America’s Travel Problem Is Getting Worse

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On this episode of the Skift Travel Podcast, Sarah Kopit and Seth Borko unpack why inbound travel to the U.S. continues to weaken, what travelers abroad are actually saying about America, and how politics, affordability, safety perceptions, and global media narratives are reshaping tourism demand.

They also break down new Skift reporting on the growing pressure facing hotel owners as major brands continue expanding power through franchise agreements, creating tension between public hotel companies and independent operators trying to survive rising costs and shifting traveler expectations.

Later, the conversation turns to TikTok entering the travel booking business in the United States and why creators may become the next major gatekeepers in travel discovery and commerce. Seth explains why social commerce is moving beyond inspiration and into direct travel transactions, especially for tours, activities, and experiences.

The episode also explores the rise of women’s sports as a live tourism driver, the future of creator-led travel commerce, and what all of this says about where the travel industry is heading next.

Watch This Episode

The number of the week is negative 14%. That is the latest drop in inbound international tourism to the United States of America, just in time for the big summer football matches, just in time for the World Cup.

And at the same time, we have some new reporting from Skift that highlights pressure points across the travel industry while TikTok is launching a travel booking product in the United States of America. Seth, give me your thoughts on all of it.

I got a lot of thoughts on all of this stuff. That’s what this episode of the podcast is all about, Sarah. I’m excited to talk to you about this.

Yeah.

Let’s talk about the negative. I shouldn’t laugh. It just, I don’t know.

I don’t know what to say anymore. I mean, negative 14 percent, it’s like, I mean, that would have been for like last month and spring. But like we are like full into, we are almost at Memorial Day.

It is almost the summer and this is still going on.

Yeah. I mean, the street continues. I do think that there was some stuff with how you compare the numbers.

Like I think April 2024 was strong and the weekend that Easter falls on matters and all that stuff, the technical stuff does matter. But the bigger picture when you zoom out, from the month to month data, the trend line just continues.

It just, the US just struggles to attract international visitors. I mean, I genuinely believe that the brand has Brand USA, not the organization, the people.

Not Brand USA.

Sorry, not Brand USA. But I believe that USA, the brand, has really suffered, has some serious issues.

Well, I think, I mean, I was just in Asia, and it’s like my favorite thing to kind of do. And I don’t even have to try anymore.

Like, once people find out, you know, you’re an American, it’s all they want to talk about is kind of the chaos around what is going on here in the United States, and like the issues with our inbound travel, what do you think is going to happen with

the World Cup, blah, blah, blah. But the thing that I was most, I can’t stop me if we talked about this last time on the pod.

I can’t, sometimes like what we talk about on the pod and what we talk about like in real life, I can’t remember which one is which, and there’s Ben jet lag.

2:52

Is America Safe

But the biggest question that I got, which was really surprising to me was like, is the United States like physically safe?

I get that question all the time. I get that question all the time. Yeah.

I know.

And it’s so surprising, especially for me like in Tweed Carroll Gardens Brooklyn, especially right now. Like I wrote about this in the Trump Effect last week. You should see the flower boxes.

I mean, they are impressive. Like gardening is top notch here.

It’s spring, the spring has sprung. It’s one of the best seasons. It’s my birthday coming up.

Side note for all of our-

Mine too.

Yeah. Really?

Yes.

I don’t want to say on a podcast Sarah.

Mine is May 25th.

I’m like a week before you. I’m like a week before you. Sorry, podcast listeners, you are all my friends, but I don’t want too much personal information with my out there.

Would you like my mother’s maiden name and the city that I was born in as well?

Three digits of my social security?

No, but that is a funny thing because I don’t think that the US is a uniquely dangerous place. In fact, I think it’s a safe place.

Exactly.

So I’m not here on my soapbox talking about the US as a dangerous destination to visit. I just think it’s fascinating that that is what people think, and it is so much speaks to the news and the media that you consume and how it’s reported.

But I’m also not saying that that reporting is bad either. The reporting is not wrong. It’s just not going to affect you and your…

It’s a big country. It’s not going to affect you and your day-to-day lives, your day-to-day business. Yes.

And to the point, this downward trend in inbound travelers to the United States of America is surely linked to how all of our troubles, I suppose, our broadcast to the rest of the world.

