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, how you doing? Good, Ed. Good to see you, literally. Thank you. Welcome to episode three of season two of the Travel Again podcast. Mike, we’re back after what for me has been a very strange few days for myself and the family.
And a bit concerning for all of us on the outside looking in. What people don’t know is that you’re a resident of Asheville, North Carolina, and had quite a weekend there as we’ve all seen the devastation from the double whammy that hit the Asheville area—both the rains leading up to and then eventually the hurricane that came through. Still just utter devastation. Fortunately, you, your family, and friends were able to literally weather the storm, as they say, with no power, no water, no phone, nothing over the weekend. Fortunately, you were able to evacuate. Maybe a little bit of your insight and those rare situations where you were actually right, literally in the eye of it all.
There is a little personal story. My wife and two young kids moved to Asheville about three, almost four years ago now. My wife’s whole family moved there well over 25 years ago. It’s a beautiful mountain town. It’s full of artists and river rafting, hiking, nature, lots of beer brewing companies and great beer. Biltmore Estate is there. There’s a great minor league team called the Tourists that we love watching there. Great restaurants. It’s a real gem of a town in Asheville and all the surrounding areas of Western North Carolina.
Over the last couple of days, obviously the storm hit. First we lost power, then we lost water. We had some drinking water on hand as we had prepared. Then you lost cell service. You really are cut off. Eventually, as the fridge starts to melt, you start to worry about food. You start to worry about potable water. It starts to become a bit of a dire situation where you really start to be worried about yourself and your family. My house, all of my property, all of my friends and family are safe, but not everyone in Western North Carolina is. There have been reports of well over 100 deaths and lots and lots of damage. The areas around River Arts District and Biltmore Village were completely underwater. A beautiful mountain town not far from us called Chimney Rock has been wiped out completely by a mudslide.
We are very lucky and blessed. We evacuated when we no longer felt safe. We are at an Airbnb in Seabrook Island, South Carolina, near Kiawah Island, which is not far from Charleston. For those in the travel industry, they probably know that area pretty well. It’s new to me, but it is a beautiful area. We are safe and obviously quite lucky to be able to move out of the destruction and relocate. A lot of my family is still there. My wife’s sister and all of her family and extended family have decided to stay there. They are river raft guides and they know how to camp and how to get clean drinking water for themselves. They’re equipped and they’re staying to help people because they can, and so they’ve made the choice to stay and be helpful in the area.
Mike, as you know, I’m not that handy. I’m not really a camper. Getting myself out of harm’s way and my family out of harm’s way was a priority. I did pick up my wife’s grandmother, so she came with us. We got the gecko and the dog and we’re safe for the time being. But it could be weeks before running water is available and electricity and all those things. There are just some weird parts about it where you don’t realize when you don’t have cell service and your phone doesn’t have internet service, you just don’t know what’s happening. You feel so cut off. Even if you can drive a certain distance, you could only get so far because roads are cut off in every direction. You only get a sense of the lines at the gas station and lines at the stores, which by the way at this point are completely empty. But then you arrive at an Airbnb and you can see the destruction on the TV and all the news conferences. You really start to get an eye view of it and it’s really something.
I hope everybody that I know is safe and taking care of themselves. Asheville is a tourist destination; that’s the other reason we decided to cover this. This is kind of getting near peak leaf-peeping season where people come to watch the leaves change. There are big events at Biltmore Estate and all around is a great place to have events. My ask to people is: wait for the recovery. It’s going to take quite a while, but then think about next year and the year after planning your events in Asheville to help prop up the recovery.
From Travel Again, we ask that if you do feel like donating, you donate to the Red Cross. That’s the address to donate to. I’m sure there are lots of great places to donate; we recommend the Red Cross. I know they need the help getting more food and fresh water there now and in the coming weeks.
It was a huge sigh of relief when we finally were able to make contact on Sunday just when you first got any kind of cell service—not text or anything, but just able to make a phone call out. So just happy to know you’re safe. But the real work begins and I agree with you, Red Cross is always a sure thing in terms of getting your money to somewhere that will translate into help. By the time we release this podcast, hopefully things are better. As we talked, Mike, we may do an interim special edition to keep people updated. Thanks for letting me share a little personal story. I say we get rolling with episode three and onto the news. What do you say?
