Travel Industry Earnings Coverage

The straight talk from Diller and Kern will likely delight Wall Street and rankle former management and current employees. Employees will have to buy into the new vision if there's any hope it will become reality.

When Tripadvisor first started diversifying away from its hotel-auction business several years ago, it was mostly aspirational because its experiences and dining businesses were relatively small. Now there is a bit of revenue meat on those bones. Still, meaningful profits will be slow going in this competitive climate.

Maybe it was a bit too much to expect some big strategic initiatives from such a new CEO, or maybe the airline is keeping them under wraps for now. But an airline with Norwegian's historic problems cannot tweak its way to viability.

Trivago CEO Axel Hefer said the company will focus on those things it can control. But the issue for Trivago and some competitors is that there is so much they can't control, including Google's incursions, the rise of Airbnb, and the whims of major online travel agency advertisers when they cut their metasearch spend.

Sporting some red ink in its financial results doesn't spell doom and gloom for Airbnb's prospects of going public in 2020. On the other hand, the question for employees and investors becomes — at what valuation?

Longtime leader and co-founder Deep Kalra will remain critical at the company in a newly created role of executive chairman. The change in job titles is a reward for co-founder Rajesh Magow's years of work leading the India business. Both executives have pushed hard on a subscription model, one of Skift's Megatrends for 2020.

TUI CEO Fritz Joussen sounded much more upbeat than he did last December. While the Max grounding continues to cause problems for the company, holiday bookings for summer 2020 have grown. For now, it thinks it has the edge on its remaining competitors.

As long as the flight suspensions don't last too long, Finnair thinks the impact of the coronavirus outbreak should be fairly limited. The problem is at the moment no one knows exactly how quickly, or how easily, it will spread across the rest of Asia and possibly the world.

At this stage it's difficult to tell how long the coronavirus outbreak will last and how far it will spread. For now Royal Caribbean is acting with extreme caution in China.

Travel companies with a big exposure to China are already feeling the impact of the coronavirus outbreak. For others, the opposite is true — at least for now.