I mean, they are connected. And the fact that we are getting these sorts of questions when we travel abroad, there’s no accident there. They are connected.

And I would say, especially here in New York City, I mean, the United States is an incredibly safe place. And even in New York, they get to bad rap for such things. It’s an incredibly safe city.

We have to worry about a lot of stuff, but that is not high on my list. Yeah, that is not high on my list. My physical safety.

I agree totally.

And by the statistics, definitely bear that out, that for all to talk about New York City being the big, bad, dangerous city there are, it is one of the safest big cities in America and in the world.

5:33

Why Visitors Stay Away

I mean, look, we did a survey over, I think it was over a year ago now, last April, which is when Trump’s first Liberation Day came out, which is where a lot of this trend started.

And we asked people and they gave, I mean, the answers are clear and straightforward. And quite frankly, we haven’t updated the survey. And maybe this is, you can criticize me, but like, I don’t think we need to.

I think the data speaks for itself and still is true. The number one reason, number one reason why people are avoiding the US is the political situation. They don’t want to endorse the US’s politics.

Number two is distant but related. You’ll remember this survey was done around Liberation Day, but it’s also like tariffs and trade policy and just economic policy.

You know, if you feel like the US has sort of been in the lead, this is different from, related but different from politics, but if you feel that the US has been in the vanguard of causing economic distress, you probably don’t want to support it.

I’m sure with the war in Iran and oil prices that we get blamed for that. I mean, I don’t know if we should, whatever. But we take some blame for that as well.

We get blamed for that.

That’s a fair statement.

And then number is factual, right? And then number three comes back to tie these all together. Safety and security shows up.

And that was especially with stories about border patrol, stories about violence, stories about all these things. And then the other big issue is affordability, which ties right back into this whole conversation that we’re having.

By the way, the inflation data just came out. We didn’t talk about that. It could have been another number of the week.

Very high inflation. Inflation is actually fine. It’s decent inflation if you exclude energy.

I think airline tickets were number two on that list for right now.

And that’s a direct reflection of energy costs, right?

Exactly.

Yes. Yeah, that’s jet fuel, but yeah.

So the US is an expensive destination. And also, by the way, it just structurally is an expensive destination.

If you are one of these large outbound markets in Europe or Asia, there are a lot of local places you can go that probably are cheaper just by virtue of the fact that the flights are shorter and they burn less jet fuel, and they burn less jet fuel

before jet fuel doubled in price. And now that jet fuel has doubled in price, it’s very expensive. So I think the brand’s been damaged. The affordability is an issue.

The welcome-ness isn’t there. And all of this in time for the World Cup, which is just perfect.

Yeah.

8:07

World Cup Reality Check

So let’s see. So I believe the first game match, not a sports fan, is June 19th. So it is May 13th.

So we’re just a little over a month away. I still believe that when it all shakes out, the World Cup will be a success. Everybody’s going to say it was.

It’s what level of success, like the Delta, as I’ve been saying for a year, like what it’s going to be and what it could have been, that’s the number I really want to see. Why do you think this is going to change?

Do you think May and June are going to be the same? Are we going to see a dramatic shift? Next month, just because people, they are going to start coming?

Well, people, I mean, we should.

I mean, we’re on a month delay, so we just got the April, it’s May, we just got the April numbers. I do not know what May will look like.

I imagine, I mean, I think if we’re going to see a shift, you’d better see it in June, and which is the World Cup, and those June numbers will come out in July.

So I think come July, we will have a very good sense of whether these numbers are going to be affected. I mean, we’ll start to get a sense in May. May will also have some timing differences, again, with like the Easter stuff and everything.

So I think June is the real test. So the July data released into July for June data will be the real test of what’s happening.

9:38

Market Breakdown Canada EU Asia

I mean, I would call out a couple of things, just looking through these numbers, I’m referring to our own report in here, which says Statistics Canada showed that Canadian resident return trips.

So what Canada does is we measure inbound travel from Canada and Canada measures return travel. We release them on different schedules. The Canadian data comes first.

So our own report says Canadian resident return trips rose 1.4% year over year in April, the first gain in 15 months. However, that gain came off of a low base last April, where travel from Canada to the US was down 30%.