Let’s get on to it. Our first article today, which we talked about in last week’s episode, was getting ready for the Southwest Airline investor day. Since that episode was recorded, although we have not published it yet, we will soon. Southwest had its investor day, and our friends at Cranky Flyer put out a really nice note saying it’s time for Southwest’s $4 billion plan to sink or swim and released the full details. Now we wait and watch. Mike, what did you learn from the investor day and from following all the articles about that?
It’s one of those where there’s a lot to this. I think it’s really the epicenter for a whole class of airlines—meaning the low-cost carriers and ultra low-cost carriers—and where this is all going to go. What Southwest is coming back with is assigned seating, premium seating, and starting to get into the code share for international service to link up. Icelandair was a partner they had tried 30 years ago, but it is a natural fit because of Icelandair’s service out of Baltimore. It’s kind of a low-hanging fruit in terms of a code share.
They’re doing a stock buyback which is to give the investors a little bit of short-term benefit to buy time. But the kind of sacred cow they’re hanging on to, which will be interesting to see how it plays out, is not charging for bags, which has been a big part of their marketing and their positioning and everything over the years. Now they’re still maintaining that position at least for now. It’ll be interesting to see. It’s really all about execution at this point and time. The challenge, of course, is that it took the activist shareholder to force these changes. You still have a lot of pressure around the leadership there, particularly the CEO, Bob Jordan. The pressure from Elliott, the activist group, is wanting him to resign. He’s driving the plan and we’ll see where it goes, but certainly everything they’re doing seems like the logical things to do. There’s even more in there in terms of efficiency and cost savings and different things they’re going to do that will add up to the benefit that they’re planning. If they stay on track, then I would guess their investors will stay supportive, but it will probably be a pretty short leash. They’ll be watching them closely.
We will be too because it has a downstream impact on a lot of things relative to the airline industry. I know a lot of friends, colleagues, and yourself will be happy to have assigned seats, Mike. It just removes one stressor. Traveling by myself for business as opposed to when going with family—my family experience traveling with Southwest was always terrific. Giving families the chance to board as a group ahead of the bulk of the people on the plane and the inflight cultural part of it is terrific. They get it and they know how to support a family. I’ve got a large family, so traveling with that kind of support you really notice and appreciate. Anyway, we wish them well but we’ll be interested to see where it goes.
The next is not an article; it’s a conference we attended last week called Destination AI. This was a generative AI conference really specific to hotel distribution and hotel operations. I know you got to attend and our partner at Guyapan was on a panel there. Why don’t you tell the audience a little about the conference and what were your takeaways?
It’s a brand new conference. As I learned, it was basically put on and largely orchestrated by a NYU grad student who is jumping into the game. She did it, and I thought the event they did a terrific job. It was a nice forum. They had over 100 attendees. Really great lineup of speakers including George, and I think some really good content. That size event for this type of topic is really good because you get to really dig in with people in the room and out in the hallway over coffee.
Some interesting takeaways because for AI, and this was focused on hoteliers, this is the new battleground. I’m calling it the AI arms race from my perspective. After listening to everyone there that day along with George, there was an executive from Microsoft on the panel and he said their capital expenditure previously ran around $10 billion a year. He said they’ve ramped up to $10 billion a quarter in terms of the money that they’re putting into positioning for the future.
It’s really amazing because as you go through the process, there’s some analogies drawn to the early days of internet and how when all that happened there was this internet division and you had people who within the company were specialized. The point was that all those skills will just be largely absorbed into mainstream of the business. You won’t have this kind of separation anymore because as we go through the adoption curve and the investments are taking place, the interesting thing George really brought forward is that you’re not going to have an actual customer consumer adoption curve because the features and functionality are just going to be baked into your device. The way things are done, the services provided, you’re not going to initially start out by hitting on your app. There’s a number of them that you can use to have an AI experience, but over time, Apple Intelligence leading the way, you’re not even going to know anymore. It’s just going to be like a part of what you get.
You take away the adoption part of this where somebody actually has to decide to use AI. Now you’re in a whole new realm about the way travel planning is done, the way booking is done. You’re going to have these kind of AI agents that will very much be coming online now where you’ll have this whole experience that you can talk about. “I need to plan a trip that does this with these features,” and you’ll get feedback, but then it’ll be very interactive in terms of the changes you make and the refinements you make. You won’t have to think like you will in a traditional fashion.
