and time again, it’s shown in our industry that the best thing you can do is think in those terms: how do I bring everyone along with me? How do I bring customers and agencies along? How do I get everybody on board? We respond well to that as an industry. Using all stick and no carrot never has played out well.
A previous guest on our podcast said that agencies shouldn’t be so quick to return and hug American Airlines at this stage. Everybody has to get back to business, but American seems to be paying the price for what they did here. They certainly are. But again, they will recover, and years from now you’ll look back and they’ll have a reconstituted sales team and be back in business. Along the way, things will be changing as we go, and we’re going to talk about that with our special guest today too.
Article three is a twist for you today. Carnival Corporation continues a streak of record revenue. The CEO of the world’s largest cruise company has gotten creative in describing his company’s financial victories. Josh Weinstein told investors in March that the company knocked the cover off the ball with record revenue, booking volumes, and a 30% year-over-year increase in new cruisers in Q1. The company was hitting on all cylinders in Q2, breaking records for revenue, operating income, and booking levels. We don’t cover the cruise industry much, but I love the baseball reference.
Clearly cruise is back and even stronger than ever. Record bookings and record revenues. Carnival is one of the major groups that has a number of brands under their portfolio. This is clearly an indicator of the health of the industry. You talk about an industry that through the pandemic was so hard hit and took much longer to come back because of the health-related issues. Getting a cruise healthy and COVID-safe again was a harder task than for an airplane or a hotel. Now that they’ve recovered, cruisers are back and stronger than ever. In the meantime, they’ve been making investments in products like private islands and additional things that are part of their product set that are helping to even increase cruise adoption overall. Here is a part of the industry that is healthy and booming, and the outlook is really strong.
Speaking of baseball references, the Phillies took game two last night. Our guest has connections to Boston and Chicago. I think we need to figure out what team she roots for when she comes on. I think that’s a requirement for any future guest coming on our podcast; they really have to adopt the Phillies as their team. I don’t see how we go any other way. Maybe we should start sending Phillies caps out to our guests that they have to wear on the podcast. It might reduce the number of guests we can get, but who knows.
I have one more article related to her: the FAA ceases increased oversight of United Airlines. The FAA has given United’s safety processes an all-clear. The federal agency had dispatched extra staffers to United facilities in March to review the carrier’s safety procedures, a move that followed a string of original United mishaps. But they seem to be back in the right direction now. With our guest today, that’s one of the topics we’ll certainly cover: learnings from all of that. This is a very positive tailwind for them and certainly for the industry. We always want healthy operations, which are fundamental to the travel experience. It is great to see that happen and hopefully we return to some normalcy there. Across the board, especially on the Boeing-related issues, we need those to be in the rearview mirror. Good for United and glad to see that for sure.
That is all for the news today. We will be right back with our guest. Thanks to our sponsor safe travel RX, an app that takes the worry off your itinerary, providing travel peace of mind with emergency response components, travel security, and risk management, especially for those traveling internationally. It includes 24/7 global concierge assistance. Landed in the hospital in China? Forgot your prescription? Wallet stolen? Safe travel RX is your prescription for better, safer travel. Download it today to discover the power of safe travel RX and reach out to them if you have interest in offering this tool to your travelers to provide them with the duty of care you are required to provide. Safe travel RX: your prescription for better travel.
One note before we do that on safe travel RX. An old boss of ours used to always say, “control the controllables.” That’s a perfect example from a user product where you control the controllable. You can’t control what’s happening out there in the world, but you can certainly do some things to prepare yourself before you are out there traveling and do it safely. Build some security, not just for the company you work for, but obviously for your family and friends in these times. Those are the things that you can do in this environment. Sam Katz always said that to us; it was wise business advice. I have attempted to use that with my wife every now and then, and it doesn’t work as well in that environment. It is not great for personal adaptation.
Our guest today is Doreen Burse, Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales at United Airlines. In this role, she oversees the global sales strategy, enhancing existing business travel programs and building new partnerships to improve the United for Business customer and partner experience. Prior to joining United, Doreen worked for 30 years in the hospitality industry. Most recently, she led a team who served over 1,300 corporate, association, and meeting agency intermediary partners as VP of US and Canada Global Sales at Marriott. Doreen is a well-known figure in the travel industry. Currently she’s on the airline editorial board for Smart Meetings magazine, the Business Travel News board, and the Allied Leadership Council for the GBTA. She’s a Chairwoman’s Circle member and board member of US Travel, as well as a board member for Choose Chicago.