So we’ve just seen the reversal of this trend with Canadians. They may be ready to forgive us a little bit, but it’s also a statistical anomaly. It’s very hard to tease these things apart.

The other thing I would point out in the data was Japan was up 5% year on year in April, and China was technically negative, but it was down negative 0.8%. And I think that’s one of the hidden, I mean, that’s basically around an era we call flat.

So China flat, Japan up, Canada flat, but flat off of a terrible 2024. Meanwhile, the European Union continues to post pretty consistent, like negative teens, negative 10s, 12s, 13s. So I think the people coming from Canada, it’s the cheapest.

They can drive. They don’t have a longer flight. That’s the first tell.

I think it’s interesting that China is covering a little bit. I think China is an interesting story that people don’t talk enough about. They’ve just signed visa-free agreements with Canada, with the UK, with the European Union.

Long-haul international China seems to, China outbound travel from China seems to be recovering. So I’m going to look at the Canadian data. I’m going to look at the Chinese data.

But we seem to be pretty stuck, generally stuck with, I mean, yeah. To have 1.4 percent growth from Canada off a negative 30 percent last year base, it’s hard to call that growth.

Yeah. Yeah. And I am very curious to President Trump and his entourage of tech billionaires has landed in China today as we’re recording this.

11:50

China Trip Visa Talk

And so I’m curious to see if we get any travel industry headlines out of that. I’m curious what, if anything, they’re going to talk about or we’re going to learn that they talked about as these days go on.

I mean, I won’t say I wouldn’t be surprised, but I think it’s worth putting on our radar looking for a visa-free travel agreement. Because we know that Chinese diplomats have been all across the European Union signing these agreements.

They just did it with the UK. They just did it with China. I’m sure they would love to do it with the US.

It’ll probably be discussed. I don’t know if it will be agreed to, but it will probably be discussed.

There’s currently a loophole that lets most Americans travel visa-free for, I think, a week in China, as long as you don’t return directly back to the US. So if you tack Korea or Japan onto your trip, then you can go visa-free to China.

So I wouldn’t be surprised to see that as a bit of a carrot and stick conversation. I don’t know if it will get publicized. So I think this is a bigger trend, too, where we are seeing some divergence.

Where if Chinese tourism starts to grow, if Xi Jinping and President Trump sign something, we could see a reversal of the tourism numbers, but not out of Europe, which I think says a lot.

Yeah, the Europeans, they’re with the Canadians. The Europeans and the Canadians are, they’re holding their anger.

Pretty significant damage, Don. Like very significant damage, Don. So, and by the way, the World Cup is not just a US World Cup, it is a North American World Cup.

There will be travel to Canada, will be travel to Mexico. I’m also quite curious to see if people choose to travel all the way to North America, but then avoid the US.

I think that could be an interest in story of Canada and Mexico World Cup trippers who skipped the US. I don’t know if that would happen, but it’s possible.

I cannot see. I mean, this is the very practical nature of the way that I think coming out. I can’t possibly see that happen, but who knows?

Who knows?

Who knows? Yeah.

14:03

Hotel Owners Squeezed

Well, you know what I’d like to talk to you a little bit about, Sarah? If that’s OK?

Yeah, go for it.

Can we talk a bit more about your feature? I know you wouldn’t want to bring it up yourself, but I want to bring it up on your behalf.

OK.

The feature that you wrote about, the squeeze, which is hotel owners, basically trapped in the middle between brands on one end, we’re capturing a lot of economic value and customers on the other end who have very high requests and want affordable

pricing and their own cost structure. And the hotel owners are going to squeeze in the middle. This story got a lot of traction. I saw a lot of comments to it.

And this is a bit of a social media cheat, but I would like to react to the reaction if you’re open to that.

It’s very meta of you, Seth. It’s very 2026.

I’m trying to learn how to grow our podcast here.

I know it’s been discussed on other people’s podcasts, which is honestly terribly flattering. That’s kind of crazy to me. And I do read comments on LinkedIn.

I’ve gotten okay with doing that. I know it’s shown up a lot on X and on Twitter, but I do not go into the comment cesspool there very often, until you flagged it to me.

Should we go into the comment cesspool on X?

Let’s go. Let’s go. Let’s go there.

So we have a couple of people.

One of them that stood out to me, it got a lot of traction.

