Startups

What travel industry and traveler anxieties will we be coping with and having to adjust around? This week's episode of The Long View will focus on that question, and others.

In the past two months, travelers have bought roughly 100 million points and miles a day, on average. That's good news for cash-strapped airlines and hotels. They're using promotions to transform potentially costly refunds for canceled travel into less costly miles and points.

All Nippon Airways has invested in Avatar-in, a startup that lets travelers use remote-controlled robots to see experiences far from them. Meanwhile, Eddy Travels, a digital booking assistant, has raised funding, too, despite the crisis. Keep hope alive.

New tech can screen passengers for elevated heart rates, respiratory rates, and temperatures. The kiosks sound minimal enough. But their accuracy and speed still need to be proven under busy airport conditions.

Please join Skift editors and research analysts, along with VC investors and startup founders, for this dive into the state of travel startups today.

This week, travel startups Air Doctor (which helps travelers find doctors overseas), Hotelmize (which helps bedbanks automatically rebook hotel rooms when rates drop), and Huilianyi (a business travel expense manager), announced rounds of investment this week, in a bit of good news.

Travel is a long-term megatrend because all across the globe people appreciate the value that it brings to their lives. This holds true across a vast range of human differences — cultural, geographical, religious, historical, generational, and more.

Everyone in the travel industry is frustrated right now with much of the world frozen up. But Nicolas Brumelot, the co-founder and president of travel startup Misterfly, speaks for many agencies frustrated by alleged delays in refunds by some airlines.

Take a break from all the bad news and dream about flying taxis.

Not all tech is worth the hype. But then again, the current crisis will likely accelerate the adoption of some worthwhile emerging technologies. It’s important to know how this will impact the travel industry. We’ve set out the most important technologies to help you burst that hype bubble.