What’s Really Changing Inside the Airline Industry

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Airline leadership shakeups, alliance shifts, and AI-driven discovery are all hitting travel at once.

Airline CEOs are stepping down. Global alliances are shifting. And AI is quietly changing how travelers choose where to go.

All at the same time.

In this episode of the Skift Travel Podcast, Sarah Kopit and Seth Borko break down a week that reveals something bigger happening inside the airline industry. They unpack the fallout from a high-profile airline CEO exit, why leadership changes across global carriers may signal deeper structural shifts, and what Willie Walsh’s move to IndiGo says about where the industry is headed next.

But the conversation goes beyond airlines.

As travel discovery moves from search to AI, the way people plan trips is changing fast. Travelers are no longer starting with hotels or even destinations. They’re starting with experiences — and getting just a handful of AI-generated options.

That shift has real consequences for airlines, hotels, and anyone trying to stay visible in a world where shelf space is shrinking. From airline consolidation and global competition to AI reshaping demand, this episode connects the dots across a rapidly changing travel landscape.

Presented by ⁠⁠⁠⁠Viasat Ads⁠⁠⁠⁠. Click ⁠⁠⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠⁠ to learn more!

Watch This Episode

Hello, everybody. The number of the week is, and bear with me now, un, deux, trois, which is probably as far as I can count in French. We’ve had a lot of airlines moments this week.

We’ve had a lot of culture clashes. We’ve had a CEO out after a language controversy. We’ve had another airline reshuffle in leadership, a global new alliance is underway, and all of it is happening at the exact same time.

So the question is, is all of this leadership drama something deeper? Is that what’s going on inside the airline industry?

1:18

England Trip Banter

Or is it just a little bit of more of the same with a different twist? I don’t know, Seth, what is your take?

Well, there’s a lot going on, isn’t there? I mean, there’s just so much all at once. I’m gone for a week and look what happens.

It’s crazy.

Oh, I was going to say, how were the fish and chips?

They were great. They were great. I think English food gets a bad rap.

The fish and chips were great, the shepherd, the shepherd’s pie, the bangers and mash.

1:45

Brummy Accent Storytime

It’s good, hearty food. I think it gets such a bad rap.

I personally, now granted, I grew up in England for a little while when I was a kid. Did you really? You didn’t know that?

Oh, you Sarah Lohr dropped, I didn’t know.

Yes.

This is exciting. Not only did I, but when I was home in Michigan with my parents over the summer, my dad pulled out. So when we lived there in 1984, we had this like burgundy camp quarter.

And not only did he find, like he’s always had the little tapes that they had to be like in a tape stresher, but he happened to find like somewhere like in the bowels of the garage, a VCR. That was the thing that we didn’t have.

And so we hooked up the VCR. He’s like, I have no idea what is on these tapes. So, you know, nine-year-old Sarah with her, now for all the Brits out there, I didn’t just have a regular British accent.

I had a Brummie accent. We were in Birmingham, Birmingham, Birmingham. So, 10-year-old Sarah with my Brummie accent.

Yep. Yeah. So I sounded like I was, you know, an orphan from Peaky Blinders.

Amazing.

That was, yeah.

So anyway, welcome back from England. I can’t wait to hear, I can’t wait to hear all that.

And straight to the back. Maybe we’ll, maybe that’ll be our catch up at the end of the little session. Yeah.

I’ll tell you all about almost, almost get, I rented a car. So there’s a travel angle there and rent a car driving.

You drove on the other side of the road?

Drove on the other side of the road. Look at this airline news.

Yeah.

I mean, at the same time, when you’re traveling, you’re acutely aware of all this stuff, right?

3:29

Air Canada Language Fallout

Because I was worried about what’s going to happen with the TSA. I think I even texted you like what my TSA line check-in was.

You did.

I actually had a very quick one. I was luckier than others. But the content in French, I think that’s the reference to the CEO of Air Canada.

I have been surprised.

Well, I’ll say this and then you can explain to our audience what’s happened, although I think they probably already know.

So I was going to say that I’ve been really surprised at how much this particular controversy about his inability or lack of ability.

Very similar French language feels to the ones that you’ve just demonstrated, Sarah. I think it’s the problem.

That he, like how much that has broken through into even mainstream media.

When I’m getting alerts from the Wall Street Journal that, you know, is like the airline CEO who was fired, you know, for only speaking English, like you know that a particular story has reached the business news zeitgeist.

