How Digital Disruption Happens in Industries, the Travel Industry Edition
Skift Take
Everyone forgets that in the moment in business, everything is cyclical, and the fate of business forever is bundling and unbundling over a period of time, even if they're put back together in different and potentially unrecognizable ways.
When Southwest CEO Gary Kelly spoke to CNBC last week on its biggest-loss-ever quarter, there was a moment when Kelly wanted to say the writing was on the wall, but didn't want to create panic. Watch that clip below couple of times and you'll see what I mean.
The subtext: Kelly knows this pivot-to-leisure-for-now in pandemic-induced lockdown could turn permanent for the ruthlessly efficient and forward looking airline, or at least for a long time to come, and it is ready to cannibalize itself first before anyone — or anything — else does.
https://twitter.com/CNBC/status/1319274812041117697?s=20
Now let's put all of this in context. About 25 years into the digital disruption that happened in almost all sectors of the global travel industry — read our Definitive Oral History Of Online Travel that we published in 2016 — there were a few major sectors of travel didn't go through the waves of disruption that most others sub-sectors of travel have since mid-'90s.