The hotel brands are very concerned because they’re learning from before. They don’t want to be behind the curve. They don’t want to lose out and find themselves in a situation like they did in the early days of online adoption where they were so late to the game and really lost a good part of their business. We were founded on a business, Lodging.com, that was really taking advantage of that where you were providing and creating a whole new booking channel that it took a long time for the hotel brands to kind of be able to reconcile and find middle ground with, and thus Expedia and others were born.
It’s really interesting now to see how the attitudes are changed, but how it’s a whole new battleground for the hearts and minds and the traveling public and the way they book. I don’t think we know how it’s all going to work out yet but an incredible amount of investment being made. From an investor perspective, some real doubts about the ROI of all this investment. That was the other thing that came out in the discussions too: trying to figure out where do we need to go here and how much needs to really be spent to be competitive. You don’t want to be too early to the game either, overspend, and not see the return on investment. Everybody’s dollars are always scrutinized; you have to show the returns. That’s the key. So it’s going to be really interesting. Again, terrific event, enjoyed it, and great insight from the group. Good opportunity for George to get up there as an expert that we partner with.
We may have some videos we’re able to put up from that so if we are able to do that, we will. Thanks for attending and giving us some perspective on that, Mike. That’s great. All right Mike, we will be right back with our guest.
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Okay Mike, onto our guest. Are you ready? Oh yeah, I’m really excited for our guest today. This is great. Please join me in welcoming Peter Greenberg. He’s a travel journalist, CBS News travel editor, and the Travel Detective. Peter Greenberg is an American journalist. He is the CBS News travel editor reporting regularly on The Early Show, CBS This Morning, and CBS Evening News. He may be best known as the travel editor for NBC’s Today, CNBC, and MSNBC from 1995 until 2009. Previous to NBC, Peter was travel correspondent for ABC’s Good Morning America from ’88 to ’95. Greenberg is an Emmy award-winning journalist and television producer in his own right. Also, he is known as the Travel Detective and has published several books with that moniker. He was brought to NBC by Jeff Zucker. Peter was also a contributing writer and editor to the GBTA magazine, a short-lived but award-winning association magazine published by myself and Mike. Everyone please join me in welcoming Peter Greenberg to the stage.
Hi guys, thanks for coming. Appreciate you making the time. You’re actually in New York today, which is amazing that we managed to get you in the same time zone as us. Welcome, glad you could come on with us. Nice to have you, Peter. We know a little more about you certainly than the general public, but you’ve had such an amazing career in travel journalism. You just keep on doing it, man, which is fantastic. But your career didn’t start in travel. Just give us a minute; what got you to the travel industry? You were in broadcasting, did some producing, but then you ended up on camera. What got you, what drew you to travel and how did you get here?
My background really is as an investigative reporter. I was the West Coast correspondent for Newsweek magazine for many years. During that time, as you might suspect, I was the guy with the suitcase in the trunk of my car because I was always flying to the scene of something, whether it was Watergate, Patty Hearst, or Gary Gilmore. Every one of those cover stories was mine. It dawned on me very early on in my career that nobody was covering travel and transportation as news—that it wasn’t just lovely London or beautiful Bermuda or lovely models on a beach somewhere, but it was also aviation safety, cruise ship safety, fire safety at hotels, things that people need to know about the process of travel.
Back in the days when I was at Newsweek, I used my access as a journalist to immerse myself deeply into the process of travel. I trained in the cockpits, I trained in the cabins, I trained on the bridges of cruise ships. I literally still do that today in the simulators because I need to be able to have conversations with the people who really know what they’re doing so I can understand what they’re doing and then explain it to my audience. Back in 1980, believe it or not, I started the first investigative travel column in the Chicago Tribune, which they’d never done before, every Sunday in the newspaper. That grew to about 60 newspapers and then to MSNBC and then of course ABC on Good Morning America, then for 14 years on The Today Show, and then for the last 15 years CBS. It’s clear I cannot keep a job.
Actually you’ve covered every network! You’re just making sure everyone gets a taste. You got to put the context of… we’re so used to having so much information, not always accurate information, but so much information available to us in overload. But this is a time when there was little or no information for people about travel destinations, what was happening again to your point, safety, just traveler tips.
