GetGoing Mini Review: an Interesting Variation on Opaque Booking Priceline and Hotwire have proved that airlines and hotels are willing to provide deep discounts on unsold inventory through “opaque” distribution channels. The idea is that the shopper purchases the product based on a generic description and the actual brand and product are revealed only after…
Mini Review: Peek Destination Activity Booking Site Peek, a destination activities guide and booking site which launched late last year, is backed by Google chairman Eric Schmidt and Twitter and Square co-founder Jack Dorsey. Schmidt and Dorsey know a good thing when they see it. There are other sites and apps that do destination activity…
787 Woes: Systematic Problems or Teething Pains? A rash of 787 incidents has been reported in the last few days. As was the case with some earlier issues, some of them are related to the new aircraft’s electrical systems. It’s not clear whether there are systematic design or manufacturing issues or whether the press is…
I think Expedia’s “Find Yours” promotional campaign is brilliant. Instead of limiting itself to the stereotypical travel promotion themes of beautiful/relaxing travel destinations/experiences it goes deeper into the purposes, emotions and meaning behind travel. It’s been a while since I’ve written a travel news and commentary compilation post (I’ll post the next one shortly). Besides…
Sometimes a blogger’s hand is forced and he has to put out a certain post. I had been thinking out loud for the past couple of weeks that I ought to post a True Geek’s gift guide as a response to all the tech gift guides that hit the web this time of year. The…
Full Contents MS Surface Pricing • Passwords are Weak Security • Anarchist Hacker • Not Mobile First • Video Release Dates • Google App$ • S.E.C is Old-school • 60 Tech Briefs • Just 3 More Microsoft Surface Pro Positioning Drives Pricing I was asked to comment on Microsoft’s pricing of the Surface Pro over at Quibb.com. My comment…
I used to teach university advertising classes and I spent a lot of time analyzing ad campaigns. I’ve been impressed with Expedia’s “Find Yours” campaign from the start. After seeing the latest “Find Yours” video, I’m genuinely touched and very proud to work at Expedia. Through January 31st 2013, Expedia is matching donations to St.…
While preparing a recent blog post, I was researching Google travel search results. I was appalled to find that a user searching for hotels in a popular market like New York City could easily miss seeing any organic search results. Organic search results are the ones deemed most relevant to your query by Google’s search…
Suppliers make the Majority of Online Travel Sales and the Gap is Widening For all the complaining that hotels and airlines do about pricing pressure from online travel agencies, you would think that OTAs had all the power in the market. The numbers suggest a different story. Industry analyst firm PhoCusWrite predicts that supplier websites…
A group of online experimenters at Microsoft has just written a new paper that has the potential to increase the value that A/B and multivariate tests can bring to online businesses. They have documented methods to combine pre-experiment data with experiment data to yield increased sensitivity for testing the performance of new designs and features. They…
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