As happens in many fields, even in tourism, crises accelerate changes, speed up the transformations taking place. The attacks on the twin towers have accelerated the evolution towards the use of digital for the management and marketing of tourist services. In the months that followed the attack, industry giants disappeared, Sabena and Swissair in the lead, who were unable to withstand an agile and competitive system.
In 1996, four years earlier, Bookings.nl was founded which, in 2005, acquired by Priceline, gave life to Booking Holdings, the giant of online reservations that we know. At the beginning of the 2000s, Ryanair took off, doubling the number of passengers in three years, from scarce 10 million in 2001 to over 20 million in 2004.
Even from the 2008 economic crisis, the tourism system has come out with many changes. If 2011 had sanctioned the personalization of travel, in 2008 online communication and innovative system products created super innovative products, opening the door to experiences, to bring the visitor to private homes and to the heart of local life. Just in 2008 AirBnB was born which in 4 years exceeds one million bookings on the online platform.
In the years that followed, personalization, peer to peer services, entry of new countries on the market, globalization, made the number of trips grow exponentially, until in 2012 they exceeded the milestone of one billion international arrivals in the world.
What will be the effects of the great pandemic of 2020? Predicting and riding them is one of the challenges facing tourism.