Here is why I think hotel room service will soon be replaced by Grubhub?

Hotels are facing a massive problem of finding workers in our new post-COVID world. Hotel room service was one of the first casualties of the hotel labor shortage. Many hotels don’t have people to cook your food or deliver your food. Food delivery services like Grubhub and Uber Eats are a natural substitute for room service. This evolution has already taken place in limited-service hotels but now appears ready to disrupt full-service hotels that have restaurants. Historically, room service offered very high-priced food, very limited selection, slow service plus outrageous service fees. Maybe disrupting hotel room service with Grubhub may actually cost you less, provide better food,  and more food options. If you think about it, this is nothing more than pizza delivered to your hotel room, which has been going on for decades, to the next level. CLICK HERE to read more. 

Wow! Here is an amazing promo from Southwest Airlines – Act fast! – Southwest has a three-day promotion that ends Thursday, Sept 9 that allows you to get a free companion ticket. Basically, the promotion requires you to buy one ticket by this Thursday to fly by 11/18 and then you get a free companion ticket to fly with you on another flight between 1/6/2022 and 2/28/2022. CLICK HERE to learn more. 

Say it isn’t so! American Airlines moves in direction of Southwest by not rebooking pax on other airlines if their flights are full – At a time when Delta, United, and American say they are trying to differentiate themselves from the low-cost airlines by providing better service and amenities, AA takes a page from Southwest and now says if your flight is delayed or canceled they will only get you on the next available AA flight (which might be a day or two later) or they will refund your money. In the past, if there was a disruption and all AA flights were full, AA would accommodate passengers by putting them on other airlines if they had no space on their next flights. Under their new rule, if their flights are full, sorry Charlie! You will have to wait for what could be days to get to your destination. This is how Southwest does it and now it is how AA does it. Not very customer-friendly in my humble opinion. CLICK HERE for more details. 

What looked like a light at the end of the tunnel now appears to be further away – This spring the travel industry thought they could see the light at the end of the tunnel as the masses started traveling like crazy. Airlines were full and they brought on new flights to address the increasing demand. With the new Delta COVID variant, however, things have slowed down in the last month and it appears that the 2021 giant rebound in travel may have to wait until 2022. Our company continues to see pretty strong activity in leisure (vacation) travel and has multiple groups traveling to see the fall foliage and other domestic trips this fall. We also still have a group traveling to Iceland this fall as well (keep your fingers crossed). Here is my crystal ball. I think in 60 days you will start to see the turnaround in COVID and people will start planning to travel heavily again next spring. Until then there will be some amazing airfares (see above) and good hotel availability and pricing. This will not be the case for travel around the holidays as the airfares I am seeing are shockingly high for Christmas travel to warm weather areas this year.

Airline casualty list from COVID is long and getting longer – Below is a list of all the airlines that have filed for bankruptcy or liquidation since COVID (Thanks to Skift magazine). Some are still flying and some are not. Depending on how long the COVID tail is, other airlines may soon be added to the list. After you look at the list just think of how many airplanes are sitting empty around the world today.

Filed for Bankruptcy: Flybe (UK), CityJet (Ireland), Virgin Australia, Air Mauritius, Avianca (Colombia), Thai Airways, LATAM (Chile), Jet Time (Denmark), Virgin Atlantic (UK), Norwegian Air, InterJet (Mexico), Philippine Airlines.  

Ceased operations: Trans States (U.S.), Compass (U.S.), TAME (Ecuador), SunExpress Deutschland, One Airlines (Chile), NokScoot (Thailand), LIAT (Antigua), AirAsia Japan, Cathay Dragon (Hong Kong), Ravn Alaska (U.S.).