This guy, Pritesh, at Pritesh SMB, posted about your story about how, basically, he was calling out, there were so many elements of this story, and I’m really not just trying to toot your horn here, but there were so many great elements starting.

He’s calling out how quickly the brands can crap down. Basically, it doesn’t matter how much money you put in, doesn’t matter how good a relationship you have, you screw up, they’re going to terminate it instantly within a couple of days.

And that was one of these elements of the squeeze that you kind of… Well, actually, that was one of your earlier…

The first story in this feature about the hotel industry wasn’t built this, about how political pressure led to franchise agreements getting terminated real fast. I mean, I think that’s an interest in one that people react to.

I don’t think, again, I think Pratesh knows this. It seems like he does a lot of independent hotels, but I don’t think a lot of people realize just how at the mercy of the franchises, the franchisers, the franchisees are.

And I think that’s the thread that goes through both of the stories. And I’ll give you a little kind of insight or preview.

The next one in the series is going to be about hotels who go independent, for whatever reason, who decide to drop their flags.

But I think that that kind of asymmetry or just that how much power and how much lack of bargaining, or there really is no discussion between the brands and the hotel owners. It’s like, this is the agreement. You sign it or you don’t.

That’s pretty much how it is. I mean, there’s probably a few exceptions here and there. But for the most part, that is how it works.

And the brands have immense and total power to pretty much do whatever they want. Once they’re franchisees, and the franchisees have just fortunes, their whole family fortunes are pretty much in this.

And so, when it all goes bad, it’s pretty devastating for those folks.

There are a lot of comments as I go through the cesspool that tend to actually maybe side with the brands.

17:47

Comment Cesspool Debate

A lot of people saying, well, you should have known better or… Actually, I thought there was even one interest in comment that said the lawyers, this guy’s post was saying, did your lawyers flag this one line to you?

And this one guy says, the lawyers do flag it and they sign anyways. They don’t have a choice. They have to sign it.

Yeah.

If they want the agreement, they do have to. And I’ve talked to a lot of franchise lawyers and I was one myself once upon a time. Like, that’s like, no, they’re not changing anything.

Like, you know, it is a take it or leave it kind of contract.

Yeah. Lots of discussion about ICE too, especially because ICE was the topic of this. People’s opinions on whether they deserve to lose it does tend to go with their opinion on ICE.

I thought it was funny. There is one commenter though, who in the thread about your article, which features the ICE as a story, says, this is so random. This is coming up in my feed.

I saw this in the news a couple of weeks ago. I’m pretty sure there was a hotel in Minneapolis that lost their flag because of this. So another lesson that the commenters don’t really read.

Yeah.

People don’t read their emails. They don’t even read what they’re commenting on. I will say just a little kind of like shout out to my, or not shout out, but do you know why I don’t read the comments in the cesspool?

Like it is not, yes. It is not a safe place for female journalists to be reading the comments on X. Like I was just thinking, I was, before we got on, I was thinking about my former colleague, Joe Wiesenthal and Tracy Allouey.

They have a podcast at Bloomberg called Oblots. And I just remember him talking about once, and I think I got this right. They did posts once where they did an experiment, and they wrote two posts and they flipped it.

Like Tracy sent it to Joe, and Joe sent it to Tracy, and the comments on Joe were like, oh, you are a brilliant god. And for Tracy, it was like, die. And that’s pretty much how it goes.

So LinkedIn is a little softer. I don’t feel scared going into the comment section on LinkedIn, but X is a whole different ball game.

20:14

Are Brands the Villains

Well, and speaking of well, actually well thought out and reasonable responses, there was actually an op-ed that was published on another publication on Hospitality Net by Sloan.

Yeah, a rebuttal even.

Yeah, a rebuttal, Mike.

Sloan Dean, who’s a former Hospitality CEO. Well, he starts by saying how much he loves your article. He says, this is a great article.

Sarah did such a nice job, you have to read it. Obviously, anything before the word but doesn’t count. He says, it was a great article, but he says that you were cast in the brands as the villains.

Let me ask you this. I’m just curious. I think this is an interesting conversation.

Yeah.

Did you think that you were cast in the brands as the villains or is that-

No, you didn’t. Yeah.

No, I didn’t. And I would say maybe a little bit more even in the first one. I worried about that a little bit more or I thought about it.

