Travel

Various countries have updated their travel guidance as cost-of-living protests continue in France and neighboring countries. Hundreds of thousands of people in France took to the streets over the weekend to protest rising expenses and school conditions, with some demonstrations turning violent. At least 2,000 people have been arrested and more than 600 law enforcement officers and firefighters have been injured amid these scenes of violence, Laurent Nuñez, France’s minister of the interior, said Sunday.

Barbara Muckermann has left her role as Kempinski Hotels’ Group CEO after nearly two and a half years, amid departures across the luxury hotel company’s senior leadership, according to multiple sources who spoke to Skift. Chief Financial Officer Gordon Drake, Chief Human Resources Officer Karin Raguin, Chief Development Officer Frank Veenstra, and Chief Brand Officer Barbara Biffi have also left the company, according to sources. Chief Commercial Officer Massimo Brancaleoni has resigned but it's unclear if he has left yet.

More than a third of all flights from Saudi Arabia were canceled or did not fly on Monday amid continued attacks by Iran-aligned Houthi rebels, according to aviation analytics company Cirium. Around 322 out of 941 (or 34%) scheduled flights from the kingdom were canceled or did not fly on Monday, said Cirium. This marked an improvement from Sunday when more than half of all scheduled flights in Saudi Arabia were canceled or did not fly, the data showed.

Ixigo expects hotels to become one of its largest businesses within four to five years, co-founder and group co-CEO Aloke Bajpai said on the company’s earnings call Monday. He said the category could be “if not the largest, maybe the second largest” in its mix by gross transaction value (GTV). Hotels are still small, accounting for 2.1% of GTV. The company’s stated ambition is “to become the largest player serving this part of the hotel market,” and Bajpai said growth is not optional. “There is no choice, we have to grow,” he said.

Loveholidays is one of the biggest travel companies most people outside Britain have never heard of. The privately held company sold £3.4 billion ($4.5 billion) of holidays in the year to October 2025, largely by doing something that has been around since the early days of online travel: combining flights and hotels dynamically at the moment a customer searches. That model has become a major part of the British package-holiday market, where travelers have long been comfortable buying flights and accommodations together. Loveholidays did not invent dynamic packaging, but it has scaled it much further than its closest rival. Revenue rose 25% last year to £344.5 million ($456 million), adjusted EBITDA rose 39% to £112.7 million ($149 million), and more than half of bookings came from repeat customers, according to the private company’s financials I analyzed from the UK’s Companies House and from answers the company gave to my detailed questions.

Airbnb has become the latest company to offer a weather guarantee, joining Vrbo and Marriott in giving travelers the option to protect their trips against substantial rainfall. Airbnb is now selling an insurance product underwritten by insurer Chubb, which can be added on to a booking at checkout.

Every travel commerce budget heading into 2027 carries a line for AI, and most of those lines are sized to the bookings AI drives today. That number is small. Booking Holdings told investors large language models account for well under 1% of its room nights, and Bernstein’s Richard Clarke put AI referrals below 2% at Booking and Marriott. Waiting looks prudent. The better input is which commercial positions harden while volume stays low, and four of them are moving this year.

This sponsored content was created in collaboration with a Skift partner. AI has started to move from the edges of travel businesses into core workflows. The challenge now is one of execution, taking systems that perform well in controlled settings and making them dependable inside the complex machinery of booking, servicing, payments, and disruption management.

This sponsored content was created in collaboration with a Skift partner. Experiences have become common currency across travel, from hotels and credit cards to loyalty programs and vacation rentals. For hospitality companies, the question is how to make those experiences meaningful enough to strengthen customer relationships, rather than simply adding more activities for travelers.

Photo Credit: Eric Gnock Fah, President and Co-Founder of Klook, speaking on-stage at Skift Global Forum 2024 in New York. Skift Klook has withdrawn its planned U. S. initial public offering, opting to wait for more favorable market conditions as the travel experiences platform continues to expand globally and push toward profitability.