Doreen, welcome to the podcast. It’s so great to be here. Listening to you do my bio makes me wonder if I ever sleep. It doesn’t sound like it! It’s great to be a part of this. Ed, glad to hear that you’re safe. So many people were impacted by the hurricane and hearts really go out to all of them. United has donated over $125,000 in cash and about 500,000 miles towards relief efforts with multiple matching donation offerings still out there. I just want to acknowledge that and I am glad we could still do this today. Thank you Doreen, I appreciate the good wishes and thank you to United and many airline partners who have offered to do matching and donations of miles. This is fantastic for United to do.
When people start looking at your bio and see these many years in hotels, it doesn’t feel that long. You had this successful career in the hotel industry and then you made the leap over to the airline industry. This is a big change, certainly in the travel industry, but a very different business in so many ways. What did you find when you landed there? Were there surprises? What was different and what was the same? Do you feel like principles are the same and do they apply in the airline industry? What made you make that jump?
I’ve been asked this question many times over the last three or so years. It was a little bit of surprise to folks that I made the move. I literally started at Marriott when I was in high school at 16 at the Howard Johnson’s on the Massachusetts Turnpike because it was their travel plaza division. As long as you didn’t leave for more than 90 days, you were able to maintain your tenure. So for those of you doing the mental math, I am not that old yet. I just was always willing. As I get older, I’d say: where’s the role, what do you have to do? I could do that. I moved to three cities where I didn’t know anyone.
Interestingly, I’d gone through, like many of us, managing through COVID at Marriott. I had to furlough 50% of my team. Ultimately we job-eliminated 30% of those. There were a lot of voluntary packages taken. I kind of pulled everything back together and was covering four different divisions and then United called. I was already loyal to United; I was 1K. I used to say I’m 1K the hard way because I mostly travel domestic. We were already talking about United and quoting Scott Kirby. We knew United was betting on travel coming back and I really love what they stood for. They weren’t forced-retiring planes or pilots. I actually had someone on my team deployed on United, so we really understood the airline fairly well. I wanted to be a part of that. I thought travel is going to come back and it may look and act different, but it was a global role and it was with an airline that myself and my family actually really loved.
What’s interesting is what’s the same. When they hired me, clearly I wasn’t the airline expert. But I had decades-long relationships with 70% of the clients, which are the same that we call on at United. This is a relationship business. You still have to do great deals, but fundamentally, if you understand what your client’s goals are, then you’re not really selling; you’re offering up solutions. To me, that part was very similar and the transition with another strong sales team was fairly seamless.
What surprised me is I didn’t expect the culture would be bad, but I didn’t anticipate just how strong it would be. I came from a company that I still adore to this day. The culture at United is really that those closest to the customer should have the loudest voice. That doesn’t always necessarily mean sales; it could be the frontline, it could be gate agents. The empowerment of doing the right thing is something that they really live here at United. That was a pleasant surprise.
The biggest difference to me is the decision-making process. I always say to folks: if you want to be a political science major, go work for a large lodging brand. When I left Marriott, they had 8,500 hotels and you just didn’t implement a strategy or an incentive. You had to get the owner advisory council on board and the franchise advisory council on board and then you went to the regional teams. It doesn’t make it wrong; I just didn’t realize how much of that I did until I got to United. I kept saying: okay, who else has to sign off on that? And they’d say: you. My team at United probably disagrees that it’s as quick as it is, but we own our assets and we still collaborate across multiple divisions. It’s just a quicker process because in the lodging industry you’re a management company and franchisor. You don’t own your assets and you have a fiduciary responsibility to the owners and franchisees that are a critical part of that business.
That makes sense. What’s interesting is that I also think the airline industry can learn about marketing and merchandising from some of the other sectors who’ve had to do that and have done that more effectively. It’s kind of that crossroads we’re at now with some of the ways that airlines are looking to really make big investments in how to sell and merchandise their product in a modern retailing fashion. You’re at the epicenter of all that feedback. You’re talking to individual customers, corporations, and agencies. All that feedback comes into you. Sitting here today, what are they saying that they want from United or from the airlines that they’re not getting today?
What people generally ask for is transparency and relevant updates. I chuckle a little bit; the number one thing that people ask for that they wish airlines would do is offer free reliable Wi-Fi, which of course we’re addressing with the Starlink announcement. Ed, I gotta interrupt. Starlink? Does that make you happy? It was on my question list. I personally think Starlink is one of the top technologies of the next three to five years. I’ve heard such amazing things. Putting it on planes is just genius. The previous products stunk; many of them just did not work. Was that something customers were begging for?