Remember, travel is front page news. It’s the largest industry in the world. It’s one out of every 10 jobs. It’s one out of every five new jobs. People today don’t look at themselves as tourists as much as they look at themselves as travelers. They want me—their mandate for me is to tell them something they didn’t know and put that in context and perspective. For example, this morning alone I’ve reported on everything from one of the things you just discussed, the Southwest Airlines developments, to the investigation of Boeing and the FAA in the wake of the 737 Max, and then of course talking about what a presidential election does to travel. All those three components are completely different but then somehow related.
I always say that now it feels like there’s so much information and so much not necessarily inaccurate but coming from people’s opinions and kind of their own perspectives. Being able to have credible sources that really distill it and bring clarity to what is really happening—I think that’s a terrific role you played, but now even more important than ever to cut through all of that and give people some trusted advice and analysis of what’s happening.
One of the things that we have to remember is about independence and credibility. For example, I do not endorse any products. I’m not a spokesperson for any company. If I tell you I like something, it’s because I truly think it works. If I think it sucks, look, we have a segment in my television show on PBS every week called “Don’t Go There.” We tell you where not to go. People have limited time and they have limited budget; they need to know where they should avoid.
That’s good. Tell us a little bit of what you’re working on now and what you have planned for 2025. What’s ahead for you?
In addition to what I do for CBS, I do three separate television shows that are airing now on PBS, Amazon, and Apple TV. One we’ve been doing for the last 23 years is called The Royal Tour. It’s somewhat of an impossible show where I go to individual sitting kings, presidents, and prime ministers and I get from them the impossible. They give me eight days of their schedule devoted only to me. They clean the slate and then for the next eight days, that King, President, or Prime Minister is my personal tour guide to and through their country. I should also emphasize they have no right of editorial control or review and the very first time they see the show is when it airs. We’ve done this show with everybody from the King of Jordan to the President of Mexico, the Prime Minister of New Zealand. We’ve done it with Netanyahu, we’ve done it in Peru and Ecuador and Jamaica and Rwanda and Tanzania and many other places.
The other show that I do, where I just came back doing one last week, is called Hidden. The concept of that show is very simple: no gift shop, no tour bus, no brochure, no guidebook, no Tripadvisor sticker. I take you to the most amazing experiences in a destination that nobody knows but that are totally accessible to the audience. We’ve done everything from Hidden Uganda, Hidden Egypt, Hidden Belize, Hidden Ireland, Hidden Saudi Arabia, many more. But the one we did last week, which is an amazing one which may come as a surprise to you, is Hidden Alabama. It’s eye-opening. We did that.
Then the third show, which has been long-running now going into season 11, is The Travel Detective, which is our investigative weekly travel news magazine. It doesn’t talk about lovely London or beautiful Bermuda, but which cruise ship was a floating fire trap and which isn’t, which hotel has the worst security system and which has the best, and which airline lies to you about their frequent flyer program. The answer to that, of course, is every one of them.
One thing I would say that I love about The Royal Tour and that whole concept is the fact that you could pull it off. To me, I love travel for what it is and certainly the experience, but I also love what it does in terms of bringing down barriers between borders and humanizing the rest of the world. It’s easy in this environment where people get a lot of negativity about borders and cultures and anything that’s different is bad. Anything and everything we can do to break down those barriers is good, and I think that type of content is just fantastic. It serves a much bigger, broader purpose and I commend you for it.
Listen, don’t get me started on State Department advisories. Because the bottom line is there are 196 countries in the world and there are only about six that I wouldn’t go to. Think about that. My metric for that is I won’t go anywhere where I don’t know who’s in control. Simple as that. Would I go to Syria right now? No. Would I go to Iran right now? Yes, I would, because I know who’s in control as long as I can play by the rules. I’ve been to North Korea twice because I know who’s in control. But remember, there are only six places I wouldn’t go to. Think about that when you’re thinking about your own travels. That gives you options to 189 additional countries, not counting the US, where you can go and immerse yourself in the culture and have an amazing time.
With all this work, you’re at the pulse of the traveler. What do you think travelers want from suppliers they’re not getting today? It feels like there’s still always that tension between how companies market themselves and what they think travelers want versus what they really really want.
