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.
What happened to the travel agents and agencies with the advent of online travel booking services — huge initial disruption and then normalization decades later as a smaller sector — and the sectors that depended on them, airlines, hotels, destinations and more hadn't happened to some of the other key sectors in large enough or direct ways: corporate travel, meetings and events, tours and activities, cruises and the packaged tour operator sector.
The cruises and tours operators sector have different dynamics and for now don't have substitution prod