Well, let’s recap this. I actually wanted to think about it a little bit more. I think it’s interesting.

So Air Canada had a fatal aircraft collision last week. On Air Canada, a regional jet was landing at LaGuardia Airport, and there was a mistake. We don’t know exactly what happened.

The full investigation has been done, but it appears to be that there was a mistake with the air traffic control. There was a vehicle crossing the runway at the same time the plane was landing.

It collided, and the two pilots who were flying were kibbit, and several others injured.

It was an Air Canada flight, and the CEO of Air Canada issued a statement, and I think a well-worded, well-spoken statement, a Karen, an empathetic statement, but he only issued it in English. Canada is officially a dual-language country.

French is a formal language required alongside English. At first, this seemed like a bit of a, I don’t know.

I think we were discussing this in our internal chats, and it did seem like a bit of a, wow, what a reason for someone to go, just because they don’t speak French when most of the country speaks English, most of the business is run in English.

The international language of aviation is English. I don’t know if you know that, but formally, I did know that. Speaking from an ICAO perspective, all pilots across the world are required to speak English or expected to speak English.

To get fired for not making a statement in French, seems this quirky, extreme Canadian thing. But I also recently learned when I was reading, one of the pilots who died was Quebecois, was from French Canada.

And the more I thought about it, it did seem a little, if that was his native language and his home country, if they were both from English speaking parts of Canada, I might be more inclined to call it a tempest in a teapot.

But learning that one of the pilots who died was French Canadian, did sort of change my opinion on this controversy a little bit, I have to say.

Well, I mean, it’s a bit of an unforced error in my mind as well, just like working with PR teams, crisis comms teams, which I had throughout my life. I mean, you translate it. I don’t know.

I think one of the reasons why it’s getting so much publicity is because everybody finds it a bit of a head scratcher.

7:07

Flag Carriers And Politics

I think that’s why we all are like, oh, really, huh? It also makes me wonder if that’s really the reason. I have no inside information on that.

Sarah, you and I, I want to let our viewers in on a little insider, but you and I did discuss that before this podcast recording and say that we want to make this a little more business minded, a little less political, and yet I’m about to take us

into politics, so I apologize to you and to our listeners if they’re not into it. But it is a reminder that the airline business, I think more so than any other part of travel, more so than hotels, more so than certainly more so than car rentals,

there is a major political element to it, and not just political, but national pride. If you’re an airline called Air Canada, and you have the name Canada in your business, and you have the Canadian flag on your airplane, the old school world of flag

carriers, of national air carriers is not fully gone. There are many flag carriers all across the world.

And even nowadays when we have public, private, or even fully privatized flag carriers, there is still a political responsibility that comes with being the flag carrier of your nation.

And I think that’s sort of maybe what Air Canada, the CEO of Air Canada, when he writes his memoirs, one of the lessons maybe he learned the hard way is that even when you’re a private organization, if you have the name Air Canada, you’re still Air

I think you’re absolutely right.

I mean, if there’s any… I’m trying to think of another business that isn’t more entwined, even in the United States with the government.

The only other thing that comes to mind would be like, maybe the power company. That’s the only other thing I was gonna say is like, energy and infrastructure and utilities is the only thing. And no one really cares.

No one has any pride in their national water company, but they have a lot of pride in their national airline. And I think that’s one of the things that’s really unique about the airline business.

9:10

Willie Walsh Joins IndiGo

And yeah, even though British Airways is now a public company owned by IAG Group, I think you have to think British and just because they’re Air Canada, even American Airlines, I think, has some of these responsibilities that come with it.

So speaking of IAG, our other big airlines news of the week is Willie Walsh, our friend Willie Walsh, who I must say, Willie Walsh’s interview, or Gordon Smith, our Gordon Smith at Skift, his interview with Willie Walsh at our Skift aviation event, I

think it was two years ago, was one of my favorites. I must say, I’m always running around in the background, but I hardly ever get to sit in the room and listen.

It’s always a rare treat when I do, but I did with that particular one, and it was such a fantastic interview that Gordon did with Willie. But yeah.

So for our listeners, Willie Walsh was either former CEO of IAG or former CEO of British Airways. He was high up at IAG British Airways, retired to lead IATA, which is Global Airline Trade Industry Association.

