Women Leading Travel & Hospitality’s latest report, Women in Travel Tech: Innovators Leading Us Into the Future, highlights the decision makers at the forefront of a rapidly changing time for our industry. The women featured in this report will share actions they’ve taken, plans for the future, and lessons learned while working to incorporate and...
As organizations prepare to have their employees return to corporate offices and headquarters, go fully remote, or some hybrid of the two, there are still many questions that need to be answered and concerns to be addressed. As such, sister brands Women in Retail Leadership Circle (WIRLC) and Women Leading Travel & Hospitality surveyed executives...
Women Leading Travel & Hospitality, and its sister brand, Women in Retail Leadership Circle, have produced an extremely timely report for executives who are creating a back-to-office strategy.
This latest Women Leading Travel & Hospitality report highlights how nine executive-level women in the travel and hospitality industry reacted initially to the pandemic, sustained their companies and teams over the last year-plus, and are now looking optimistically to the future. They come from a variety of sectors — airline, hotel, cruise, tourism. Interviewees include: • Natalie Bowman, managing director, marketing and advertising, Alaska Airlines; • Julia Vander Ploeg, senior vice president, global head of digital and technology, Hyatt; • Isis Ruiz, chief marketing officer and senior vice president, Norwegian Cruise Line; and • other exceptional travel and hospitality leaders.
Women Leading Travel & Hospitality is proud to present its first annual list of top women executives in the travel and hospitality industry. Coming off a very challenging year for our world and the travel and hospitality industry, the 2021 Top Women Leading Travel & Hospitality report features women leaders who continuously showed resiliency, perseverance and grit through difficult times. Some of the 2021 honorees include: President, Carnival Cruise Line; Chairwoman, Booking.com; Global Head of Operations, Airbnb; Chief Global Diversity and Inclusion Officer, Delta Air Lines; Group President, Marriott International.
CEOs and board members will need to expand their thinking in a way that transforms how they work together for the benefit of all. So, what are the trends emerging among CEOs and board directors as they step into the future side by side? To find out, we asked 105 directors and CEOs in North...
As organizations navigate the Great Resignation of 2021, all eyes are on an essential — but historically undervalued — workforce. Recent events have thrust frontline workers into the spotlight. Now it’s time to open up the floor to them, too.
Women in the Workplace is the largest study on the state of women in corporate America. In 2015, LeanIn.Org and McKinsey & Company launched the study to give companies insights and tools to advance gender diversity in the workplace. Between 2015 and 2021, over 750 companies participated in the study, and more than a quarter...
Women in Retail Leadership Circle (WIRLC) is proud to present its 11th annual list of the top women executives in the retail industry. Like the prior 10 years, the 2021 Top Women in Retail list features a who’s who in the industry. Honorees, some of whom were nominated by WIRLC members, Inner Circle e-newsletter subscribers,...
In this report, McKinsey & Company and Skift Research assess the current traveler experience and find mixed signals. While surveys and rating analyses show many travelers are satisfied with their experiences—some, surprisingly, more so than before COVID-19—a deeper look at the data reveals troubling undercurrents.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, travel and tourism represented more than 10 percent of the global economy, powered by 56X growth in international travel from 1950 to 20192. But as travel boomed, so much of it became the same — all the same places at all the same times. Then in 2020, it came to a...
Clarity in a time of change – rebuilding travel. Fielded August 4, U.S. National 1,000 adults.
To ensure organizations succeed in a rapidly changing business world, a new kind of future-ready leader must take priority. Current models of leadership go some way to answering this, but research by the Korn Ferry Institute reveals the ideal leader for today’s disruptive business environment: the self-disruptive leader. This new model of a high-performing leader...
When roughly 94 percent of Fortune 1000 chief executive officers are men, what qualities drive the 6 percent who are women to the most elite reaches of corporate leadership? To find out, Korn Ferry Institute studied 57 women who have been CEO — 38 currently and 19 previously — at Fortune 1000-listed companies and others of similar size. We analyzed structured interviews with all 57 women as well as the results of psychometric assessments taken by two-thirds of them.
In this report, you’ll learn about hotel technology trends and the perception that hoteliers have toward technology adoption today and, moving forward, post-pandemic. You will also better understand how the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the rise of certain technologies, especially touchless solutions.
