For the world’s largest consumer-facing sector, you would think that the travel industry executives would be very social and outward looking. This is, after all, an industry built on hospitality. Think again.

Turns out among the legions of big travel companies across all its subsectors, the CEO and leaders of these companies very rarely go off track from traditional corporate channels of communication. A select few of them are on social media, and even fewer have a meaningful presence — communicating with and responding to customers and peers in travel —  in the various social channels.

Part of it has to do with the top leadership among top companies in travel: it still is an old white-boys club, for most part, at least in U.S. and Europe, and very few of them are tech savvy themselves. The more practical reason is that most of the large travel companies are public companies, with lots of financial regulations inhibiting the free form of communication that social media allows