Charuta Fadnis, senior vice president, research & product strategy at Phocuswright hosted ‘The Breakfast Show In North America’ at WiT Virtual Summit on 24 June when she interviewed Melissa Maher, chief inclusion officer & senior vice president, Expedia Group, on issues from the company’s recovery programme to its diversity and inclusion initiatives.

Here are the key takeaways:

Helping hotel and hospitality partners recover

Expedia has a large recovery plan in place after carrying out research with 10,000 hotel partners, asking them what they want to see from a recovery standpoint, and built a whole programme around that, reveals Melissa Maher.

“The other thing that’s very important for us is focusing on destinations. We set aside US$25 million in advertising and marketing for destinations at large, so making sure that as destinations start to open, we’re supporting them at the destination level.

“Another thing that we’ve done, which is kind of interesting for the hotel and hospitality industry is we just launched Expedia Group Academy. … We got a lot of feedback that we could take the learning material that we have and open up it more broadly to the hospitality industry, particularly the industry team members who have been furloughed, using our training materials to give them an opportunity to upskill themselves. We have Expedia Group leaders who are leading some sessions, as well as other industry experts. We’re very excited about this as it is something new and unique to really help our hospitality partners around the world from hospitality.

Is Expedia’s US$275 million recovery fund to shore up the group’s competitive position and have hoteliers get more dependent on the company?

“Good question. As I said, we went to our partners and asked them our partners what they wanted from us and built the programme around that. We talked to over 10,000 hotel partners, did 125 webinars just to get a feel for what partners wanted. And that’s why we built the programme, we really want to be at the centre of helping travel rebound.

“And as I mentioned, hoteliers want visibility in our store, for when travel rebounds they want to be front and centre. They want data. So we’re giving an enhanced data that that goes beyond what we were giving before and driving demand into their particular hotels. It’s completely optional, hotels can opt in or opt out if they want to.

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