Online travel agencies flying high

unsurprisingly, the Covid-19 pandemic has had a devastating impact on the travel industry, but despite this, the performance of listed online travel agencies (OTAs) has exceeded that of global equity markets since the end of the first quarter of 2020 (see table).

Major OTAs’ earnings have continued to be poor after the second quarter of last year, so we note that the outperformance of their share prices has not been driven by earnings growth. Furthermore, several OTAs have either guided to continued