In 2020, the world came to a standstill. Data from the Global Business Travel Association (GBTA) shows that 93 percent of companies stopped international travel, and 72 percent canceled domestic travel last year. At Uber, all business travel was halted unless deemed critical by leadership. We spoke with Physititia Grant, Uber’s global lead of travel and expense, and Terrence Donovan, travel supplier manager at Uber. They weighed in on what the future of business travel might look like as the world recovers, and how Uber is navigating the landscape.
How were retailers and hospitality executives managing big-ticket, big-data tech investment, integrating customer-derived data and add-ons? What was the impact of accelerated change? And how was it shaping stakeholder value, attitude to risk and relationships with suppliers? To answer these questions and ensure they were fully aligned with the needs of their retail and hospitality clients, FreedomPay and J.P. Morgan came together for the first time and commissioned an independent study of primary IT decision makers in America’s foremost organizations.
Before the rise of the Roman Empire, there was no such thing as a work identity. You were defined simply by where you came from and who your parents were — by your community, not your occupation. During the height of Rome, work identities emerged for the first time and were so important, in fact, that many tombstones from the time read like a LinkedIn headline.
In March 2021, flight bookings grew 111 percent while hotel bookings grew 50 percent compared to the weeks leading up to the vaccine rollout, translating to a 24 percent growth over March 2020 for flights, and 52 percent growth over March 2020 for hotel bookings.
In a recent Korn Ferry survey of talent leaders there was full or near consensus about the positive impact of inclusive leadership, with most respondents strongly agreeing that inclusive leaders empower team members to take risks and bring their authentic selves to work while also helping organizations to innovate and capitalize on new business opportunities. www.kornferry.com
As the national benchmarking tool measuring policies, practices and benefits pertinent to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) employees, the Human Rights Campaign Foundation’s Corporate Equality Index (CEI) is a primary driving force for LGBTQ workplace inclusion. Data from the CEI tells the story of nearly two decades of year-over-year growth in the adoption of these critical policies and practices indicative of employers’ commitment to equality.
The COVID-19 pandemic has raised new barriers to building inclusive and prosperous economies and societies. Pre-existing gender gaps have amplified the crisis asymmetrically between men and women, even as women have been at the frontlines of managing the crisis as essential workers. The hardest hit sectors by lockdowns and rapid digitalization are those where women are more frequently employed. Combined with the additional pressures of providing care in the home, the crisis has halted progress toward gender parity in several economies and industries.
According to the latest Longwoods International tracking study of American travelers, 84% have travel plans in the next six months, the highest level since the early days of the pandemic a year ago. This is the third consecutive wave showing over 80% for this key metric. And the percentage of travelers who say that the...
As COVID-19 continues to affect lives and livelihoods around the world, we can already see that the pandemic and its economic fallout are having a regressive effect on gender equality. By our calculation, women’s jobs are 1.8 times more vulnerable to this crisis than men’s jobs. Women make up 39 percent of global employment, but account for 54 percent of overall job losses.
As millions of employees around the world have had to make a sudden and unprecedented shift to remote work amid the coronavirus pandemic, many might find themselves feeling like they need to work all the time to signal their devotion and productivity — and, as a result, may struggle to create healthy boundaries. Even more than before, afternoons will blend with evenings, and weekdays will blend with weekend days, leaving a sense of little time off. So, how can we “leave our work at the door” if we are no longer going out the door? Research shows it will be important to: 1) maintain physical and social boundaries; 2) maintain boundaries on how you use your time; and 3) focus on your most important work.
Longwoods International, with the support of Miles Partnership, is undertaking a tracking survey of U.S. travelers’ intentions. This summarizes four critical data points from our survey using a national sample of 1,000 adults from January 6, 2021.
In 2013, Equality in Tourism published its first report on women in the boardrooms of the tourism industry. The report found that in the companies surveyed across all the key sectors of the tourism and hospitality industry, namely hotels, tour operators, professional associations, cruise liners and airlines – the overall average representation of women on...
In celebration of our 10th anniversary, we're pleased to present this year’s Gender Diversity Index, an annual review of the status of women on the boards of Russell 3000 companies. Women now hold a historic 22.6 percent of the board seats of companies in the Russell 3000, consistent with the steady progress women have made gaining board seats over the past decade. In our first decade we achieved a lot of firsts: We were the first organization to lead an education and advocacy campaign that encouraged a national dialog about the issue of boardroom diversity. We were first to define gender diversity as a minimum of 20 percent women on public company boards. We introduced the first online directory of 3,000 companies showing the gender diversity of their boards and made it freely available to the general public.
