In a session responding to WTM's Global Travel Report, Patricia Page-Champion, senior vice president and global chief commercial officer at Hilton, said: "Currently, 85% of business travel is conducted through small and medium-sized businesses." .
He added that there was also an uptick in 'bleisure' - people combining business and leisure - and one in four people will now bring a loved one as part of a trip in 2024, partly thanks to the rise in flexible working.
Popular post-pandemic add-on requests from Hilton customers include pet-friendly hotels, confirmed connecting rooms, and electric vehicle charging, with a growing request for sustainability, including for events.
"Experience is the new luxury," said Peter Krueger, chief strategy officer and CEO of Holiday Experiences at TUI, explaining that although customers were purchasing the same holiday packages that included hotel, flight and transfers, "it is experience that is the new luxury." that triggers the sale." , it is no longer sun and beach.”
Krueger also explained how the growing demand for sustainability made a lot of economic sense. He referred to a couple of diesel-powered hotels in the Maldives, where TUI had installed solar panels and expected to recoup the money in a year and a half or two.
“There is a lot of money to be made with sustainability,” he said. “All of our hotels are sun and beach destinations, so what you get is a lot of sun!”
But he added that some governments had blocked TUI applications to build solar fields because they were still investing in fossil fuels. “For us right now that is a limiting factor. This is what slows us down the most.”
With a wide variety of markets, Krueger was not worried about the financial crisis in some countries. "We see a greater shift in source markets and destinations," he explained, with, for example, North America taking over from Europe for the Caribbean and Europeans controlling their budgets by choosing all-inclusive or value-for-money destinations. like Bulgaria.
Hilton's Page-Cham said domestic markets globally remained buoyant after the pandemic, for example, with demand from Mexicans for overnight accommodations within Mexico.
Morocco is opening more offices in Africa to encourage regional travel, said Hatim El Gharbi, commercial director of the Moroccan National Tourism Office. The destination also "stays local" for foreign tourists, encouraging more sustainable community-based tourism.
Regarding technology, Krueger highlighted the importance of digital for a company with a customer base the size of the population of Australia: “If you have a scale of 27 million customers but they all want to have a personalized holiday, how do you can you match this? The answer is technology.”
Search patterns and even hotel touchpoints collect information for TUI to enable more targeted marketing. As a result, "Look to Book" is older, Krueger said. "We can customize... but in mass production it is only possible if it is digitized."
Source: WTM.