It was definitely high at the top of the list. Our Chief Customer officer talks about this a lot. She’s been asked and she has been telling folks we’ve been working on it and finally we’ve been able to announce it. When you have the current systems, the Wi-Fi options on the planes that we have today which were best-in-class when we rolled them out, you can’t have everyone dial in or connect without impacting the quality of the connection. One of the things we’re really excited about with Starlink is that this is addressed. There was a lot of testing done where you literally can be FaceTiming with your family and on a Teams call and doing other things at the same time. This puts us in a unique position. As our United Next order brings all these new aircraft on board, they’ll be retrofitted with the new Starlink product. We’re going to start doing that in the first half of 2025. We’ll probably start with our United Express aircraft first and then really ramp that up as we’re bringing new aircraft on board. I think we think it’s the least interesting thing, but it’s the thing that we’ve heard the most about: not only is it fast and reliable, but it’s free. I still get questions like: will it be free if I’m in the economy class? Yes, it’s free for everyone. We’re excited for it to get launched in the first part of 2025.
As a technologist, congrats on that and the deal. I think it’s something customers have been clamoring for. Well done. It’s really well received so far. The other question you asked me was what are folks asking for more of. Obviously everybody wants us to put dots on the map; they want more destinations that they can fly to. We try to look at where we are serving and what destinations we are serving. If we don’t serve it direct, generally we’re probably serving it non-stop. I think we’ve got almost 375 destinations. About two-thirds of that is domestic versus international. With 4,500 flights a day in 200 countries, you’d think there wouldn’t be a lot of requests. But the fact of the matter is there are a lot of great places that people want to travel to. We’re lucky we have our Star Alliance network. You literally can get almost anywhere around the world. When you think about the 25 airlines that make up Star Alliance serving over 50 global hubs and almost 1,300 airports and 19,000 daily flights, there aren’t very many places that folks can’t get to. But the top things I hear about are free reliable Wi-Fi and folks wanting to get to destinations for business or family.
Along those lines, in terms of industry changes, two areas come up all the time. One is dynamic offers and dynamic pricing, and the other is the dreaded NDC term. American had all the headlines in terms of their 180 in their approach to the market. It seems to have quieted down a bit now as everybody is in the modes of just adapting and working through. Where is United today with dynamic pricing and dynamic offers? Do you see this having a big impact? My own commentary is that I don’t think the customer has really seen anything yet as a result. There’s been a lot of investment and industry angst, but very little in terms of any real benefit or change for the customer has trickled out. Where do we sit today from your perspective?
Depending on what you’re speaking about, I think terms get used interchangeably. United has a very clear distribution strategy and NDC is a part of that. Fundamentally, the thing that doesn’t change is we are responsible for putting together strong commercial offers that are competitive in the marketplace. We should be communicating how our clients, whether they are corporate travel buyers, agency partners, tour operators, or wholesalers, can access content that’s available to them. It probably makes sense to start with our overriding distribution strategy first. When you talk about dynamic pricing, I think what you’re talking about is continuous pricing. With my hotel background, dynamic pricing means something else.
Fundamentally, the first tenant of our distribution strategy is we’re going to make content available where our customer wants to receive it from us. The only exception to that is basic economy, which we removed from GDS Edifact for US and short-haul Latin. But basically wherever folks want to receive content, that content is going to be available. The only limitation is that channel’s ability to consume and display it. Overall we fundamentally support omnichannel buying, which is basically making it available in all the channels where people want to get it from.
The second tenant is we are really focused in aligning our economics across the channels based on the value they deliver to us and our clients. That’s just about doing the right deals with the right incentives and the right components to make sure that it makes sense for us and for our partners. Again, our shared clients can obtain their content from whichever channel they want to. I do hear a lot of folks say they’re channel agnostic. By that second tenant, we’re not channel agnostic. It’s about doing the right deals across the right channels based on that shared value.
The third tenant, which has remained unchanged, is we’re going to continue to invest in technology to go to market. We’re going to support modern retailing which includes NDC because we see it as where the industry is going. We have customer advisory boards—corporate customer advisory boards and travel agency councils—made up of thought leaders who are under non-disclosure. We will say: this is kind of what our roadmap looks like, here’s what we’re thinking. It’s a very iterative process. My competitor in Texas took a very specific approach to how they wanted to move forward. My competitor in the Southeast is waiting till everything is 100% in place. We’re in the middle somewhere where we’re just saying it’s not going to be perfect, but we’re going to continue to bring the voice of the customer into the airline and make sure that we can make it available.
