Special Edition: Rafat Ali on the Month the World Stopped Travelling
The Business of Fashion Podcast
The Business of Fashion
4.6 • 770 Ratings
🗓️ 1 May 2020
⏱️ 42 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In the latest special edition of the BoF Podcast, Rafat Ali, founder and CEO of the B2B travel news site Skift, talks to BoF Editor-in-Chief Imran Amed about the tourism standstill following the outbreak of Covid-19 and its impact on travel retail.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | No longer will we look at the person who wipes on their airplane's seat as crazy. |
| 0:15.1 | When the travel industry is hurting, by extension, the fashion industry is hurting. |
| 0:23.7 | Some people are hoping that there'll be fashion weeks in September. And what's your view? |
| 0:27.5 | I don't see any scenario, any scenario, where September, a physical event can happen anywhere |
| 0:33.3 | in the world, above 50 people with any semblance of safety. It would be irresponsible for the |
| 0:38.5 | fashion industry to attempt it. |
| 0:42.8 | Hi, this is Imran Ahmed, founder and CEO of the Business of Fashion, and welcome to another |
| 0:48.1 | special edition of the BOP podcast. This week, I sit down with Rafid Ali, founder and CEO of Skift. Now, Rapheth and his team at |
| 0:57.5 | Skift have been trying to understand the impact of the coronavirus crisis on the travel industry |
| 1:03.6 | in the same way that we at BOF have been trying to navigate the coronavirus crisis for the fashion |
| 1:09.7 | industry. Now, what few people really appreciate is just how interconnected the fashion and travel |
| 1:16.6 | industries are. About 40% of luxury consumption is linked to travel, and in 2019, Chinese consumers |
| 1:24.6 | took more than 166 million trips abroad, accounting for about 50% of their total spend. |
| 1:32.6 | Travel retail alone is worth $79 billion, so when people stop traveling, they stop spending on fashion. |
| 1:40.6 | And so I thought, who better to speak to than Ratheth to learn how the coronavirus crisis is impacting the travel industry and how the travel industry is likely to change once the lockdowns start being lifted. |
| 1:53.0 | So here's Raphat Ali, inside fashion. |
| 2:06.6 | Good afternoon or good morning, Raffeth. How are you? Good, good. |
| 2:07.6 | Yeah. You're in New York. |
| 2:10.6 | I am in New York, yes. The global hub of pandemic, not travel, but pandemic certainly at this point. |
| 2:19.1 | Yeah, the numbers coming out of New York have continued to look increasingly scary. |
| 2:24.8 | What's the situation there right now? |
| 2:27.3 | What's the vibe? |
... |
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