This Women CEOs in America report is the first of its kind overview of the positioning of women leaders. To build it, Women Business Collaborative (WBC), an alliance organization dedicated to building a movement to rapidly change the numbers of women in leadership positions, teamed up with two of its partners: C200, a global nonprofit for women business leaders, and Catalyst, the global nonprofit that accelerates women’s leadership. We’re working together to highlight the progress and opportunity for continued advancement in promoting women CEOs in businesses of all types. Our organizations are focused on driving women CEO leadership, so we celebrate the accelerating pace of change at the highest levels and call on all women business organizations and other business organizations to join us in increasing the numbers of women CEOs.
This year’s Board Monitor report explores how corporate boards sought to diversify in 2019 — with impressive gains for women but minimal changes for people of color — and added a mix of new and familiar expertise. As boards seek to help their companies through the greatest global economic contraction in a century, a pandemic, and ongoing global demands to end racial injustice and inequality, these are directors with valuable and fresh perspectives.
We know it will be critical for destination organization leaders to embrace the role that Equity, Diversity and Inclusion will play to move our industry forward, especially at a time when our industry must face one of the most challenging moments in modern history to recover from the devastating impact on the travel industry due to COVID-19. The following summary report outlines baseline results, collected from 718 respondents, identifying age, gender, title, racial ethnicity, sexual identity, religion, ability and military veteran status. Additionally, nearly 20 statements on EDI were developed to measure how destination organizations and staff embrace Equity, Diversity and Inclusion.
Women in the Workplace is the largest comprehensive study of the state of women in corporate America. In 2015, McKinsey & Company and LeanIn.Org launched the study to help companies advance diversity in the workplace. Between 2015 and 2019, close to 600 companies took part in the study, and more than a quarter of a million people were surveyed on their workplace experiences. Now, in 2020, women in corporate America are facing a new challenge: the Covid-19 pandemic. This year’s report focuses on how the pandemic has affected women at work, including the unique impact on women of different races and ethnicities, working mothers, women in senior leadership, and women with disabilities. It also looks at the emotional impact of incidents of racial violence in this country on employees. Finally, it tracks the changes we’ve seen in women’s representation over the past six years, and assesses how Covid-19 could disrupt those trends going forward.
Navigating the COVID-19 pandemic, for many players in the travel industry, has been like sailing into a hurricane. Six months in, many are trying to right themselves and realizing that their navigational charts are no longer adequate. Although the travel industry is no stranger to hardship and has been seriously damaged by the pandemic, we have already seen strong leadership actions that are keeping companies and their people above water while remaining focused on long-term growth. Many players have acted quickly to retain customer goodwill, tap new sources of liquidity, and work effectively with unions to agree on voluntary redundancy programs. We have also seen innovation and a focus on customer experience. These examples illustrate the travel industry’s strength that will help it chart a way forward through these challenging times.
The future of the travel industry will depend on more than just travelers’ pent-up demand. For some, the romance that travel used to inspire was already wearing thin even before the crisis. We spoke to people across multiple geographies who have traveled in the last two months,5 and the one constant across their experiences was added stress—whether due to limited entry points, multiple new checkpoints, or fellow travelers’ inconsistent compliance with published safety measures. Safety must be the first priority. Wherever possible, however, intensified health and hygiene protocols should be implemented in ways that avoid making journeys more difficult in the aftermath of the pandemic—for example, the way that travel became logistically more complex after 9/11 because of additional security measures. The imperative to move fast has often meant unilateral decision making, rather than solutions developed through quick, iterative feedback. Any further advance of cold or sterile experiences as a result of the (appropriate) pursuit of safety could radically shift behaviors toward simpler experiences, such as choosing to drive instead fly, or could even dampen the overall recovery.
To win in the next normal, companies need to identify the current behaviors that will define customer experience in the near term. They must then ensure that these opportunities are aligned with their business strategies and capabilities. We believe three priorities will define customer experience in the post-pandemic era: digital excellence, safe and contactless engagement, and dynamic customer insights. Each organization will pursue these priorities differently based on its industry and starting point as well as competitive landscape. Many companies are already demonstrating their understanding of what matters to customers as well as innovative ways to meet their old and new expectations. These early movers offer a valuable point of reference for how to proceed.