When you think trade association, you no doubt think foreign bureaucrats, and Willie was anything but that. He had one of the sharpest elbows for a trade association leader, that more much sharper than you would expect.

And he was retiring, had retired, and he’s back in the game as the new CEO of IndiGo. IndiGo is a low-cost carrier out of India. And when you think low-cost carrier, you probably think Spirit Airlines, or Frontier, or JetBlue, or Ryanair.

But just for our listeners to know, and I’ll be a little close to Air India. Air India is the flag carrier of India. It’s got the name India.

And if we’re being honest, it’s been so poorly mismanaged that IndiGo is now the largest airline in India. They fly more than half, I think it’s 60% of the Indian aviation. Market share is controlled by IndiGo.

So this is not just any old low-cost carrier. This is not the former head of IATA coming in to run Spear Airlines for a turnaround. This is the former head of IATA coming in to run the largest airline in the largest country in the world.

Just to give our listeners that context, this is very big news.

Yeah, we were all, and I will say like, kind of like a little bit of how the sausage is made inside newsrooms. Like when Peter Elber is-

The former CEO of IndiGo.

Yeah, left. I mean, you know, we sat around and talked about it. Like, who do you think it’s going to be?

Who do you think the new CEO is going to be? Through around a lot of names. I do not think Willie Walsh was even in the realm of like, any sort of universe that we were thinking.

So when this actually happened, it was a big surprise. It was big news. It is interesting from a cultural perspective, is he is a Westerner.

I think he might be Scottish. I think he and Gordon talked about that. Is he Scottish?

Yeah.

You talk.

I’m going to look.

Well, I was just going to not correct the record, but fill in the record of what I was saying earlier, where I was giving you Mr.

Walsh’s resume, because he was the CEO of British Airways, and then he was the CEO of IAG, and he helped build the modern IAG. He acquired Iberia, as well as Aer Lingus, Weyland, a couple of others.

He was the one who turned British Airways from a standalone airline into one of the big three conglomerates of European aviation.

Just again, for more context, for our listeners, the big three are IAG, which is out of primarily British Airways, but also includes Iberia, so Spain, and Aer Lagos, so the British Isles in Spain.

Then you’ve got Air France, KLM, which is France, and the Netherlands, and then you’ve got Lufthansa, which also has Swiss. Those are the big three in Europe, and Willie helped build one of the big three.

He’s a real empire builder, and it’s a big deal that he’s going to India.

He’s Irish, not Scottish. If I were running some Scottish airline, I would be immediately fired for making such a mistake. He’s Irish, or Irish airline.

13:43

ITA Airways To Star Alliance

There we go. So yeah, and so it is really interesting, like all of these kind of cultural shakeups. Yeah, these are big shakeups that are going on inside.

Big shakeups of big airlines.

Big shakeups of big airlines.

And there’s more, like there’s more. We’ve got a Star Alliance. We’ve got Star Alliance news as well.

I’m excited.

We talked about airline loyalty quite a bit, oh, loyalty quite a bit, but airline loyalty. And I’ve made it clear to long-time listeners that I’m a Star Alliance flyer.

So this is big news for me that ITA Airways is going to be joining the Star Alliance. They announced it today, which as of the time of recording is April 1st, which in the United States, if you’re not familiar, is April Fool’s Day.

So I hope I’m not reporting April Fool’s News, but I believe it’s a real deal. And that matters, not just because the alliances are growing.

We don’t often report on alliance news, but I think it’s relevant because ITA has come out of bankruptcy and Lufthansa Group acquired a significant stake in them.

So this is sort of part of the change of control of Lufthansa Group buying ITA, it coming out of bankruptcy.

Again, another flag carrier with lots of politics, but technically a private company, now being an Italian airline, now majority owned by, or major, I don’t know if it’s majority owned, but a major control and stake by a German company.

So on the one hand, like from a pure loyalty perspective, it’s exciting for me to fly to Rome, but I think the more business side comes back to these big three European airlines, the Air France, KLM, the IAG group, and now the Lufthansa group.

15:08

April Fools News Pitfalls

And this is kind of the Lufthansa group digest in the ITA acquisition coming through on April Fool’s Day.

Yeah. I will say, like as a journalist, April Fool’s Day is the worst day of the year. It is absolutely the worst day of the year, especially if you’re working on a breaking news desk, which I did.

No upside, right?

