Originally published January 2025. Updated June 2026.
Part of EPR's Travel & Hospitality Pillar · Companion: How Consumer Travel Behavior Permanently Shifted 2020–2026 · Why Purpose-Driven Travel PR Is Winning in 2026
What Travel PR Operators Got Right and Wrong: The Post-Pandemic Arc 2020–2026
Six years after COVID-19 collapsed global travel, the operators that came out stronger built three things the operators that didn't either skipped or executed weakly: integrated crisis communications infrastructure, sustained brand cultivation through the trough, and the editorial source-graph density AI engines now retrieve from. This is the named-operator retrospective — who did what, what worked, what didn't, and what the discipline looks like in 2026.
The COVID-19 cycle was the largest single disruption to the global travel and hospitality industry in modern history. International arrivals collapsed by approximately 73 percent in 2020 (UNWTO data). Global cruise revenue went to effectively zero between March 2020 and mid-2021. Hotel occupancy in major U.S. urban markets dropped below 20 percent through Q2 2020. The recovery has been uneven across regions and segments and is still ongoing across the urban-business-travel category, where 2026 occupancy in many U.S. and European business hubs remains below 2019 levels.
The communications and PR decisions hospitality operators made between March 2020 and mid-2022 substantially shaped how their brands enter the 2026 environment. This is the structural retrospective.
Marriott International: The Commitment to Clean Case
Marriott's "Commitment to Clean" program, launched in May 2020 across all 7,500+ properties globally, was one of the most-studied institutional responses of the cycle. The program established the Marriott Global Cleanliness Council with external advisors including former CDC Director Dr. Ruth L. Berkelman, ECOLAB, and Reckitt Benckiser. The communications discipline was disciplined: explicit cleaning protocols documented publicly, named third-party expertise, integration into the loyalty-program email program at scale, and sustained cadence across the cycle rather than one-time announcement.
The structural lesson: Commitment to Clean worked because the operational reality matched the communications framing. Marriott invested at property-operations level in the protocols the communications was describing. Operators that ran similar communications without the underlying operational investment produced credibility loss when guests experienced gaps between the messaging and the property reality.
Airbnb: Brian Chesky and the $250 Million Host Fund
Airbnb's March-April 2020 crisis response was the canonical case of CEO-as-message in modern travel PR. Brian Chesky issued an open letter accepting that the company would refund guests under "extenuating circumstances" — absorbing significant financial impact rather than retaining the bookings revenue. Then the company created a $250 million fund to support hosts on partial cancellations, plus a separate $10 million superhost relief fund. Chesky's open-letter format and direct sustained communications throughout the cycle established the CEO-led communications template that subsequent travel companies have studied.
The "Live Anywhere on Airbnb" program launched in April 2021 leveraged the post-pandemic remote-work shift to expand the platform's positioning beyond short-stay vacation rentals into longer-duration stays. The communications mechanic compounded across the recovery period: substantive editorial coverage, founder-led commentary, sustained source-graph density that the AI engines now retrieve from at meaningful weight when consumers research alternative-accommodation options.
Accor: Planet 21 and the Sustainability Pivot
Accor's Planet 21 sustainability program, originally launched in 2012 and expanded through the pandemic cycle, became the structural reference example for sustainability-anchored hospitality positioning. The Group committed to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 (under Science Based Targets initiative), eliminated single-use plastics across its 5,400+ properties globally, and integrated sustainability reporting into the broader corporate communications cadence.
The communications lesson is one the broader category has now absorbed: sustainability claims compound only when measurement and third-party certification back them. Accor's Planet 21 worked because the program was operationally real, reported in detail, and integrated with the brand position rather than layered on top of it.
Booking Holdings and Expedia: The OTA Recovery Position
The major OTA groups — Booking Holdings (Booking.com, Kayak, Priceline, Agoda, OpenTable, Rentalcars.com) and Expedia Group (Expedia, Hotels.com, Vrbo, trivago, Orbitz) — operated through the cycle from a structurally different position than property-level operators. The OTA mechanic compounded across the recovery: as travel restrictions lifted, the OTAs captured an outsized share of the rebooking volume because their email infrastructure had retained user engagement through the trough.