Worry is the wrong word. I thought about it. In the squeeze, I really didn’t think so.

I think what’s happening now is a result of structural deficiencies that- it’s not that they weren’t thought out when this system was originated. But I think that just what is happening in our economy right now, it’s unusual.

And it’s something that hasn’t really happened to- it’s a stress test on a business formation that we’ve not really seen before. And so I wouldn’t necessarily call them villains.

And they have talked about this very openly. The CEOs of the big hotel brands, they have said that they know that their good fortune is inextricably linked to their hoteliers doing well. Like they can’t have people just failing en masse.

Like that’s not good for them either. But then on the flip side, these are publicly traded companies. It is their job, it is their mission, it is their fiduciary duty to their shareholders to make money.

I mean, that’s their whole point. So their whole reason to exist is to make a profit.

22:32

Brands Aren’t Self-Correcting

That is capitalism, that is nobody’s fault necessarily, but that’s their job and they are doing it like gangbusters right now. So I think this is just a, I don’t really think that they are villains.

I think they just happen to be the ones who are doing well in a situation where it’s really easy to have a lot of sympathy for the hotelier, for the small business. This is a David and Goliath situation where Goliath is winning. David is not winning.

He’s doing pretty good.

Yeah. I do want to give Sloan Dean a shout out for a really thoughtful response, the exact opposite of a Twitter cesspool. But I would agree with you.

I mean, he says in this thing, owners went into this thing, they signed these 20-year agreements, they went into it with eyes open, they know what they were signed up for.

And I think that your point is exactly right, which is that whenever you write a profile of a struggling restaurant or struggling small business, everyone went into that with their eyes open.

They all knew that this is not like no one goes into these businesses to be fabulously wealthy, but you can still write about their struggles and you can still write about who has succeeded and who is failing.

I also think and I would critique the critique just a little bit, and maybe he’ll respond to us and we’ll respond to him, and who knows how long this will keep going on for.

But he says the system is self-correcting, and that if people didn’t want these brands, that the brands would stop, that they would stop adding more brands, and that the system would self-correct. And I have to say, I just don’t agree with that.

I think that the feedback loop for these brands doesn’t come from consumers, it comes from hotel owners. If hotel owner, the buyer of a new brand is a hotel owner.

If a hotel owner is willing to buy the brands and they will continue to create new brands.

But to Dean’s own point and to our own point, we won’t know if these brands worked for 20 years, arguably 40 years after you have to renew the franchise agreements, the second or third time around.

24:32

AI Will Cull Hotel Brands

And in the meantime, I think we actually wrote a whole piece in Skift Research for this. I think consumers are getting, if not fed up with new brands, they’re getting confused.

Brands don’t stand for anything and we are entering a new world of AI search and discovery. There’s all sorts of new gatekeepers, whether it’s AI, actually, whether it’s social media, whether it’s whatever.

And if your brands don’t stand for anything, then the reality is there’s going to be fewer and fewer brands surfaced in the future, in my opinion. AI is going to trim it down. Your favorite creator is going to trim it down.

There’s going to be more curation, more selection from trusted intermediaries. And if you have a million brands that all don’t stand for anything, then why even have a brand in the first place, right?

I mean, other than maybe a couple of loyalty plans or points. And we’ve discussed this before that loyalty programs are not always the free lunch they’re made out to be.

So I don’t know that this, maybe the system is self-correcting over a 50-year timeframe, when the first round of hotel investors needs to renew their mortgage in 20 years and see if they want to stick with this brand or not.

But it’s nowhere near as self-correcting in the real-time sense that we think about a stock market or even a consumer good being self-correcting. So that otherwise made a lot of good points.

We can even discuss, he talks about cost of software and distribution, and we talk about that along the skip research side, and that’s absolutely real.

But I think your point, Sarah, which is the right one, it’s not about winners or losers, it’s about how hard it is. In many ways, it’s about how hard it is to run a small business period in America. Doesn’t have to be a hotel business.

So you talked a little bit about AI and creators and social media.

26:13

TikTok Shop Meets Travel

So let’s stop talking about me for a moment. Let’s talk about TikTok. I must say that I have almost 15-

and 12-year-old here at the Kopit house, and the amount of packages that come from the TikTok shop is overwhelming.

