Travel
A TripAdvisor study of over 5,000 European vacationers found that 34% can’t live without their mobile devices.
UK study finds that 86% of overseas and 91% of domestic travel transactions are influenced by social media and online review sites.
Orbitz: 65% of same day hotel bookings are made through mobile devices. Hotel suppliers recognize that this heavy skew towards same-day reservations allows them to fill rooms that would otherwise go unsold and are willing to offer discounts up to 50% of rates available through other channels.
Frommer recommends university learning vacations. The Oxford and Cambridge programs are pretty much booked for this year, but Cornell has a program in the US with lots of interesting courses that’s the “full equivalent” of the UK programs. I used to work at Cornell. I can testify that the courses will be good and that Ithaca in the summer is gorges (spelling and double entendre fully intended).
Airlines’ unbundling of ancillary fees is making consumer information search difficult and costly. By decreasing transparency, airlines are decreasing competition. When consumers cannot easily determine the full costs of alternative flights, they are less likely to pick the most competitive alternative and will end up paying more.
New site DealAngel allows you to sort hotel search results by value rather than price alone. This could be helpful for example when you want a nicer room or more amenities for a special occasion such as an anniversary. Check out the site, it has a nice UX design.
Our ever-traveling friend Joel Oleson just put up a great blog post with 10 Tips for Epic Traveling. You occasionally see travel tips articles in the mainstream media but there’s a lot more substance to Joel’s tips. After all, he probably travels 10 times as much as the average author of those other articles.
Tech
Klik iPhone app tags the people in your photo even before the photo is taken.
The Pebble smartphone-connected watch set a record for crowd-funding when it broke $5M on Kickstarter. Now it has topped $10M and sold out the production run of 85,000 watches.
Facebook users can now share files with members of their groups.
Xbox is the most popular non-PC device for watching web video.
Internet Explorer coming to Xbox, with full Kinect controllability.
New Bing release features extensive social integration.
55 inch OLED TV to go on sale this year. OLEDs (organic light-emitting diodes) offer a visibly superior picture. OLEDs can be found on many phones, but until now, no one had offered one this large to the consumer market. It can be yours for only $9,000. I’m thinking my old Sony still looks pretty good.
Just One More: How about a pretty space picture?
Credits: ESA/PACS/SPIRE/Martin Hennemann & Frédérique Motte, Laboratoire AIM Paris-Saclay, CEA/Irfu – CNRS/INSU – Univ. Paris Diderot, France
TravelTekker 