Yeah. Like literally zero upside. You’re either a grump who doesn’t publish the funny story or you’re the dupe who got taken for the April Fool’s story.

And I’ll take being the grump every single time.

It’s just, you know, companies try to be funny. That is not the strong suit of most companies, although I will give props to Ryan Ayer, who Ryan Ayer and Ryan Ayer’s social media team, like real props for being actually funny quite often.

But yeah, yeah. So I just can’t wait for today to be over, quite frankly.

What’s the worst April Fool’s journalism story that you know of? Maybe not, you don’t have to be personally involved.

Yeah, I’m trying to think. There’s just been so many like lame ones over the years. But like if I could even remember it, it means that they did it right though, too, kind of, right?

There was one I remember, it was actually airplane related.

There was one, and I can’t remember the airline, but I do remember that they said that they were going to put, like I believe it was LED screens, like all throughout the inside of the airplane.

And so it was going to be like you could see outside, like beneath you what it actually looked like. And I remember just being like actually wondering if that could possibly be true.

I would say like that’s, it’s probably not like the worst one, but it was one of those where like, I just remember thinking about it and then just being like, wait a minute, what day is it?

And I’m like, oh God, like you, you pesky comms team, like don’t try to do that to me. Do not try.

So anyway, I haven’t seen very many, maybe it’s going out of fashion, I haven’t seen very many today, like come through, like cut through the noise and the zeitgeist.

Because usually that’s like the winners of it are the ones that actually get passed around.

17:41

Hotels Lose Discovery Window

You know what I mean? Even though I said on your note, yeah, like let us not be passing anything around, just because like I’m paranoid, right?

Good riddance to bad rubbish, April Fool’s Day, who needs it?

There you go.

So new airline CEO turnover, I mean, actually a major industry accident, which is terrible and airline infrastructure continues to be pushed.

New leadership at Air Canada and IndiGo, new Star Alliance members, new more consolidation, M&A acquisitions happened across that space. In the hotel side of things, we published, I thought, this really interesting piece.

Luke, our hotel reporter, has some nice stuff about how like, headline, I like it. Hotels are losing travelers discovery window and scrambling to get it back.

I like talking about discovery windows, search discovery book, and I mean travel, consumer behaviors, that’s where my research team lives. This is a really nice article all about how consumer behavior and preferences are shifting.

Well, I mean, discovery in general, social discovery or AI discovery, GEO discovery, whatever you want to call it.

I mean, I didn’t think that so fast, like it really truly used to be like, if you’re talking about discovery, it was linked to social media, like at least a few years ago, like before, you know, ChatGPT.

Because everybody had got their press release, got their CEO statement, like whenever companies had news or anything that they wanted to communicate, there’s only a few ways to do it, like back in the days of old.

Then came social media and all of a sudden, the world of, quote unquote, discovery exploded. And that’s what people in PR teams, cons teams, companies in general, that’s what they were trying to figure out.

19:45

AI Disrupts Travel Discovery

They were trying to figure out how to get eyeballs, how to get customers, like both into their ecosystem, enough where the funnel could drive them to book.

And now we’ve got yet another layer to that, which I think has flamuxed people considerably more, and that is the age of AI.

And how, just because like, you know, we run some tests, like we do all sorts of things, you know, with AI and using AI just to be more efficient. And like, I’ve run some tests with the newsroom.

I’m like, okay, put this prompt into CLAWD, like hypothetically, what do you get? Like, what does it tell you? And it is all different, man, like that.

Like, if you’re a comms team, like that is a nightmare. That is a nightmare.

I think, you know, we talk, we talk about this trend of GEO generative AI and general optimizations, but at least with SEO, you sort of generally know how the Google algorithm works.

20:50

AI Discovery Black Box

Sometimes the developers of these AI algorithms, we figured it out over the years. Yeah, that’s right.

Exactly.

Some of the developers of these models don’t even understand how the models, I mean, they understand conceptually how the models work, but they are truly black boxes.

And so it’s this interesting thing where we’re trying to get ready for AI discovery, but AI is where we know it’s going to be different from SEO and regular discovery.

And yet many of the things that feed regular discovery, like reviews, like social media, like Reddit, like all these things, are in turn feeding the AI. So the inputs are the same. Plus there’s a new series of data-driven, AI-driven inputs.