When it comes to NDC, what that means is in direct relation to who’s asking about it and where they’re at on that journey and maybe the technology or lack thereof that they have implemented to support it. Regardless, we’re continuing to invest in that technology and it’s really about making content available where folks want to buy it from us. As it relates to continuous pricing, when I first joined, our revenue manager was talking about the fact that we saw a certain percent of sales increase. The first reaction was you’re charging us higher fares. What we had to clarify is no; if you go in between the fare class steps in the GDS, maybe K is 100 and L jumps up to 200, well maybe the marketplace is sitting at 150. Continuous pricing is about pricing where the market is. We’re actually selling the fare when before we didn’t even get sold; it went to somebody else who was more appropriately priced in the marketplace. A lot of the GDSs have caught up, so you have GDS NDC connections and the advantage to that is now you can see continuous pricing. We send it to all the channels—again, if not all the channels can consume and display it—but we do make it available. It’s about just being priced appropriately and all the attributes that go with that price still apply. That’s the way United manages that. We just want to be appropriately priced in the marketplace.
It makes sense. Conceptually and theoretically, there’s a good outcome. You’re unlocking value for the customer and for United within those stepped product offerings, making it much more dynamic and customized. I think one of the enablers coming is generative AI and the ability for the customer to really do something with it. They can cull through a number of diverse offers and really try to create something that is palatable as a traveler and really adds value. There is a solution there and I think the combination of those things may spark a lot of change. But again, right now it still feels like there’s not much change for the customer yet, but it’s definitely coming. Where are you in your progress in terms of use of AI in various forms? I’ve read about your initiative around better information back to customers about flight disruptions. That was welcomed; talk about a good use case. What’s on the horizon for United around AI?
Our approach is responsible AI. I’d say the biggest impact not just to United but probably the industry is going to be around efficiencies. We’re all doing more with fewer resources. That example, we call it “Every flight has a story.” Instead of a person having to figure out what they need to update in irregular operations because of weather or whatever, that AI can actually in a much shorter time frame communicate something that is not only accurate but timely and relevant. Most travelers or travel arrangers will say: the sooner I know the better I can actually make decisions about whether this impacts my travel or not. We’re using it for that reason.
We’re thinking about it from a communications perspective; think about training and having that training go out into different markets in different languages. We’re just spending a lot of time saying: how do we ensure that it’s responsible? What it does is it frees up our critical operations staff to allow them to do what they need to do to take care of the customer while taking these functions that can be managed appropriately and accurately by AI. I think we’re going to see more of it and we’re putting it through the appropriate protocols because we want to make sure that it’s being used appropriately. But by and large, we think efficiencies is going to be the number one impact at least for now.
It’ll be very interesting to watch in the coming 12 months or so as we get more rollout of features and capabilities from Apple, Google, Microsoft and others. We were just at a hospitality AI conference and the Microsoft leader on the panel said they moved from spending $10 billion a year in development and capital expenditure to $10 billion a quarter. You just think of the massive investment that’s going in that’s going to change the tools and capabilities on the front end of all this. It really can change the whole booking experience, which is exciting but a lot to consider certainly.
The use cases where you’re using it to intermediate and help with direct communications with customers are the obvious use cases and it sounds like you’re doing a great job with that. I’m still not convinced on the booking use cases; more to come there and maybe airlines can do something creative on that front. But a lot can be done on the customer interface side, which is great.
Switching gears a little bit competitively: we covered one of the news articles about Spirit Airlines and their woes, and certainly Southwest and their shareholder challenges have been well documented. There’s a lot going on in that LCC sector. Where does United kind of look at that competitively? Do you see the future of that whole segment? Any thoughts about that from an industry perspective?
My CEO is pretty vocal about his perspective on that. I think it starts with understanding United is a premium airline not because it’s the latest fad; it’s really core to who our passengers are, what the passenger demand is, our premium business hubs, and how we operate. What you’re seeing of course is given the success of our model, and there’s really in the US only three airlines that are thriving. In fact, if you look at the increase in demand over the last year, really it’s only gone to two or three airlines with us being one of them. Given the success of that model, it’s not a surprise that what you’re seeing is the low-cost carriers try to copy that model, whether it’s new cabins or seating charts or even expanded cabins. We’ve been at segmentation and the way we manage our seating and offerings for almost a decade. Attempting to copy that is not simple and it doesn’t happen overnight. It’s especially going to be a challenge for anyone that does not operate business at business center hubs.