We don’t have enough time to cover all that, but I’ll try. Let’s put it this way: if the airlines today were being honest about their branding message, it would be this: “We’re not happy unless you’re not happy.” Because the problem right now is we’ve seen an additional consolidation in the marketplace. The airlines are not being run by entrepreneurial CEOs anymore; they’re being run by CFOs and it’s all an ROI and a numbers game. We become line items, and with very, very few exceptions, at least in this country, we might as well define ourselves as self-loading human cargo. It’s not getting any better at all; in fact, it’s getting worse.
You mentioned the Southwest story that’s still evolving. Southwest Airlines branded themselves, in fact branded the entire airline, around the idea that you would not be charged to check two bags. Now you have an investor group at the table demanding that they get rid of that. So far they haven’t. But I have to tell you that they’re changing the culture of Southwest Airlines and their unique selling proposition about the fact of open seating. Everybody’s nice. Look, when they did their open seating thing, I felt like I was back in second grade during a fire drill in school because you have to line up and then you go. But you know what? It works.
The beautiful thing about Southwest Airlines is they’re not promising something they’re not delivering. You’re not picking Southwest Airlines because of the rich Corinthian leather or the Broadway show tunes that the airline’s flight attendants are not performing on board. You’re not certainly picking them because of the food. You’re picking them because they made you a promise: they’re going to get you from point A to point B on time and the planes won’t spend a lot of time on the ground turning around because they only fly one aircraft type. It made sense. You don’t pick Southwest Airlines because of their frequent flyer program; you pick Southwest Airlines because of their route network and the fact that they’re reliable. Even when they had their huge debacle back in ’22, which was huge, let’s not sugarcoat it, they had such a reservoir of positive passenger goodwill they actually stepped up to the plate and recovered quite nicely. The problem right now is they’re being governed by fear of an investor group that just wants to look at the bottom line. Even though they said as recently as last week when they had their investor conference that they’re not going to touch the policy of not charging you for checked bags, don’t hold your breath. It’s coming.
Because again to your point, economic pressure. You covered a lot of it. Some of the frustration consumers have in general, they take… there’s supposed to be some joy in travel and the whole experience. What I loved about Southwest also as a company to deal with culturally was fantastic.
But everybody talks about the Golden Age of air travel; it sucked back then! What are you talking about? But the deal is this: every time I go somewhere, somebody says to me, “Did you have a nice flight?” Simple question. You know what my answer is? It’s always the same two-word answer: “We landed.” I’m not on the plane for the wine list. I got from point A to point B in an aluminum cylinder traveling at 600 miles an hour and I didn’t die. That’s the joy of travel.
My answer is always three words: “It was uneventful.” got there reasonably on time. Both are great answers. At least you got there and you’re alive. These are good things. But you see Mike brought up something interesting. He says the difference between what marketing is and what the reality is. The marketing from airlines has always been luxury in the air and some 24-year-old beautiful flight attendant serving me caviar. Stop it. We all know better than that. Airline food is an oxymoron. People don’t eat it because they’re hungry; they eat it because they’re bored. It’s true. Now every once in a while an airline will surprise you, but it’s not a US airline, I can tell you that. Because they’re run by the accountants, and when the accountants run the asylum, everybody goes crazy. That’s what’s happening right now.
The one thing we haven’t talked about, which is a touchpoint for everybody watching this podcast, is this: the airline frequent flyer programs in my opinion now meet the legal definition of a criminal fraud because they’ve made promises they knew when they made them they had no intention of keeping. You’re seeing now some activity on the legislative front. Senator Durbin’s bill, the US Department of Transportation, is now investigating the airline frequent flyer programs because it’s the Wild Wild West and there’s no sheriff. Everybody watching me right now is a member of at least one frequent flyer program, and you have miles that you have not been able to redeem. That is not correct.
There’s no point in saying that your miles never expire if you expire in the process of trying to redeem them. Do you know how many unredeemed miles there are right now? Take a guess and get wild. I know from working with one airline—not a non-US airline—at one point they had $5 billion worth. That was one single non-US airline. I can’t even imagine the number for the others. Take one wild guess.