21:36

Experience First Search

They’re all getting fed into this black box, turned up, shaken out, and each algorithm has different outputs. I think one of the things, it’s a really interesting time. You pair that too with changing traveler behavior.

By the way, did you catch the quote in this article about scuba diving? Sarah, I have to take the scuba diving reference.

I didn’t. Oh, my goodness.

How could I have missed it? Luke, in his reporting, he was at a hotel investment conference in Berlin, and Peter Kruger, the CEO of TUI, T-U-I, I think it’s pronounced TUI, TUI Holiday Experiences.

He says, from a search perspective, people type in, give me the best diving spots in Africa.

22:26

AI Shelf Space Shrinks

They don’t want to go for a four- or five-star hotel. So what he’s basically saying is, people don’t search for the hotel, they search for the experience.

They search for the experience not just on search and on social media, they now search for the experience on AI. AI has a much shorter shelf space than a traditional Google search or an OTA window.

And so your hotel is potentially getting excluded from consideration before the game is even afoot, so to speak. Because they’re searching for the best diving spots in Africa.

If your hotel is not coming up for that, I assume it stands a bar best diving spots in Africa. Oh, Egypt, obviously.

Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah, Red Sea. I’m on too, I’ve heard.

But well, and it’s also kind of interesting. I’m sure we’ve all done this where we’ve asked, because I do the exact same thing that everybody else does, like I want to go to the Caribbean for a long weekend. What’s the best hotel for tweens?

It’ll give me three answers, and then if I don’t like those three answers, I’ll open a new chat and ask it again. It’ll give me different answer.

Absolutely. If you modify just a little bit, you get different answers.

Yeah.

By the way, I’ve just searched ChatGPT for the top diving spots in Africa to really bring this specific article to life right around out of your professional interests. Red Sea, Alawal Sho in South Africa, which I think is the Sardinian run.

23:55

Funnel Flips To Experiences

Yeah.

I don’t know this one, the Basaruto Archipelago.

I don’t know where that is.

I don’t know where that is either.

Zanzibar and the Seychelles come up. Mozambique. So I guess the point is that people are looking for things to do.

They’re looking for these unique experiences. The shelf space. Basically, this is one we’ve run a lot of and we have a lot of research about this.

And experiences are coming at the start of the book and funnel. So people are considering the experience set. Before they, in some cases, even consider the destination.

They’re considered a scuba diving experience. Then you’re selecting your destination. Then, only then are you selecting your hotels.

And so for a hotel who is, you maybe were coming, there was a time, and there still is a time, but there was a time when you would say, I would like to stay at the Ritz and let’s see where the Ritz, that’s the perfect world or whatever.

I want to stay within my program. Let’s start with hotels and see where they’re available.

Or start with flights, pick your destination, then pick your hotel, then call up the hotel, go to this thing called a concierge desk, talk to a human, see what activities were available, book those activities through the hotel.

And that’s totally flipped on its head. You don’t, the idea of flights, destination, flights, hotel activities, no longer the case. And then also the case of when you search for hotel, you get 100 options.

No, now you’re asking AI and it’s giving you 3, 4, 5 options. Yeah.

Oh, not even 5. Never give you 5. It’s too many.

It’s too many.

Who’s got the brain capacity to read 5 bullet points anymore? Come on, we’re in the AI world.

Yeah, yeah, Luke did a fantastic job on that. I will say, my favorite African hotel or a scuba diving spot is Ras Mohammed, which is in Egypt off the Sinai Peninsula. Oh my gosh.

It’s kind of like an island a little bit. Nobody lives there, but it’s like you drop down. It’s a current that goes around it.

You drop off the boat, and you go down as you circle, and of course, the lower you get, the more big pelagics.

That’s awesome. That’s so cool.

It’s like an aquarium, a big aquarium. In the fish, you’re all going with the flow too.

26:10

Hotels Build Surface Area

So you just hang out and drift with them. It’s fantastic.

That’s amazing. It’s amazing.

A little shout out to Ras Mohammed there.

Shout out Ras Mohammed. Shout out Scuba Diving. We love a good scuba diving reference on this podcast.

I think it’s indicative of that bigger point, which is that how can you, as a hotel operator in the Sinai Peninsula, then integrate yourself more fully into those experiences, have those unique things I offer.

I often, we’ve been using quotes, and I think back to we had the CEO of KSL Hospitality at our global forum. KSL owns Deer Valley, which is a ski lodge, not just a ski lodge, the best ski lodge in the world.

