Airbnb Muscles Its Way Into Top 3 Strongest Travel Companies: Skift Health Score

Skift Research updated its Skift Health Score for April 2021. This month takes a look at how publicly traded travel companies fared during their fourth quarter earnings.

The Skift Health Score is a proprietary metric that assesses the strengths of public travel companies. Our current version includes scores for 94 travel companies across hospitality, airline, cruise, and online travel and distribution sectors.

The Health Score ranges on a scale of 0–100, calculated by selecting and weighting 23 individual indicators that are core to a company’s overall strength. All the 23 indicators fall under three categories, each a crucial component for a company’s overall health.

- Survivability: how prepared each company is to weather the current Covid-19 crisis.

- Current Performance: how each company is operating at present.

- Future Prospects: how well-positioned each company is to return to growth in a post-coronavirus world.

The below is an excerpt from our April 2021 Skift Health Score update. The full report includes the top ten healthiest travel companies from this past month and the full dataset of 94 different travel businesses.

Top Travel Companies for April 2021

Skift Health Scores perked up in April as hopes for a travel recovery solidified and companies moved past their dismal summer 2020 financial performance.

The severity of localized COVID-19 outbreaks continues to be the primary driver or inhibitor of travel industry performance. Differences in the success of government lockdowns and quarantine measures had already been driving a regional divergence between companies. And now, the uneven rollout of a COVID vaccine has only exacerbated those geographical differences.

Europe, which had been successfully locked down when we published this report last, has since seen a resurgence in Covid cases, while the U.S.’ vaccination program has outpaced most of the world leading to travel optimism. As a result, U.S. companies surged to the top of our Skift Health Score rankings, displacing their European counterparts.

The top four companies of our Skift Health Score for April 2021 are Hilton Holdings, Booking Holdings, Airbnb, and Marriott International. All are based in the United States and focus on the hospitality industry. Booking Holdings, admittedly, still primarily operates in the European market, but it has been taking advantage of the current state of disruption to gain market share in the United States.

Booking has fallen from the number one spot to number two. While Intercontinental Hotels (formerly #2) and Ryanair (formerly #3) fell in the rankings. Again, this is to be expected with the reversal in the relative success of Europe and America’s COVID-fighting efforts since last summer.