As the final weeks of summer in the Northern Hemisphere race to a close, I can’t help but think of a travel season coming to an end with far too little travel having occurred.Arne Sorenson (Marriott)
Pavlova is a meringue-based dessert named after the Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova.Angela Saurine (BBC)
Boeing failed in its design and development of the Max, and the Federal Aviation Agency failed in its oversight of Boeing and its certification of the aircraft.House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee
Senior aviation bosses, including Heathrow chief executive John Holland-Kaye, say quarantine measures have hung the ‘Closed’ sign on Britain and are costing the economy £60million a day in lost foreign visitor spending.Tom Payne (Daily Mail)
Sandra Carvao, the UN World Tourism Organisation’s chief of market intelligence and competitiveness, said the $320bn (£244.5bn) in lost exports from January through May is three times what was lost during the year 2009 at the height of the last global financial crisis.AP (The Independent)
The thing with the airline industry is profitability got quite low, and it needed to merge and consolidate. I don’t think we’re there in the hotel industry. It’s still possible for a good, small, single hotel to be profitable.Richard Clarke (Bernstein)
It’s clear that the lower-priced chains—the economy, budget, and midscale hotels—are doing better. Some of that is locational: A lot of those hotels are at airports, around airports, and on the interstates, so that means that they’re accommodating people who are moving around. But over the next six- to 12-month period, you’re going to see a bit of a barbell recovery, where lower-tier, lower-price hotels will be doing well, and then you will have luxury hotels doing well once air travel starts to free up a little bit.Mark Hoplamazian (Hyatt Hotels)
For those quarantined in South Korea, ready-made budae-jjigae packages, as well as packaged kimchi, ramen and spam, have been common items in quarantine meal kits delivered by local government offices.Hahna Yoon (BBC)
Google has used a new colour-mapping algorithmic technique to make the service, which launched 15 years ago, visually richer. Previously, the colour coding on Maps was largely limited to green and brown, with lightly shaded areas to denote urban centres. For the update, Google has used computer vision to identify natural features from satellite imagery, looking specifically at arid, icy, forested, and mountainous regions. It’s then analysed these features and assigned them a range of colours on the HSV (hue, saturation, value) colour model.Jonathan Chadwick (Daily Mail)
Airbnb takes a cut of the stays and activities that its rental operators book. It has come closer to turning a profit than Uber or WeWork — until the coronavirus evaporated more than $1 billion of bookings almost overnight. In the spring, Airbnb projected its revenue for 2020 would drop to half of the $4.8 billion it brought in last year. The company quickly cut costs, raised emergency funding, laid off almost 2,000 employees and shelved its plans to go public.Erin Griffith (New York Times)