Is that true? It is. Wow.

So what happens is they’re logged in, and the cash kind of remembers things, and then the little small Kopit will come pattering in and say, Mom, I really need, I need it, I need it.

And it’s only $5.99. Can I get it? Please, please, please, please, please, please.

Keep my room clean. And I generally relent. So the TikTok shop, I can tell you from market research in my own house, the TikTok shop is, is very effective in selling at least kind of small junky goods.

We have talked a lot about how vacations are not that, they are the opposite of that. And so what do you think? You think, you think TikTok is going to be able to make a go of it?

I think they are. So I’m curious to see if you think they are.

Yes, the news, which I don’t know if we said explicitly, the news is that TikTok shop is launching for travel in the United States, and they’re partnering with brands as well as OTAs and intermediaries, so that increasingly you can watch, just like

you watch your favorite influencer talk about a handbag or a tchotchke or a dirt bike or whatever. Now when they talk about travel, you’ll be able to book a room or a flight or an experience.

I noticed in the list of partners, they have a lot of experiential partners, like I think you can get tickets and get your guide. So I suspect that they’re going to really go in on, I just think just from the perch.

Well, so I think they will succeed. Let me answer your question directly.

I do too.

I think they will succeed.

28:08

Why Experiences Sell First

I think they can particularly succeed in the experiences category. Booking a $2,000 flight on Impulse, that’s hard. Booking a seven night stay in a hotel on Impulse, I don’t know.

But if you already booked a trip to Iceland, let’s just say I’m picking a random country, and they have a very well organized and very digitized experience economy, and you’re offered a, I just did this at the Blue Lagoon and look, you can book it

too, and it’s 50 bucks. That’s in that sweet spot where you really can’t impulse buy. And once you get used to buying travel on TikTok, then it ladders up to hotels and flights and cars and the big stuff too.

And I really think it just needs to work once, maybe twice. If you do it twice and it works out great for you, then I think, why not? Why not do your flight that way too?

It’s just a different button.

Yeah. We talk about this with AI, it just needs to work a couple of times. Then my counterpoint was it just needs to break a couple of times with AI.

But creators have so much more trust than AI. AI is this faceless, outridden machine. Your creator is a real human.

It’s Sarah Kopit on her vacation, and you feel like you know her, and she got great taste, so it’s going to be a good experience to buck.

She just gave you her birthday and her children’s ages.

Yeah.

29:40

Survey Data on Social Booking

But I think, so let’s pull up some charts. So Skift Research has done some work on this. This was a study that we did.

So what we’re looking at again for our listeners, we asked about comfort level with booking directly through a social media platform. This was US travelers.

Thirty-four percent said they were very comfortable with booking directly through social media. Thirty percent said that they were somewhat comfortable. Let’s add those together.

Sixty-four percent, almost two-thirds of American travelers have told us in our surveys that they’re at least open to this idea. At a bare minimum, somewhat comfortable. Many of them are very comfortable with this idea.

So I think it will be a very low, I think it’s a behavior that consumers can learn very easily. And like you said, Sarah, they’ve already been trained on how to do it with, you know, micro-transactions and with retail transactions.

I think that training on the retail end is super important. And TikTok, I’m trying to think if there’s anybody else that, well, I guess Instagram. Like, I buy things on Instagram, things I don’t need.

Well, I mean, that’s the thing.

Instagram now has these tools. YouTube now has these tools. Meta, Facebook has these tools.

So, you know, I think if the case, use case gets proved out, it will be pretty easy to turn it on on other platforms. And I now see whatever they call them, stickers or whatever on Instagram or on YouTube, where you can buy products as well.

31:08

Creators Close the Funnel

And so I think this is really the next stage of the creator economy, you know, moving beyond, and this was a mega trend in 2025, moving beyond influencers as just influencer, like this was a distinction that Raphit liked to make, and I think it’s a

good one, where influencers sit at the top of a funnel, and it’s literally the name influence. Whereas these new creators are really sent the bottom of the funnel.

They don’t just take a pretty picture of a beach in Bali and influence you to consider a trip to Southeast Asia.

They will walk you through live in either 20 TikToks or a live stream or a YouTube or whatever, or an Instagram Reels, and they’ll walk you through and they’ll say, by the way, this is the guy I did it with, come book with him.

