What is The Skift Travel 200?
The Skift Travel 200 (ST200) combines the financial performance of nearly 200 travel companies worth more than a trillion dollars into a single number. By bringing together the largest publicly traded travel companies from across the globe, the ST200 makes it easy to track travel industry performance for the first time ever.
How does it work?
Stock indices are often used to understand the performance of industries and nations. The Dow Jones tells us about the U.S. economy while the Nasdaq gives us insight into tech stocks. Yet despite being one of the world’s largest industries, travel has had no equivalent index until now.
The ST200 is the first ever to take a holistic look across the entire travel industry. It breaks down artificial barriers within travel by combining companies from five different sectors: accommodations, airlines, travel tech, cruises and tours, and ground transportation.
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Ground Transportation Sector (Homepage)
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Cruise and Tours Sector (Homepage)
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The travel sector has seen a dramatic expansion of public companies over the last few years. It started when Airbnb came public in late 2020. What followed were so many public offerings, we called 2021 the year of the travel IPO. Frontier and Sun Country IPO’ed, while the SPAC boom brought Sonder, Inspirato, and Vacasa into the public market, among many others.
This is great news for our industry. The wide range of public companies speaks to Travel’s growing maturity and prominence within the broader business community. It creates a valuable level of standardization and transparency into the financial health of the travel industry. And it provides us with a critical read on investor sentiment vis-à-vis travel.
But even as the number of public travel companies has grown, there was still no major stock index that tracked the performance of the travel industry.
The major hurdle is that travel is not often viewed as a proper industry itself. The global industry classification standard (GICS), which slices and dices major stock indexes into 11 different buckets does not consider travel to be a standalone industry. Instead, the Airlines are shunted as a sub-sector under the broader category of “Industrials.” Hotel brands fall under “Consumer Discretionary,” but hotel owners likely end up as “Real Estate.” Meanwhile online travel agencies fall into the “Information Technology” industry.
None of these are wrong per se, Expedia is a tech company and a Marriott stay is a discretionary consumer purchase. But by scattering travel companies across half a dozen different industries it is hard to take a holistic pulse of the industry or to aggregate financial data in a meaningful way.
The goal of Skift Research’s Skift Travel 200 is to rectify this problem and to build a stock index designed for the travel industry from the ground up. You can think of the Skift Travel 200 as the S&P 500 for the travel industry. The index currently tracks 196 public companies in the travel sector from 34 countries divided into five travel sectors and 14 sub-sectors. The cumulative market capitalization of our travel index is over one trillion dollars.