25 billion. You are not going to the showcase showdown! No, I’m going to go like 34 trillion. 34 trillion. By the way, the airlines carry those miles on their books as a contingent liability, which is also a fraud because they’re under no mandate to redeem them. So it’s a false liability. They just use that to balance the books and pay fewer taxes. The real bottom line here is the airlines have morphed from a loyalty program to a spend program, and in the process, they cannot turn off the spigot because they make more money from their frequent flyer programs than they make as airlines. If they didn’t have the support of American Express at Delta, or Citibank at American, or Chase at United, they would be Chapter 7 within 24 hours.
Tell us how you really feel, Peter! I earn no miles for saying it either. The bottom line is we are at an inflection point right now in terms of loyalty and actually doing the basic math. So get ready; it’s going to be interesting. As soon as I saw Durbin’s bill, the one-two punch of when you get alignment of administration and Congress both focused on something at the same time… and you want to know why that bill got introduced? Because every member of Congress is a member of a frequent flyer program and they can’t redeem their miles!
It’s going to get really interesting. A couple things for you, more on a personal level. At this point you must have traveled a trillion miles. Name someplace you haven’t been in all those 180-some countries that you’d still like to go.
Remember everybody has a bucket list, and my advice is always to burn that list because the same place is always on the list. They all want to go to France because they’re all a bunch of failed art history majors. They studied the painting in school and they figured they better go see it once, and they stand in line for 11 hours at the Louvre and they come out an hour later going, “It’s so small.” Of the 196 countries, I’ve been to about 152 of them, so there’s still 44 I have not been to and may never get to. But high on my list is Madagascar. It’s the fourth largest island in the world. I’ve not yet gotten there; I want to do that. I’m doing some of the smaller and hidden islands of Oceania like Kiribati, the former Gilbert Islands, Vanuatu I have not been to and can’t wait to go, Tuvalu—these are places that are on not only on my list but they’re on my schedule already. But again, it’s not a race. It’s not ticking off a box. I laugh every year when somebody says they’ve gone to every country in the world. My question is: how did you go? “Oh, when the cruise ship got in I jumped off, touched the ground, and went back on the ship.” You haven’t gone. The bottom line is you need to immerse yourself in that location in that culture to be able to say you’ve actually been there.
I was really fortunate; my first job was a finance major and I happened to get a job working for a travel agency doing financial analysis. One of the things I loved about my early days of travel for business is I would go to countries for business and people would literally, proudly show me around. I felt like I would get these local experiences that I still remember this day. It’s so hard; a lot of times in business you’ll show up somewhere, go to an event, go to a conference, and you never leave the hotel. You could have been in Cleveland and nothing against Cleveland, but you’re not really getting experience. In those days, this is pre-internet when your phone is the phone in the hotel room, it kind of forced you to have those experiences. I really relish them and I try now to make sure that I devote a little bit of time at least always to get some of that. In these times you almost have to be more deliberate about it than you did years ago.
I’ll give you a little secret. Where’s the first place I go every time I go to a different destination? Where’s the first place I stop for information and for help? Take a guess. Local restaurant? No. It ain’t the Chamber of Commerce. I’ll tell you where it is: I go to the local fire department. No kidding! Because first of all, I’m also a fireman here in New York. I’ve been one since I’m 18. I did know that about you. I’m on duty three days a week. But the reason why I stop at the firehouse in every city is because they’re the best arbiters of information ever. They’ve been in everybody’s house, they’ve been in everybody’s hotel, they’ve been in everybody’s restaurant. They know where to go, they know where not to go, and they know where to eat. They can’t be more helpful. It’s unbelievable. People don’t use them as a resource, and unless there’s a four-alarm fire underway, they’re more than happy to talk to you and share information and share their stories.
I was going to ask you whether just a layman could knock on the door. Oh absolutely! Are you kidding? Couldn’t be happier. That’s a great tip. A great idea. In these times, anytime you can take a little bit of local experience home, it feels like you actually went somewhere. So much of the hotel product and everything has gotten so homogenized. It’s hard to find where you did much more local flavor. It was unfortunate; I used to say when you would bring gifts home for family it would be food or things that you couldn’t find anywhere. Now unfortunately you go online and basically find anything anywhere.
I’ll give you an example that just happened last week. We were in Alabama doing a one-hour special and I was in Huntsville. I practiced what I just said. I went by to see the fire chief and next thing you know, he wheels out his 1927, still working, antique firetruck, puts me in the passenger seat, and they gave me a tour of Huntsville that I otherwise never would have had. It was unbelievable. That’s great!