Yeah. And like, why wouldn’t you?

And why wouldn’t you? Why wouldn’t you? We have another chart I’ll pull up.

And this one, I will give credit, I think I, I, I mean, we gave credit, we borrowed this one from Jeremy Johnsey, who has been on the podcast before, Beautiful Destinations.

Yeah.

He’s really into social commerce. And I think he pulled together a bunch of these stats that we’ve since used as well. There are 36 million TikTok social shoppers in the United States as of 2024.

So your, your kids, Sarah, are in very good company.

Good company. Yeah.

What I think is shocking is that that 36 million figure was 4 million in 2020. So basically in the five years since the pandemic, we’ve added over 30 million social TikTok shoppers in the US. 30 million in five years.

So that’s 10% of the US population. That’s huge. Huge.

And when you look at the social commerce, social commerce is a percentage of e-commerce in other countries. It’s something like 10% globally.

These numbers, I have to say, I’m not trying to critique Jeremy live on air, although I am doing it somewhat. The numbers were 10% globally, 15% in China, and 8% in the United States. I don’t know if those numbers are exactly right.

I suspect they’re a little bit lower, but I think the directionality is correct, as in the usage of social commerce in China is double that of what it is in the United States, and that the United States lags the global average by fifth, or whatever

the number is. I don’t know the exact numbers, but I think the order of magnitudes are right, that we’ve added 30 million social shoppers, we’ve just launched travel for TikTok, and we are behind the curve in the United States.

I think that’s the story I’m trying to tell, and that’s the direction that the world is going in, and I think we’re actually not on the cutting edge, we’re on the wagon edge in this scenario.

I would agree. And I’m sure you’ve seen like the live shopping in China online. Like isn’t that nuts?

Isn’t that crazy? It’s like we have no equivalent of that here in the West, but I bet it’s coming.

Well, we have Home Shopping Network. Isn’t that the equivalent of that in the US?

Bless. I haven’t thought about them since the 90s, Seth.

Well, yeah, I think yes.

Everything old is new again, honestly. Seriously, I haven’t thought about them.

34:25

Live Streaming Travel Commerce

I mean, the opposite of TikTok, which is the short-form scrollable videos, is live streaming, which are these multi-hour long, three, four, five-hour marathon sessions where you just see into everyone’s lives.

And there’s a whole genre of live streamers traveling and basically taking you with them on their vacation and doing activities on their vacation. And I’ve actually thought for a while, this is super under-monetized.

We did a story, I think Ralph did a story on one of them. Oh no, Expedia just signed a deal with one of them. I Show Speed, who, if you don’t know, is a huge, huge streamer.

But he’s the biggest and he’s signed now and he’s got the brand deal and whatever. But there are, I won’t say a million other, but a thousand other that are doing this at a much smaller scale.

And I think the other way to think about it is also like watch time. They get 50,000 viewers, but those viewers spent six hours with them.

That’s got to be worth a lot more than X number, that’s worth a lot more than 200,000 viewers who spend 30 seconds with you, right?

Yeah.

And so we’re seeing it come from both ends, but the long form end with iShow Speed, we’re seeing it come from the short form end with TikTok, we’re seeing the integrations happen, both these brand partnerships, affiliate relationships, and now just

true seamless e-commerce. Yeah, I mean, our trend for 2025 lives on, that creators are the new power brokers in travel. I think that that lives on.

Yeah.

35:51

Winners and Losers Segment

Let’s do some Winners and Losers. I had a little bit of a think about this. Just basically, I don’t know, I’ve got a winner.

Can I do a winner?

You can do a winner.

36:03

Liberty Game Marketing Win

Okay.

So I, on Friday, I went to the New York Liberty opening game here in Brooklyn at the Barclay Center. It was just a rock and roll good time. And I’ve been to a Nets game also at the Barclay Center.

It was not that. It was completely different. It was like wildly different.

So my winner of the week is not just the New York Liberty, who did win, but whoever does, whoever is working on the back end there of doing, who made all of that happen. I mean, the stadium was sold out.

To state the obvious, this is a women’s basketball game. So the stadium was sold out. Everybody had a towel that they whipped around.

I mean, it was like going to see a Rangers game at Madison Square Garden.

