Expedia China•Bag Revenue•New Rollercoasters•Longest Flights•Cost2Drive•Swimming High•Pixar Catastrophe•Privacy Malpractice•Banansynth•& More Travel eLong, Expedia’s Chinese subsidiary, had significant year-over-year-gains from the first quarter of 2011 to Q1 of 2012. In Q1/2011 less than half of eLong’s bookings were made online while in Q1/2012 more than two-thirds were made online. Year over year for the same period eLong…
Travel Kayak’s long delayed IPO is likely to move forward quickly if the markets respond favorably to Facebook’s IPO. CNBC The sales channels hotels dislike: Partners large and small sign on as Online Travel Agency affiliates. For example, if I wanted to, I could become an affiliate and sell hotel room bookings from my blog…
Travel This new corporate travel booking app can teach current consumer travel apps a thing or two. Searching, booking and expenses are reduced to three screens. Travel planners can see door-to-door trip details in one view and edit any individual element. Tnooz An introductory how-to on Big Data, with practical applications, from Thematix by way…
Travel My quick analysis finds Expedia to be the strongest U.S. Travel Booking Brand. I used this very cool trick from Avinash Kaushik’s latest blog entry to measure brand strength. Since there’s no way to directly measure brand strength using standard quantitative analytics tools, Avinash shows how to use unaided brand recall as a proxy…
Travel An interesting Tnooz article argues that travel motivation sites will monetize better than inspiration sites because motivation is closer to action than is inspiration. The article goes on to suggest creating bucket lists for prospective travelers and then communicating personalized suggestions to motivate them to act on bucket list goals. Tnooz Roomkey adds white-label…
Travel A TripAdvisor study of over 5,000 European vacationers found that 34% can’t live without their mobile devices. Tnooz UK study finds that 86% of overseas and 91% of domestic travel transactions are influenced by social media and online review sites. Travolution Orbitz: 65% of same day hotel bookings are made through mobile devices. Hotel…
Travel Roomkey In a move sure to displease some of its constituents, Roomkey, the booking referral system started by six hotel chains, has added TripAdvisor reviews. Some hoteliers criticize TripAdvisor, claiming that reviews can be entered by people who haven’t actually stayed at a property or who are biased (e.g., competitors, disgruntled employees). Roomkey also…
Travel UX: I really like this airline ticket price graph. It’s just a simple price over time plot with hover-over flight details, but if price is important and your dates are flexible, you can see at a glance your best times to fly. It’s so simple and obvious that others have probably executed similar interfaces.…
Travel The Need for Speed. User survey data shows 8% abandoned transactions because of slow site response. This one is interesting because it confirms what we already knew from a/b tests, but the data came from direct user feedback. Due to non-response bias, their estimate of the global cost of slow sites is problematic unless…
Travel Orbitz/CheapTickets brings back air-booking fees, offers customer 10% off room bookings in return. Orbitz Worldwide was forced to follow Expedia in dropping the fees in 2009, but is now trying to reintroduce them in a way that customers will accept. It remains to be seen if the tactic will be successful. Competitors like Expedia…
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