Travel Industry

TAKEAWAY: TRAVEL INDUSTRY

KAPLAN:
Talk about where your growth is coming from. You're a global company, obviously. Talk about what's driving your growth.

SORENSON:
It's a great time for our industry. Travel is exploding for a number of reasons. You've got, I think, a shift globally towards people wanting experiences maybe a little bit more than things. We were talking about our kids sitting here at the table. I have four kids, all adults. None of them owns a car. None of them owns a house or a flat. But they love to travel. So, whenever they get a chance, they're going to go someplace. Of course, they'll call their dad to see if they can get a great hotel rate.

But often the rates are high, and they'll end up finding some other way to do it. They're not unusual, in the sense that that generation wants to travel, and I think my generation does too. I don't know whether I speak for other people in this room, but I think we've gotten to the point where, OK, we got a lot of stuff. That's fine. And it's not like we're no longer materialistic. But we want this time together, and we want these experiences that we can relish, maybe brag about a little bit. A generation ago, it might have been the car we drove up in that would say, you know what? You've arrived. Look at that fancy car you're showing up with. Today, we're sharing it on Instagram or Facebook, and the things that people see are the experiences we've had. That's a global trend which is good for us.

You've also got a global explosion in the middle class. Think about the Chinese as the biggest example of this. Hundreds of millions of new members of the middle class. What do they want to do? They want to come to Boston and they want to see the start of the American Revolution and the history that's here, or go to Paris, or go to London, or go to—fill in the blank, these destinations that they've seen in movies or read about forever. That mass, too, is moving.

There's a global competition for travel. The statistics are just coming out now. I think inbound travel to Europe last year was up 7 or 8 percent. The United States—we don't have final numbers, but probably down about the same amount, 5 to 6 percent. Why? Because we're less welcoming today than we were before.