So anyone who searches, what are the best places to go skiing? Guess what? Utah, Park City, Deer Valley comes up.

So he’s got a very premier product. He’s got a great product, but he’s built, he’s invested in these assets that have such, I’m using the word surface area.

27:13

Ads And Monetization

It’s a property, a hotel property with so much surface area, so many points of contact with these unique experiences, these unique assets that the AI can’t help once you put in the right keywords, it has to come up.

And so how do we get to that world as hoteliers is I think the key question.

Well, I do wonder, because I think they, despite the fact, like we talked about how AI, even for the creators of the artificial intelligence is often a black box, somebody is going to figure it out because there’s so much money on the line.

Capitalism always wins, right? So somebody is going to figure it out. I do wonder how long it’s going to take, because you’ve got to imagine at any business.

There’s just so much.

I mean, well, and open AI is already, we know experiment and wait and then pull them back. Like they experiment with advertising, they pull back.

I was going to say.

It’ll come back again, right? It has to.

Like how long is it before I get those three answers and like next to one of them, it says sponsored.

Sponsored.

It’s going to come, right? I can’t believe it hasn’t happened already. I mean, I think that is what they were.

I mean, I said that they weren’t playing with that. They said they weren’t, to be clear. They said they were just thinking about doing like in line, like on the rails.

Not like native, like we would think of as native internal advertising, but it’s coming. It’s coming.

I have to watch ads when I watch Netflix and Hulu nowadays. I imagine ads are coming for us all eventually.

Yeah. I actually gave Amazon some additional money recently because I just couldn’t do it anymore.

Yeah.

So they got three more dollars a month from me.

It’s also one of these interesting things of also, where will it live? Like right now, we have these AIs that are these big, almost like they’re really at the same level as Google. They’re like internet, broad, horizontal internet infrastructure.

But we might increasingly see vertical industry AIs. I mean, you and I both know plenty of start, entrepreneurs who are working on those kind of ideas. And even personal AIs, like where is the Sarah and the Seth AI?

And so where is the level of monetization going to be? Is it going to be at my personal AI? Is it going to be at an industry AI?

Is it going to be a horizontal AI instead of a vertical AI? There’s a lot of open questions here.

I think the answer is all of them. I think the monetization is going to be all of them.

29:45

Live Translation Breakthrough

We just haven’t seen it yet. I mean, I think it is interesting to think about, just how nascent this technology is, like what we’re living through right now. We’re at the very start of it.

Speaking of nascent technology or that we’re at the very start of, live translation, our tech reporter, Adriana Lee, just did this story about Google offering live translation, T-Mobile is about to offer live translation.

That’s another one of these AI-powered technologies that feels like we’re right on the cusp of something kind of transformative.

Yeah, they haven’t quite got it yet though. I think that’s the thing. Yeah, so I’m very curious about the Meta Ray-Bans, like how they work.

I mean, they must have, that’s what Adriana Lee’s story was about. It was about Meta’s Ray-Ban, prescription Ray-Bans that will have a live translation component.

I got to assume they’ve got speakers like on the branches of the glasses and microphone. I have the AirPods that I’m wearing right now are the third generation, or whichever the one that Apple says has the translation capability.

I’ve tried to use it before. It just doesn’t work very well.

I think, and I’m sure that everybody else thinks this too, it’s going to be one of those technologies where until they really get it, nobody’s going to use it because it’s just kind of annoying.

At this point, enough people speak two languages, or frankly, just doing the translation on your phone, it’s less annoying than kind of the disruption that it causes in your ear when you’re using your AirPods.

But once they get it right, it’s like game over. Like, why would you do anything else?

And I am very, very curious about what that means, not only just for travel with people being able to go places that are more remote, but what it means for culture, what it means for society. For example, just I am a Trekkie.

You can imagine this world where it’s just universal translation in inner ear. Right now, we talked about it with airplanes. We, for a lot of business purposes, English is the universal language.

And it is just assumed and known that like, if you fly an airplane and it makes sense, you know, your air traffic controllers, everybody that works on the ground, anybody who’s leading you in, anything that is a safety component, they all are going

to be speaking English to each other no matter where you came from. But you can imagine a situation which is not too far in the future. Well, that will not be necessary because the technology is so good.

