The journey business has had just about every little thing thrown at it within the first six months of 2025. It has confronted ongoing world battle, financial instability, political uncertainty and challenges associated to local weather change.
The second quarter earnings of on-line journey businesses (OTAs), resort teams and airways mirrored a few of this turmoil. Airlines blamed macroeconomic elements for income losses and demand uncertainty, whereas the CEOs of resort teams and OTAs had been cautiously optimistic.
The fixed in journey that leaders come again to many times is its resilience—bounce-backs after an ash cloud, inventory market crashes and a pandemic spring to thoughts. While journey was down in sure areas of the world, journey firms are sometimes fast to pivot to different locations and merchandise to compensate.
Go City provides attraction passes in 28 cities unfold evenly between the United States and Europe. In an interview within the PhocusWire studio at Phocuswright Europe 2025, Go City CEO Jon Owen mentioned that Europe is having an important yr, with some cities seeing a rise in customer numbers.
“I think ultimately what you need to do as a business is just keep going—you can’t affect European reluctance to travel to California at the moment, but what you can do is keep building the right products for customers, and those market trends will change,” he mentioned.
He was joined within the studio by Linda Bryndísardóttir, vp of enterprise improvement for Dohop, who mentioned that the scenario was not as “bleak” as it’d sound.
“If you look at numbers from IATA, for example, the number of passengers is growing year over year, even in the U.S. Asia is growing quite fast. We’re increasing our partnerships in Asia,” she mentioned.
“So, like you just said, hedge your bets. Make sure that you’re operating in each continent. You want to be where the customer is, for sure. The customer is going to travel. They are traveling, even though economic growth has slowed down.”
Owen and Bryndísardóttir agreed that whereas forecasting is difficult, the journey business is used to altering technique, directing advertising to the place demand is and specializing in the weather that it may well management.
Watch the total dialogue with PhocusWire’s Linda Fox:
Phocuswright Europe 2025 Executive Interview: Travel in turbulent instances