Khao Luang Cave Temple, Phetburi, Thailand.
See ‘Travel Aspirations’ at the end of this post for more photos of the world’s most beautiful caves.
Photo © by Dreamstime Contributor Trahcus
Contents
Wiki Travel Lawsuits • Restaurant Yield Management • Beautiful Caves • Travel Briefs
Wikimedia Travel versus Wikitravel
The Wikimedia Foundation (parent of Wikipedia) confirms it will create a wiki travel guide. Much initial content will be forked from existing content at Wikitravel.org. Wikitravel is now owned by for-profit company Internet Brands, which has sued two of the Wikitravel volunteers active in the fork effort. I am not a lawyer, but it’s clear that the Wikitravel Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license allows for the fork. Since Internet Brands is unlikely to prevail if it sues people for forking the content, it is instead alleging that the defendants are engaged in a civil conspiracy. In response, the Wikimedia Foundation is suing Internet Brands. I have to agree with blogger Jani Patokallio, who opines that Internet Brands is going to get “slapped down.”
Statement from the Wikimedia Foundation
The complete text of Wikimedia’s lawsuit against Internet Brands, which is actually quite succinct and readable as these things go:
Restaurants get into Yield Management
Following in the steps of airlines and hotels, restaurants are adopting time-based yield management pricing models. Cornell researchers found that consumers are comfortable with variable pricing, but more accepting of messages that frame low cost periods as discounted off of a normal higher price. Consumers are not as accepting of mesasage that frame popular dining times as premium priced.
Travel Briefs: Significant Recent News Items
- Expedia joins Priceline in competing with the HotelTonight same-day booking model.
Travel Weekly - Expedia Launches new US college football travel ad campaign.
Tnooz - Democratic National Convention plagued by bloodsucking…………bedbugs (and you thought I was going to say politicians and lawyers).
Tnooz - OTA threat? Openhospitality.com enables hotels to place ads in Google Hotel Finder with real-time pricing.
Tnooz - Facebook offers new metrics of interest to the hospitality industry that enable travel brands to measure how many Facebook fans physically visit their destination.
Tnooz - New airline fare predictor tool SteadyFare goes beyond Bing’s Farecast in functionality. In addition it offers price hedging insurance for a fee.
Tnooz - Windows 8 Travel Apps
Tnooz - Qantas leaves British Airways behind, hooks up and codeshares with Emirates, gets almost 50 new destination in Europe and Africa. All European Flights will be via Dubai.
Skift Story 1
Skift Story 2 - Up and coming travel news/intelligence site Skift launches comparison dashboards for air travel.
Skift - Global hotel prices are up 4% in industry recovery.
Skift - Best and Worst US Airline Economy Seating.
Skift - New Nokia phones feature traveler-friendly features including augmented reality, offline map support, high quality cameras and wireless charging stations at airports.
Skift - Startup Routehappy gets $1.5M in seed money for a flight amenities search engine.
Skift - Airport sleeping pods: I wish I would have had access to one of these when I had to spend the night in an airport recently.
TERMINAL U - Forecast: global air service offerings will be determined by business alliances rather than driven by local needs. (Also see item above on Qantas/Emirate Codeshare.)
Skift - Half a rating star can make a difference between a full and empty restaurant.
Skift - The self service airport
Wall Street Journal - Mobile Device Travel Access: Apps are used significantly more than mobile web.
Nielson Blog - Quotes from Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary. Not sure how significant this item is but it is by turns appalling and laugh-out-loud funny, like “The best thing you can do with environmentalists is shoot them.” It does explain a lot about Ryanair. The quote about consultants is worth posting in the office.
Skift
TravelTekker 