Our segment strategy is not only robust, it’s complex. It’s a complex set of products that is also anchored in delivering excellent customer service. The LCC business model is built on simplicity, not complexity. With those business models, they’re really difficult to make complex without adding a lot of cost. Starting starting this week, all the earnings calls are starting up. Thursday starts with Delta Airlines and you’re going to hear a lot about this overall. One of the things that United did when we offered our basic economy fares at a competitive rate was we saw and believe customers will continue to always choose United over a low-cost carrier. That’s given the overall travel experience and the best-in-class product. All of those things remove friction from travel and then add in Mileage Plus and now Starlink and free Wi-Fi. I think it’s going to be a really difficult road ahead. I know a lot of the folks in those airlines; we’re all part of the same airline industry family. I don’t relish it, but I think it’s going to be pretty tough. The next quarter and watching those earnings is going to be pretty telling. We’ll see, but it’s not looking very optimistic.
United has had its own set of issues and crises and things to manage through as any airline does. So much of it was externally driven meaning Boeing, CrowdStrike, weather. CrowdStrike didn’t hit you like it hit Delta. Weather is of course unpredictable and variable and regional. Most of the time it’s how do you deal with these issues. What learnings have you had as an airline around handling crises?
Airline processes are really built on redundancy. It’s about not only having the right systems, but you have to have systems in place to take over should another system be down. When navigating the CrowdStrike outage, that was a great display of team effort. Despite the challenges, we were able to minimize the impact to both our customers and our normal operations fairly quickly because of that infrastructure and that redundancy that has been built in. We’ve learned things over the years just with weather and those kinds of things.
CrowdStrike and that outage actually was a good test of our robust safety and our continuity plans. We had things in place coming out of some of the weather events over the last couple of years and it really came to fruition. It’s a combination of multiple things, but the one thing I learned coming over to the airline industry is that those redundancies and those backup continuity systems directly impacted the way we manage not only CrowdStrike but also weather factors. The thing about the weather factors too is the best card that we at United have in our deck is the hub and spoke model. What that means is we could really section off one or two hubs that are experiencing bad weather without impacting the rest of our operations. Being able to contain the impact of a weather event in particular without downline aircraft dependencies is really a competitive advantage. It’s really about taking the learnings and making sure it’s part of the continuity plan. Those redundancies and that hub and spoke and containing our impact to those areas are really the greatest drivers of us being able to maintain operation and minimize impact particularly when things are out of our control.
I do have a CrowdStrike story. I love the story and probably should save it for the end, but it’s really about the industry and the resiliency. When that CrowdStrike situation happened, we were in Atlanta for GBTA. I had a client tell me they landed on that Monday and it was two in the morning and they got to the baggage claim and it was kind of mayhem. People were everywhere and bags were everywhere, but this beautiful thing kind of happened. All the people that were in the baggage claim area were asking, “what color is your bag?” Every time someone found a bag and they held it up, everybody would clap and cheer and pat them on the back. They were so happy. I just thought: we’ve gotten through COVID. Yes, there were a lot of impacts because of the CrowdStrike outage and it affected different airlines differently, but what it didn’t impact is the resiliency and the camaraderie of the travel industry. I just love that story; to me it’s like a great depiction of who we are and what we stand for.
That’s the only positive story I’ve heard out of CrowdStrike. As a technology executive, I’ve only heard the horror side, so good to hear there was some positive and you guys did a good job of being resilient through that. It wasn’t easy for any company to be honest.
Our wrap-up question for you, our season two question we ask everybody: what’s your guilty pleasure when you’re on the road? Clearly working for an airline you’re traveling as much as or more than you probably ever were.
I saw this question come across and I knew you were going to ask me. I literally said to my colleague Aaron: I am like such a loser because I can’t think of anything good. And he says: well you know we have Cheez-Its on your rider. I’m like: it’s like the one thing when I’m traveling that is so bad for you, but that salty cheesy crunchy snack. I would say that and because I am working for an airline, I’m really good about getting on an earlier flight and my guilty pleasure is leaving when I can and not feeling compelled to stay longer than I need to. But yeah, I’m going to go down as the most lame interview you’ve ever done: Cheez-Its on my rider.
Cheez-Its are the worst for you but the best snack! I should get stock in Cheez-Its considering how many my kids eat, Mike, and I know your kids are probably eating them too. Anyway, so that’s my answer. I thought I could come up with something clever but that’s really my guilty pleasure so I minimize it. That’s a good one. Thank you Doreen for being a guest. Doreen Burse is senior vice president of worldwide sales at United Airlines. Thank you Doreen for being a guest on the Travel Again podcast. My pleasure, thanks for having me. Great to have you.
