Hello Travel Research Friends! 

I have an exciting update to share. Skift Research is launching a new report format: the Decision Brief. 

Decision Briefs lay out the key evidence, strategic context, and paths forward behind a specific strategic choice that is facing travel leaders.

Skift Research has always been about insights. Let me tell you a little secret that data people quickly learn: raw data on their own are pretty useless. It's insights that make a difference to a business. Our formula for what makes an insight has always been data plus. Data plus analysis. Data plus industry context. Data plus forward-looking forecasts. It's that combination that makes a great insight.

However, we are not stopping there. If you are like me, you have probably felt the pace of business accelerate as AI tools get rolled out and adopted across your organization. Customer demand is shifting fast. The cycle from research to operational rollout has compressed. And, as a result, the intelligence layer is becoming more important than ever. 

If insights are data plus analysis, then intelligence is insights plus decisions. You need the best insights, backed by the best data, to make the best decisions to drive your business forward. That's actionable intelligence built for an AI world.

To close the loop on that intelligence cycle, Skift Research is proud to introduce the Decision Brief. These are easily digestible research reports that focus on — no surprises here — the key decisions that travel leaders need to make in response to current market intelligence. They get straight to the point and surface what you need to act on to address the most important challenges facing your organization.

Each Decision Brief contains a signal and the key evidence supporting it. The signal puts its finger on a fault-line in the industry where there is still active debate — why does this decision need to be made now? It’s followed by key evidence that backs this signal with data. Then, at the heart of each briefing sit the three paths forward: different decisions trees that a travel leader could plausibly make. Skift will often have a recommended option, but no decision can ever be truly one-size-fits-all.

Here’s our first live example. We recently published a report on what drives travelers to return to destinations they have already visited, Beyond the First Visit: The Destination Loyalty Race to Own the Repeat Traveler. The report covered the drivers of repeat visitation, the economics of visitor spending, lessons from other sectors, and more.

The punchline: your guests love you, they're just not coming back. It makes for a great deep dive, but we heard from many of you that you wanted us to go one step further — to make it easier to surface the key decisions that flow directly from the research.

So that's exactly what we did. From the destination loyalty report, we identified three major decisions that travel leaders grappling with repeat visitation need to focus on. Each of these is now live as a standalone Decision Brief.

The concept is that our signature long-form research reports create the knowledge base around a timely topic and lead to several executive decisions that need to be made. And that Decision Briefs are bite-sized reports to help guide your path forward, but from which you can always refer back to the parent report, if you want to go deep into a subject. 

We are building out more Decision Briefs quickly, and more new report types are in the works. 

Meanwhile, the Skift Research offering keeps evolving to deliver more value and deeper intelligence to our subscribers. Beyond new report formats, we have launched monthly webinars where subscribers can engage with our analysts. Enterprise subscribers also have access to direct 1:1 analyst calls and custom research presentations. 

Please don’t be a stranger. We’d love to hear from you and understand how you would like to see the future of Skift Research evolve. What would be most useful to you to have next? Your feedback is appreciated, and it shapes what we build next.

Best,
Seth Borko
Head of Skift Research