Skift Take
IHG CEO Keith Barr’s take on how we’ll be using technology now and in the future is both contrarian and perhaps more pragmatic than the views of some of his travel industry peers.
At a time when many in the travel and hospitality industry are pondering the possibility of Amazon re-entering the travel space, as well as the inevitability of booking a hotel room by using your voice, one hospitality CEO sees the tech and e-commerce giant as yet another distribution opportunity, rather than a potential threat.
“They don’t publicly seem to have an opinion or desire to move into [travel],” said Keith Barr, CEO of InterContinental Hotels Group. “And if they were, the threat wouldn’t be to hotels. The threat would be to OTAs [online travel agencies].”
“The question for us is what would our relationship look like with Amazon?” Barr continued. “Because we are always essentially going to own the stay. We always own the brand, we always own the customer experience.”
In Barr’s view, Amazon’s potential re-entry into travel boils down to a simple theme: “How do different intermediaries battle it out over time to be the intermediary of choice?”
Barr spoke to Skift after the company released generally positive second-quarter earnings. His comments are a stark contrast to statements made in June by Marriott International CEO Arne Sorenson, who described hotel and travel brands as being entrenched in “an absolute war for who owns the customer” with technology companies that include Google, Amazon, Facebook, and others. Sorenson added, “It’s a long-term war, and ‘long term’ in digital space might be a few years.”
As for the possibility of Google and Facebook adding more travel products of their own, Barr said, “I don’t p
