Expedia and IAC Chairman Barry Diller said that the economic and business landscape caused by the coronavirus and the political actions to fight it have been cataclysmic. Diller does not see a return to normal anytime soon. He believes that people will first have get over being scared and that won’t be easy.

Barry Diller, Chairman of Expedia and IAC discusses our current “cataclysmic landscape in an interview on CNBC:

I See the Landscape As Cataclysmic

I see the landscape as cataclysmic,” says Diller. “We’re in something that it’s very hard to be objective about because we’re in the eye of it and we’re inside of it. We can’t really see it for what it is. Everybody says the same thing there’s been nothing like it before and while we know some things we really know nothing. We know nothing about what happened and when we’re going to get out of it. “

What will we be doing and will our habits change? Will this result in some really profound difference in people’s lives in the future? So I see it as everybody is scared. The fact that we have so much media and so much information with all it telling us that we’ve got to be quite scared about cohabitating with anyone. That ain’t good. 

A Quick Return To Normalcy Will Not Happen

No, (I don’t believe that we will go back to normal on the other side of this as we did after 9/11). What I said then was that if there’s life there’s travel. I still do believe that but this is not going to be what happened then which was a very very quick return to normalcy. That is not going to happen. At best, we’ll have kind of a rolling way out.

As far as travel is concerned, while I’m absolutely optimistic that it will happen at some point, I don’t think it will be soon. It will probably be September, October, November, or December to really get life back. And in order to travel, you have got to have that. So they’re totally different conditions. This is not analogous. I don’t think this is analogous to anything and is certainly not analogous to 9/11 and to the financial crisis in 2008.