Inspired by Hans Rosling’s “200 years in 4 minutes”, where the late Swedish stats guru and public educator visualised the story of the world, using 120,000 numbers, Wego’s vice president, strategy and planning, Nedyalko Terziev, has put together this visualisation telling the story of online travel from 1999-2024.
“Rosling’s visualisation was so amazing, intuitive and insightful, it showed us 200 years of evolution of longevity and income levels, and I thought why not do it for online travel,” he told WiT.
Terziev’s visualisation takes us through the dot.com years of 1999-2000; shows the huge impact of acquisitions on growth – Expedia buying hotels.com in 2001 and Priceline buying Booking.com in 2005; dramatises the devastating impact of Covid on company’s financials and the spectacular growth that followed the pandemic.
Wego’s vice president, strategy and planning, Nedyalko Terziev: “Online travel is in a very good place right now.”
“Online travel is in a very good place right now,” he said. “Most companies are in the top right quadrant, reporting positive top-line revenue growth and a positive bottom-line profitability. This may normalise now that the revenge travel period is over and in fact, the latest Q2 financials show a bit less momentum than where Q1 results were.”
He said it took “some effort” to find and normalise the financial data required for the visualisation, given the dynamic changes in the market. “But I thought it would be an interesting way to visualise a quarter century of online travel companies being publicly traded with just a couple of simple metrics.”
