Travel Demand post-COVID-19

How do you think OTAs and travel players will start bringing marketing spend back to the market, when demand returns?

When preparing for an upswing, what we’re doing right now, is focusing heavily on engineering and product, to make sure that our product is even better, when we return. Think about planning tools, think about lower conversion funnel. This is one of the rare moments that you can actually do a lot of work there, because you are not hindered by the daily pressure of performance. We can now spend a lot of time on making sure that the foundations are right. We are also tapping into a lot of different data sources, from Google, from other metasearchers, like Trivago, to make sure we understand what the customer behavior in travel is, outside our own industry.We are the tours and activity vertical, which is the second largest vertical in travel. You have hotels and you have flights. We’re also looking at data from flights and from hotels, from around the world. Where are people coming from that are searching right now? Where are they looking for? What date ranges are they looking for? This year on year trend, we can use to see where we see a potential uptick and is it domestic or international?

We’ve seen that, now in China, slowly we are coming out of the dip and the recovery will take, probably, four or five more months. But as you might have heard yesterday, China is looking at increase in cases again, so they might go into a second wave, which will make it last even longer until it fully returns. Our expectation is that this will take at least two quarters of zero travel and then Q4 will see a slight uptick, but travel will be different. People will travel closer to home, will make less use of airplanes, but more use of their own transportation. We expect, and we’re planning for, more of a staycation or explore your backyard kind of campaign, for when travel resumes.