All right Mike, we will be right back with headwinds and tailwinds. Just again, I want to talk for a few minutes about our product called Travel Again Spotlight. We did our first Spotlight with Guyapan over the summer. The response has been really strong; we’ve gotten media coverage off of it and George has too, certainly. Basically the product is a 7 to 10 minute interview format. It’s a shorter format that’s really great for social media and for getting the word out. We focus on your company’s either leadership, brand, product, whatever it is. Maybe you are bringing something new to the market or you want to talk about your differentiators and what you do and why you’re different and what you’re bringing to the industry. We produce it and Ed and I do it together along with whoever from the company is a part of the spotlight.
If you want to learn more about bringing it and using that as a way—what we love about it is anytime we can bring new products, new offerings, fresh ideas to the marketplace, we’d love to do that and take it out to our influencer network. We’re really pleased with what the podcast has done, the audience we’re reaching, and the response we’re getting. We feel like it’s a way of adding value and bringing something back. So if you are a company or a leader and you’re looking to do something like this, just get in touch with us and we’ll put something together and take you out to the marketplace.
Thanks for that Mike, and now we will wrap with headwinds and tailwinds where we identify what we think is adding value to the travel industry or taking it away. Mike, I’m up first with a headwind and it’s literal winds. Obviously hurricanes are on my mind. Hurricane Milton is forecast to become Category 5 on track to the Florida Gulf Coast. I pulled that from CNN about an hour and a half ago when we were prepping for the podcast and Mike, it is now already a Category 5 on its way to the Florida Panhandle. We hope that everyone who is in harm’s way is thinking about evacuating, which evacuation orders have already been posted. It’s an area that got hit by Helene. I saw pictures of houses with all the debris on ready to be picked up by the trash folks. This is also headed towards Disney and the vacation area, so we wish all of our tourist friends and our families in that area the best through this storm. Whenever these kind of things hit, they hit tourism very hard and they hit people personally. So good luck out there with Milton coming your way, Mike.
Now for a bit of a tailwind. Good news, and again not directly related to travel, but we’ve been following this in terms of the dockworkers union and the strike that happened right in the midst of everything with Helene. I think to the credit of both sides they’ve postponed now and suspended till January 15, giving them more time to negotiate. Sources close to the negotiations have said that basically they’ve got a wage increase kind of in place that they think tentatively will work for both sides. Now they still have the open issue of use of automation, which is a big deal in terms of future jobs and security around jobs. Looking for ways that automation and various forms of AI can be helpful, maybe assist jobs but not eliminate jobs, and that’s a big point along the way for a lot of industries.
This issue still needs to be worked on. What I loved about it is that both sides read the room and understood this was happening in the midst of this damage. It potentially could have had a huge impact on supply chain ability to focus on recovery and I think both sides stepped up and found a way to basically move things forward, diffuse, get people back to work, and make sure that there weren’t disruptions. Credit to everybody involved there. I tie that back to the hotel workers again and striking that continues to expand across the country. I’m just saying I really think both sides, but the hotel brands really need to think about what they’re doing here. I don’t think the right answer is the direction that’s been going, which is eliminating services and eliminating jobs in hotel cleaning and support. This is not good for the industry. They’ve got to find a way to get to a good place.
Workers need to be paid competitively and they need to be paid fairly. There are ways to do that. Customers are not asking for less services and support in a hotel; they’re just not. This notion that just because during COVID we weren’t cleaning your room now we’re never going to clean your room—those kinds of issues—it’s just not good for the hotel property honestly. You need to continue to maintain and service and keep your property up. I just see this as going the wrong direction. I think both sides need to really come to the table and work this out. We don’t need this now as an industry on top of all the other things we face. Back to control the controllables; this is a controllable step up. Let’s find a way, let’s get this resolved and get people back to work and get them the paid support they need so that the industry is very successful. It is a very profitable industry and I’m sure they can find a way.
I hope they do and congrats to the dockworkers for taking this step and delaying things further so we can have conversations. There are unintended consequences from these strikes. Toilet paper disappeared from the shelves overnight even though toilet paper is not an import. They need to be careful with this. Best of luck to the hotel workers; I hope they can work it out like you said Mike. Thank you for that Mike, that is our show today. Thanks again to our sponsor safe travel RX and we will see you back again here in two weeks at the travel again podcast. Thanks Mike for a great show. See you.