Expedia Celebrates the Seattle Seahawks: We have a lot of Seattle Seahawks fans at Expedia and as you can imagine, there was a lot of excitement at Expedia HQ in the days before and after the Hawks’ historic Superbowl victory. We made the local and national news when a group of employees stayed after work…
Focus on: China Skift Country Profiles: Chinese Online Travel Market in 2013 Informative article on the Chinese Travel Market, with some astounding numbers: “Total revenues of the travel industry in China grew from RMB1.16 trillion (US $190 billion) in 2008 to RMB2.57 trillion (US$419 billion) in 2012, representing a CAGR of 22.0%, according to iResearch.…
News Trend: Social Media in Travel Hotels put best foot forward on social media [INFOGRAPHIC] | Tnooz Infographic with lots of statistics on guest reviews and social media usage. You’re grounded – (social) media storms and airline responses | Tnooz “Airlines are generally held-up as quite advanced in social media so it’s curious to see…
Anticipatory Assistants • Focus on: Social, Reviews, Tours, Innovation Blockers, Air Distribution, Space Travel • 180 Travel Briefs • Awesome Travel Photos • Tech Briefs • I Write Like… Editor’s Note I’ve been very busy with my day job, helping to deliver a next-generation travel search and booking site and it has been far too…
GetGoing Mini Review: an Interesting Variation on Opaque Booking Priceline and Hotwire have proved that airlines and hotels are willing to provide deep discounts on unsold inventory through “opaque” distribution channels. The idea is that the shopper purchases the product based on a generic description and the actual brand and product are revealed only after…
Mini Review: Peek Destination Activity Booking Site Peek, a destination activities guide and booking site which launched late last year, is backed by Google chairman Eric Schmidt and Twitter and Square co-founder Jack Dorsey. Schmidt and Dorsey know a good thing when they see it. There are other sites and apps that do destination activity…
787 Woes: Systematic Problems or Teething Pains? A rash of 787 incidents has been reported in the last few days. As was the case with some earlier issues, some of them are related to the new aircraft’s electrical systems. It’s not clear whether there are systematic design or manufacturing issues or whether the press is…
Full Contents MS Surface Pricing • Passwords are Weak Security • Anarchist Hacker • Not Mobile First • Video Release Dates • Google App$ • 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…
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…
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