In the coming year, the travel industry will simultaneously face its greatest opportunities and greatest perils ever. Few years have begun as auspiciously in terms of profits and consumer demand, but perhaps no year since 2002 has posed as many headwinds and all-out threats from forces beyond the industry's control.
In the following pages, our reporters, editors and contributors take on the always perilous task of predicting what the year ahead holds for the industry. This isn't crystal ball stuff; it's an attempt to follow current trends in products, technological efficiencies and finances to their logical conclusions. Still, as any businessperson will tell you, that path of logic is always riddled with danger, and unknowns lurk everywhere.
The one sector on which all others depend, at least to some degree, is commercial aviation, for years a failing segment that posted more bankruptcies than profits. Today, it is emerging from its fifth straight year of record results, a turnaround widely credited to a tight focus on capacity discipline made possible by years of consolidation that eliminated many pesky, smaller competitors. But as aviation editor Robert Silk points out in his preview, American, Delta, United and Southwest now face a growing challenge from ultralow-cost carriers. In Europe and Canada, the legacy giants have chosen to fight back by operating their own ultralow-cost brands. Will U.S. aviation be forced to follow suit as fares continue to drop?
Cruise lines, too, are emerging from a year that in many cases produced record margins. Now brimming with optimism, almost every major cruise line, including high-end luxe lines, has ordered new vessels to be delivered over the next five years or so. Cruise is a sector on a roll, and the lines appear certain that they can not only build high-capacity ships Royal Caribbean, MSC, Carnival and Norwegian all have their largest classes ever on order but that they can fill them while expanding both prices and booking windows. The good news for agents is that unlike aviation, cruise is highly dependent on travel advisers for sales.
At the same time, the industry is continually finding new ways to expand. Senior editor Michelle Baran writes about two such sectors: tour operators, which continue to find new worlds to explore and new ways to market them, and river cruising, which in 10 years or so has grown from a tiny, highly specialized sector into a ubiquitous presence on Europe's rivers. Owing to their size limits, river vessels can never offer the capacity of ocean ships, but Viking long ago discovered the solution to that problem: Keep building and launching more ships. Uniworld instead will expand its target market with U, a millennial-focused product.
Of course, two giant unknowns hang over the industry as we peer into 2018: terrorism and weather, both of which grew more frightening in 2017. Thankfully, there are signs the public is growing inured to both.