That’s awesome.

Which is amazing. So the other thing that is incredible is the mascot, which I was unfamiliar with, I must say, although my daughter told me was like, how can you not know about Ellie?

So Ellie is an elephant, and she is the New York Liberty’s mascot. She is a sassy elephant. And she is, like, she’s a, I don’t know, like, I don’t know, like I said, I’m not a huge sports fan, so like, I’m, I am not the one.

But like my daughter and her girls basketball team, like, they like tracked this elephant, the mascot, the person wearing, I don’t know. Maybe we can bring up-

They’re Ellie the Elephant superfans.

Yes, and they, they found her, and they like, I mean, the selfies and like all of it. Anyway, it is like a marketing masterclass, I think, of what the New York Liberty has been able to do. And we talk about live tourism a lot.

We talk about live tourism and sports. I mean, we spent the first half of this podcast talking about the World Cup. So my winner of the week is the New York Liberty and the elephant.

That’s your tip.

That’s the tip. When you come into New York City for the World Cup, instead of paying $100 to go to the Meadowlands, you can just go to the Barclays Center and see the LED elephant and the WOV. That’s a great winner.

I can’t beat that. I can’t beat that.

38:33

Hantavirus Cruise Panic

Loser? I mean, I’ve gotten so on the downer, but I’ve got an obvious loser that we haven’t talked about. The hantavirus cruise ship and all that has to do with it.

I know.

And we could talk about social media about that too, which I found very distressing having, I used to cover this for Bloomberg and just watching it all over again, like flashbacks to 2020 with miss and disinformation.

That’s my point here, was just kind of insane.

It’s terrible. I mean, we haven’t really covered it too much on Skift. I guess we’re treating it more like a business of travel story, right?

Is that what the deal is?

Well, it hasn’t become one yet.

Yeah.

I think that’s the thing. I think, fingers crossed, knock on wood here, this is an isolated incident on a ship, as opposed to more of a trend or a crisis in travel.

We haven’t seen any hints that it is impacting anything other than that ship, at least for right now, it’s definitely something we’re keeping our eyes on though.

No, I think it shows how traumatized the world is, because it is right now only, I mean, someone will criticize me or pull this clip up, not with my birthday, but with all my other information, pull this clip up and talk about how I was so wrong, and

I hope I’m right. But right now, it’s only a few cases, and I mean, but it’s so clear that the panic is there. So it’s been really scary. I mean, I’ve been a little scared, it’s been tough to watch.

And what’s so tough about it was it seemed like it was a great cruise, seemed like a great trip, seemed like a great vacation, like a dream vacation turned nightmare. Oh, I mean, that’s sad.

And to see the new friends around, what really, I mean, people are really dying, and it’s like this crazy media circus over, I don’t know, that’s my loser of the week, the whole circus.

So next week, what we’ll do is we’ll do the loser first, and then we’ll do the winner. So we can do this for how long?

We haven’t learned the lesson that we have to… Maybe our editors can cut that and reverse that.

Yeah, we can fix it in post, as they say, as they say in the business. We’ll just fix it in post.

40:57

Ending on Women’s Sports

Well, I mean, I think, let’s go back to the positive for just a second and we’ll wrap this up, but I think it’s incredible what’s going on with women’s sports, with WNBA, with also, by the way, I don’t know the name, but the New York women’s hockey

team played an exhibition match at Madison Square Garden. We did it. It was like, packed. It was a blast.

I think we’re a little behind the scenes at Skift, but he’s not a SNAR staff accountant now, he’s been promoted, but a senior person on our accounting team is a huge hockey fan, and he went and was telling me he loved it. That’s awesome.

That’s so cool. Yeah, and Ted Laszlo is coming out with Soon, and Ted will be coaching the women’s team this time around. Everything old is new again.

To talk about 2020 all over again, but that’s what I just saw. So we can talk TV anytime. I should just do a TV podcast too.

That’d be great.

Yeah, absolutely.

42:00

Wrap Up and Sign Off

Did you see the Devil Wears Prada? Now we gotta cut this. We gotta end this stuff.

I gotta ask you that afterwards.

Goodbye, everybody. See you next week.

Thank you for listening.

We’re just gonna stop now. Thank you for listening. Yup, bye-bye.