Skift predicts

I’m an infrequent reader of the travel intelligence website Skift. Lots of their content interests me, its just seems I never get enough time to read it. Maybe that should be number one New Year’s Resolution: Read Skift more often.

Anyway – they just published a Bold Predictions for the Travel Industry in 2019 column. There are a couple of things that caught my eye:

Some airline will create a lie-flat premium economy seat.
They are having a lend, but interestingly they tell us:

They can sell the product at roughly 1.7 times the base fare, even though each seat doesn’t take up 1.7 times the space of an economy class chair. As Airline Weekly’s Seth Kaplan told Bloomberg, “Anytime you can get paid double for something that doesn’t cost you double to produce, that’s a pretty good place to be.”

Brian Sumers

He bases this quite correctly on the evolution of the business seat, which was just a seat until British Airways introduced flat-beds in 1999 – and then everyone did.

BREXIT will be cancelled (or postponed).
I am staying with two BREXITiers at the moment, and they are as frustrated with the process – maybe more so – than us non-BREXITers

Opinion polls suggest the public now favors staying in the EU given the other current options, and more and more politicians are getting on board with the prospect of a second Brexit referendum. Like Bobby Ewing’s return in Dallas, maybe next year we’ll wake up and realize that Brexit was all just a bad dream?

Patrick Whyte

I wish that I thought Patrick was right – but I think it will be ugly and messy right down to the wire. It will be all very well for me to sit back and say ‘I told you so’ when the shit hits the fan, and British passport holders are treated like pariahs in the EU, forced to queue, in endless snaking lines, like the rest of us non-EU passport holders. But the BREXITiers will still blame it all on the EU, and not the fact that they supported BREXIT.

Careful what you wish for.

Big Industry Predictions on Amazon Airlines, Expedia, Sabra, Airbnb and Microsoft

The rest of Skift’s predictions are about larger scale movements in the travel industry, particularly about buyouts and expansions. They are a good read.