"It will, of course, be a year to forget - but with the arrival of a vaccine unlikely to trigger an immediate return to mass movement and gatherings of people, coronavirus will dominate the headlines for some time to come."
It turns out we were depressingly on-point when we wrote this in our introduction to the Travel Newsmakers 2020 article in December last year.
Many in the industry thought the arrival of mass vaccinations in many parts of the world (Africa, sadly, is a blot on the landscape of the world's influential countries and agencies ability to get everyone jabbed ASAP) would herald the end of a tumultuous year.
But 2021 decided it wasn't going to play along with the hopes, dreams and recovery strategies of the industry's companies and their traveling consumers.
The emergence of two significant variants of COVID-19 (Delta in the first quarter of the year, Omicron in the last) ensured the ability to recover and build up immunity following injections would be compromised considerably.
Despite the immense challenges that 2021 has continued to throw at the travel, tourism and hospitality sector, a string of trends and developments have emerged to make it, once again, a year to observe with interest - if only as an illustration that the sector can still operate and innovate when it needs to.
The PhocusWire team's newsmakers of 2021 are listed below (and here are our 2019 and 2018 lists)...
Sustainability
COVID-19 - or the industry and society's ability to live and operate with it - might go away eventually but climate change will not.
If the coronavirus pandemic is the crisis of a generation, how the world gets to grips with sustainability will be the challenge of our collective lifetimes.
Collective action is needed in every corner of every industry, which is the travel, tourism and hospitality sector has to play its part. And do enthusiam than a passing mention in a corporate social responsbility section of the annual report.
The near-shutdown of the travel sector in 2020 may have been enough for people to (finally) take the issue seriously, beyond the buzzwords and phrases.
There are, of course, those who argue about how much impact the industry has on climate change - but anyone who flies somewhere for a one-hour meeting, or has clean towels in their accommodation every day, knows they can probably change their behavior a little bit to play their part.
Changes in consumer attitudes and awareness may be the trigger that tips the industry to doing more, but it would be reasonable to suggest that 2021 has seen the issue become a serious concern in wider travel circles for the first time.
The COP26 Summit in Glasgow, Scotland, may have polarized many campaigners as to its overall effectiveness and the policy targets that emerged from it - but it has provided the industry with some ways to address their own strategies.
If the adage that "where Google leads-others follow" rings true, then the search giant's proclamation that consumers will be altering their travel behavior to counter climate change, then this should be another wakeup call to the sector.
Google's research came after a string of other reports and activity produced this year, all seeking to raise the profile of sustainability and what the industry can do to address the challenge.
But perhaps one of the biggest moments came at The Phocuswright Conference 2021, when a panel on sustainability argued that a significant role must be taken - and aggressively - by the big players in the industry, namely the online travel agencies.
Google may not like it but there was a very strong argument made by Jeremy Sampson, CEO of The Foundation, for companies with the influence and pockets of Booking Holdings and Expedia Group (who in a normal year happily spend $10 billion+ on digital marketing) to rethink how they spend their money.
It may have been a turning point in how travel considers its role in what will be the greatest challenge that the industry will ever face.
A video of the conference panel is included below...
Travel's Dilemma - Are We Making Our Mark or Leaving One? - The Phocuswright Conference 2021
SPACs
Even the casual Twitter scroller likely encountered a post or two this year asking, “What is a SPAC?” (Or, “What is an NFT?” But that’s for a different post.)
Over the course of 2021, special purpose acquisition companies, better known as SPACs – which are shell companies that raise capital through an IPO for the purpose of acquiring or merging with an existing company - dominated the investment landscape.
In fact, back in April, Goldman Sachs said SPACs could account for about a trillion dollars in deals in the next two years and estimated around $129 billion of SPAC capital was out seeking targets.
Naturally, the SPAC craze made its way through travel, impacting players big and small.
Let’s start with some of the big: This month, Vacasa went public via SPAC at a $4.4 billion valuation, and American Express GBT announced its plan to go public through a deal with the SPAC Apollo Strategic Growth Capital at a $5.3 billion valuation.
Other SPAC deals of note this year include Grab, Sonder, Inspirato and Selina.
PhocusWire senior reporter Linda Fox created a handy guide to tracking the rise of SPACs in online travel, and the topic even made its way to Center Stage at The Phocuswright Conference last month.
Will the flurry of SPAC activity in travel carry over into 2022? It’s likely, at least until we have a new acronym to contend with.
Hopper / fintech
This year “fintech” entered the mainstream lexicon of travel, led in particular by one online travel player: Hopper.
In March and August of this year, Hopper raised two massive funding rounds - $170 million and $175 million, respectively – bringing its total funding to-date to $585 million.
Its Series F round coincided with the launch of a new B2B product called Hopper Cloud with Capital One as its first partner. With Hopper Cloud, Hopper can sell its infrastructure, agency content, financial technology products and data science capabilities to other businesses.
In July, Amadeus announced it will offer some of Hopper Cloud’s products to its clients through the Amadeus Travel Platform. And this month, Trip.com Group added Hopper’s price freeze in North America and Europe.
Hopper counts price freeze, flight delay protections and refundable bookings among its dozens of fintech products, which earlier this year co-founder and CEO Fred Lalonde said account for about two-thirds of Hopper’s revenue.
You can hear even more about Hopper’s fintech ambitions in the video below – one of the most talked-about sessions at this year’s Phocuswright Conference.
Keynote + Interview: Fintech and the Future of Travel - The Phocuswright Conference 2021
Another major player making fintech moves in travel is Booking.com, which created a fintech business to further remove financial friction from the travel process in July.
The COVID-19 pandemic laid bare just how critical the role of payments is in travel. In fact, we dedicated an entire PhocusWire Pulse event to the topic. View all the sessions – covering the buy-now-pay-later phenomenon, the changing ecosystem in Asia and trust in shopping and booking – right here.
Deal activity
Our recent review of startup investments during 2021 indicated that there was no let up in the money flowing into new travel businesses over the last 12 months.
A report from Lufthansa Innovation Hub estimates investment in travel startups will be about $44 billion in 2021, up from 2020’s figure of $23 billion.
But, aforementioned SPACs aside, there has been a flurry of other financial moves that have shown that M&A is still an important part of the corporate ecosystem, despite no obvious end in sight from the global health pandemic.
Perhaps most significant, at least at the large end of the industry's participants, came in November with deals by Booking Holdings to acquire Getaroom for $1.2 billion and a €1.63 billion takeover of ETraveli Group.
It's fairly certain - as our analysis indicated - that many think the company is positioning itself for a new phase, finally fulfilling what it needs to do to provide the much-heralded "connected trip" strategy.
Other notable deals include: