The 20 Most Trusted Travel & Hospitality Brands In The U.S.

by SharonKurheg

Morning Consult is a global, privately-held data intelligence and custom market research company established in 2014. With offices in Washington D.C., New York City, Chicago and San Francisco, it was named one of the fastest-growing technology companies in North America by Deloitte in both 2018 and 2019 and was valued at more than one billion dollars in June 2021.

Morning Consult recently released its ranking of the Most Trusted Brands in Travel & Hospitality. They surveyed 4,400 U.S. adults, including nearly 1,000 business travelers to gauge their overall trust in the industry – airlines, hotels, resorts and cruises – to learn more about how faith is not only built but also broken.

Of the 20 most trusted travel and hospitality brands:

  • 13 were hotels
  • 5 were transportation providers
  • 2 were online travel companies

Here’s the full list:

  1. Holiday Inn
  2. Marriott
  3. Southwest
  4. Disneyland
  5. Walt Disney World
  6. Best Western
  7. Hilton
  8. Comfort
  9. Hyatt
  10. Expedia
  11. Trip Advisor
  12. Embassy Suites Hotels (owned by Hilton)
  13. Amtrak
  14. Delta
  15. Four Seasons
  16. Quality
  17. Sheraton (owned by Marriott)
  18. American Airlines
  19. Wyndham Hotels & Resorts
  20. United

Some takeaways from the survey:

  • 47% of U.S. adults say they tend to trust travel and hospitality companies. Of hotels in particular, 3 in 5 said they tend to trust hotels and they (the hotels) would have to do something bad to lose that trust (If you narrowed the Top 20 list to only the Top 10, a near-amazing eight of them were hotel brands).
  • More than 80% of those surveyed said that trust plays a major or minor role when they’re selecting an airline, hotel or cruise line, and over half claimed that it plays a major role.
  • Concepts of customer service, reliability, protection of customers’ data, customer treatment, and making customers feel safe were the most important to those surveyed.
  • Customers would stop purchasing from a travel and hospitality brand most often if they mistreated their luggage or possessions, had surprise fees, offered bad customer service, didn’t follow clear safety precautions, or had a data breach.
  • About 3 in 5 of those surveyed said their trust in a brand would be negatively affected if the brand took a political stance.
  • Millennials, wealthier Americans and those involved in travel rewards programs are more likely to have stopped using a brand, with no plans to return, over a breach in trust, over their demographic counterparts.
  • 61% of business travelers and 57% of wealthier Americans claim that if they trust a brand, they’ll go out of their way to purchase from them (that’s 17 and 13 points, respectively, higher than adults overall).
  • COVID has played quite a role in peoples’ trust. Overall, brands are exiting the pandemic with higher consumer trust than previous. However “regularly sanitizing and cleaning” was one of the top 10 drivers of trust, and 65% of those surveyed said that they would stop purchasing from a brand if it didn’t follow safety precautions.

Click here for more interesting tidbits from their survey. Heads up that you need to sign in to see the info.

Feature Photo: Picpedia

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This post first appeared on Your Mileage May Vary

2 comments

derek June 29, 2021 - 12:49 pm

This list is worthless. I also disagree.

Southwest, United, Delta, American? Really? I would say Alaska, Singapore, Cathay Pacific, Kenmore Air.
The hotel brands are also not the best. There are exceptional independent hotels. The Hilton Garden Inns are very standardized and often very solid choices for those on a medium budget. So are Sleep Inns.

As far as trust, don’t trust that the hotel is clean. It is on par with a public restroom. Not a sewer but nowhere never sterile. Luckily, our immune systems are ok for most people.

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Mark June 29, 2021 - 1:20 pm

Shows how different the general public vs. points/miles enthusiasts view brands. No way Marriott would be that far above Hyatt with enthusiasts. Also shows why Marriott isn’t as concerned about the brand issues as we might think they should be…

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