I mean, you think it will be like a wearable or an implant. I mean, I think in our lifetime, we will be partially bionic, Seth.

I do think that. All of your Klingon language skills will be for not doing once. Anyone can understand Klingon.

Kapla.

That means I love you. It also means like fight and war and stuff too, but I do have a couple of words in Klingon.

33:13

Travel Friction And Language

It’s about as much as my French.

I think that, yeah, except there’s no air Klingon. There’s no.

Oh, just wait. Maybe someday. Maybe someday, Seth.

Yeah.

I think one of the things to think about always with travel is friction. I don’t want to get too, I worry sometimes we get too philosophical.

But since we’re talking about languages and words and all that stuff, the word travel itself comes from the word, like, travail is actually the root word. Like, it’s hard, it’s tough.

Like, I’ve read stuff about people being like, what was travel like in the medieval, in the medieval time? Be like, why would you do it? Like, it’s terrible.

Like, hotels and hospital have the same route as well, because like the Knights Hospitalier have like, anyways, we don’t need to get too far into it. But the point is that like, it’s really hard.

And what’s happened is only the really rich could travel because it was so difficult.

And at every stage over the last, really 200 years, like really starting like the 1850s, we’ve made each and every part of this industry easier and easier, less and less friction.

First, having hotels, then having transport, then from ocean liners to planes, then from random hotels to standardized brands, then from brochures and guidebooks to online travel agencies, instant book in and now social meeting.

You can pretty much now at any point, see anywhere in the world, get a 30-minute tour of what the hotel is going to look like. Look at the hotel rooms online. You can pretty much do your entire trip remotely and figure out what it’s going to be like.

That lowers me in a meaningful way. That lowers the barred entry. We are very experienced travelers.

I’m sure most of our listeners are very experienced travelers. You forget how much fear there it is. When you talk to someone who’s not a regular traveler, they’re actually scared of how will I get from the airport?

How will I do this? How will I do that? And the last great barrier is language.

And so if we are moving towards that, even for a while, it was Wi-Fi, your phone wouldn’t work. And now my phone works. Now I can Google math stuff.

So even directions, which are like this huge thing, is now a thing of the past because I’ve got Google Maps, Apple Maps. The final one is language.

Yeah, we used to just like travel around like pirates constantly.

It’s kind of fun where we were.

Yeah, it is kind of fun. Do you remember that? No.

Yeah, I do. Well, actually, what I remember is printing out MapQuest directions. But that was like my formative years.

Like it’s so you have your printer, you print them out and your passenger has to read them to you. No, turn left. No, no.

Fights in suit.

Which like you have to go over three lanes because you’re in the wrong lane on the-

36:12

Winners And Losers

Yeah.

That was the best part about Google Maps is the lane management. Yeah. Lane management, especially if you’re like us and live around New Jersey, which is just a nightmare in lane management.

So I think that we need to move on to winners and losers this week. So I have a winner this week. We haven’t talked about it and it’s shocking to me that we haven’t talked about it.

But at some time today, United States of America is launching Artemis 2 and going to the moon again. I find-

I didn’t know that.

Yes, I know. So for me, it’s a very- like it’s very, very cool.

I think it’s very, very cool. And so I would say, I would say the winner, I mean, fingers crossed that everything goes well. The winner today has got to be NASA.

Amazing.

What a great winner. Yeah. Love it.

What about a loser?

Who’s your loser this week? Yeah.

Am I a loser this week? I can’t pick another reality television star again, because there’s more reality television gossip.

Although, I won’t know it, so if you feel so inspired.

What about the institution of April Fool’s Day? Actually, the loser is anyone who put out an April Fool’s Day press release.

There you go. Absolutely. You should be ashamed of yourself.

If you wrote up a really funny, clever April Fool’s Day press release and press send, and said, this is going to be great, we still love you, but you’re the loser this week.

37:48

Airlines Week Wrap

Yeah.

Reach out to all of your journalist friends, make sure they’re okay at the end of today. Coms people, again, shame on you. Don’t do it.

I don’t know. I guess to wrap up, Seth. This week was really about airlines.

We got people going to the moon. We got online translation, we’ve got AI, but it’s really about airlines. That’s leadership, that’s alliances, that’s competition.

It’s all shifting at once. We are keeping an eye on everything as always, and we’ll let you know how it goes. We’ll see you next week.

Thanks everybody.

See you next time.