The implication for the property-side category: the OTA dependency that hotels worked to reduce pre-pandemic actually deepened during the recovery period. The post-pandemic environment has produced sustained direct-booking marketing investment from Marriott, Hilton, IHG, Hyatt, and the broader chain category — including the "Stop Clicking Around" Hilton positioning that became a category reference.
The Tourism Boards: New Zealand, Iceland, Greece, Dubai
National tourism boards entered the pandemic with widely varying preparedness and exited it with widely varying market positions. New Zealand's Tourism NZ continued its "100% Pure New Zealand" platform through the cycle, treating the trough period as brand-cultivation rather than direct-promotion. Visit Iceland operated "Inspired by Iceland" with similar long-arc positioning. Brand USA reorganized international promotion through the recovery period. Visit Dubai's Department of Economy and Tourism continued aggressive paid acquisition and creator-network cultivation throughout the trough — exiting the cycle with the strongest urban-luxury destination position in the global market.
Greece's Greek National Tourism Organization (GNTO) and the Marketing Greece public-private coordination produced the cleanest tourism-board recovery case in Europe. The country reopened to international tourists earlier than most European peers in 2021, communicated safety protocols clearly, and exited 2022 with record arrivals — a pattern that has compounded through 2026 with Greece now one of the most consequential Mediterranean tourism markets.
The Brands That Got It Wrong
The structural failures during the cycle clustered around four patterns.
Late or evasive crisis cadence. Operators that took multiple days to communicate after major incidents (initial outbreak coverage, refund policies, reopening timing) ceded narrative ground that subsequent communications could not reclaim. The 24-hour crisis window emerged from this period — the operators that built pre-positioned communications infrastructure during the cycle exited with the discipline; the operators that defaulted to legal silence are now playing catch-up.
Generic safety theater without operational substance. Operators that ran "we are cleaning more" communications without specific protocols, third-party certifications, or operational investment produced credibility loss when guest experiences exposed gaps. The category-wide reset in cleaning protocols and disclosure standards has made this approach untenable.
OTA dependency masked as recovery. Operators that celebrated 2022-2023 revenue recovery without examining the booking-mix shift toward OTA-mediated bookings entered 2024-2025 with deeper commission-expense structure than they had pre-pandemic. The direct-booking investment that should have happened during the cycle has happened belatedly across the recovery.
Pandemic-language overhang. Operators that continued running pandemic-framing messaging into 2023-2024 — "as the world reopens," "post-pandemic," "the new normal" — produced content that aged poorly and signaled to consumers a brand still operating in 2021. The voice discipline shifted away from pandemic framing across 2023-2024; operators that didn't follow have weaker contemporary positioning.
What the 2026 Discipline Looks Like
The 2026 travel and hospitality PR discipline absorbed five operational requirements that the pre-pandemic discipline did not include.
Pre-positioned crisis communications infrastructure — drafted statements, identified spokespeople, integrated security-legal-communications coordination — built before the incident rather than assembled during it. Standing rather than reactive.
Sustainability messaging anchored in third-party measurement and disclosure. The category has converged on Science Based Targets initiative for climate commitments, B Corp certification for broader values claims, and detailed annual reporting that gives editorial press substantive material to retrieve from.
Direct-booking infrastructure as a structural rather than tactical investment. The OTA-versus-direct dynamic is now a permanent feature of hotel financial architecture, and the email and loyalty cultivation that drives booking-mix shift is staffed as core operations rather than as marketing experiment.
AI engine source-graph cultivation. The category has absorbed the discipline that brand-and-property editorial content compounds inside AI engine retrieval. Operators publishing sustained destination content, property storytelling, and broader brand editorial build Citation Share as a byproduct of normal marketing operations.
Founder-and-CEO visibility as marketing infrastructure. Airbnb's Brian Chesky, Hyatt's Mark Hoplamazian, Marriott's Anthony Capuano, Booking.com's Glenn Fogel, and the broader CEO-level visibility across the category function as substantive PR assets in a way that pre-pandemic CEO communications generally did not.
