How travel industry site Skift survived the pandemic

Brian Morrissey interviewed Skift CEO Rafat Ali about how the travel industry site survived during COVID and is now growing.

Morrissey writes, “Travel was historically broken into sectors – flights, hotels, cruises, meetings – but that’s not how consumers approached the category, so Skift took the POV of people, not vendors.

“Media and data make sense together… on paper. In media, the cliche ‘Uber for X’ pitch is the ‘Bloomberg for X’ pitch. Using publishing as a top of the funnel for a high-priced, recurring revenue data business is a business school case study. The problem: These are very different businesses to staff and run. Skift originally cast itself as a ‘travel intelligence company,’ but ended up being a media company.

“Covid expanded the talent pool. Skift used the pandemic to become a permanently distributed company. As it has hired people back, of the 20 people brought on, only one has been based in New York City. That’s led to a great expansion of its talent pool, not to mention a lower cost base.”

Read more here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.