Peter, again, I can’t thank you enough for coming on. We love your passion for travel and travel rights and focusing on the travel experience and what’s best for the industry. Just keep it up, man; we can’t get enough of it. Thank you so much for coming here today and being with us. Ed and Mike, thank you so much, guys. Thank you, Peter. Peter is a travel journalist, he is the Travel Detective, and so much more. Thank you again, Peter, for joining us on the podcast today. You got it.
Mike, lot lots with Peter. Great stuff. Never disappoints. We will be right back with headwinds and tailwinds.
At Travel Again, we introduced a new product called Travel Again Spotlight. We did our first Spotlight with George Roukas, who we talked about being on the expert panel at the Destination AI event. We did one with him over the summer and we got a terrific response to it. It’s about creating that content to bring forward products and opportunities for people to talk about things they’re doing that are actually benefiting the industry—new products, new features, new anything that’s helping, and even an approach to business at times with leadership where they’re really proud of what they’re doing and want to have a chance to talk about it.
For us, it gives us an opportunity. We do a 7 to 10-minute interview, we talk about the issue, we work with you, and give you an opportunity to get it out to our influencer audience that’s out there. It’s terrific. If you’re interested, give us a call, hit our website, or send us a note. We’re always trying to do that to get more and more of that out to the industry. If you have the opportunity and you’re interested, get in touch with us and we’re more than happy to use our platform to help get the word out.
Great new product. Now we will wrap with headwinds and tailwinds where we identify what we think is adding value to travel or taking it away. Today I’m on tailwinds, and it’s more news around fundraising, which you know is one of my favorite topics. Over the past two weeks, 13 travel startups from a variety of sectors in travel have now raised over $600 million in venture capital. $645 million to be exact. It shows that many companies are positioning themselves for the future. We’ve got alternative jet fuels in there, we’ve got distribution systems, we’ve got hotel systems. We talked about Engine last week. All kinds of travel startups raising a ton of money. I love the action in the space. We’ll continue to report on fundraising because it is an indicator of interest in our sector, and we’ll keep an eye on these startups and how they do over time. Just a great tailwind with more fundraising hitting the travel sector, Mike.
I love it. That’s great. Unfortunately, there’s always a headwind too in terms of what’s going out there. On my end, I think this is just… we continue to see striking in either the travel industry, as we’ve talked before about the strikes for hotel workers, but now the latest is dockworkers, which could affect the supply chain up and down the East Coast. This could be really devastating, particularly at a time when we’re just talking about all the devastation from the hurricane. The last thing we need is holdups with anything related to the supply chain.
But what concerns me about all this, and bringing it back to the hotel industry and what’s happening with hotel workers—I just was on a trip with my son for the weekend and we stayed at a brand new property. I won’t mention the brand name, but it was a new property in that three-star roadside caliber hotel. I asked, just curious, at the front desk what their policies were around cleaning and everything. Basically it’s upon checkout, or once a week if you’re there a week or longer. I just think something’s lost here. It’s back to what Peter was saying about CFOs running the world and the emphasis around return on investment constantly. I know how important that is, but I think at that point we’ve lost sight of what the customer needs and wants. Actually, I think it’s a negative on the brand. When you’re not maintaining your properties like that over time, they’re going to degrade faster because you’re not cleaning and checking on the properties regularly.
I think it’s terrible for hotel workers because you’re putting a tremendous burden on them. It’s a cost-cutting exercise; let’s not disguise it as a consumer-friendly thing. If I want to opt out and put the sign on the door and say don’t clean my room today, that’s my choice. Not… literally I found out because I went down and no cleaning the room, no additional towels, no nothing after a couple days. I was kind of like, “What’s going to happen here?” and he’s like, “Oh, here, I’ll just give you some towels.” What are we doing? It’s kind of the equivalent to the airline experience Peter was talking about. We’re losing sight here, and I think the brands really need to step back and think about the product, what they’re offering, and the longer-term implications. This flare-up with striking workers is just a symbol of the frustration people have. Let’s think about doing the right thing by the people doing the work at these properties every day and the people in the roles that are vital to moving the economy.
Thank you for that, Mike. That is our show today. Thanks again to our sponsor safetravelRX. Please go to our website to learn more about our Spotlight product and we will see you back here again next week. Thank you everybody. Take care. Bye Mike.