The airline industry is in tailspin, hoping for a recovery some time maybe next year.
It will take years to make up for last year’s losses. But it’s basically always the same story; losses in bad times wipe out the profits of previous fat years.
In good times the airline bosses get obese and act like there is no tomorrow.
Fledgling metasearch engine fly.com will launch in Germany later this year as part of its ongoing expansion programme outside of North America.
Although up and running for a month or so in the UK, Travelzoo-backed fly.com officially announced its arrival in the country via a press release this morning amid a tightening of the metasearch market in recent weeks.
The addition of fly.com and TripAdvisor’s flight search into an already crowded sector is raising the stakes for new entrants as the likes of TravelSupermarket, Skyscanner and Cheapflights have a reasonably firm stranglehold on the market.
Adventure travel anyone?
VholdR just began shipping the ContourHD1080p wearable camcorder. It seems to be perfect whether you are jumping off a cliff or biking along the boardwalk.
Check out the specs: The company says: “ContourHD1080p offers several unique features including four HD settings (1080p, 960p, and two at 720), two frame rates (30fps and 60fps), lighting you can configure (contrast, exposure, metering, and sharpness), an adjustable microphone, and a new feature not previously announced: Three bitrates (default, high, and max).”
The most successful marketing campaigns seem inevitably to always feature some kind of mascot – whether it’s a logo, animal, celebrity, or simply an object.
Perhaps one of the more bizarre yet effective mascots of recent years is the Travelocity Roaming Gnome.
Simply weird to some, cute to others, ironic to a few, Gnome has headed the Sabre-owned online travel agency’s marketing drive since 2004 when its Where is the Gnome campaign launched.
What you missed on Tnooz this week, Sunday 18 October to Saturday 24 October 2009.
Read on to see the most commented articles, every other article this week, and the most commented articles of all time…
User generated content isn’t just negative reviews, edgy opinions and often poorly put together multimedia – contrary to the still reasonably popular belief of many travel companies.
But while text reviews of products and destinations are now pretty much a given, with relevant protocols and checks in place, open and unedited video reviews on travel sites are far less popular.
This is an interesting challenge for travel brands and tourist boards: firstly, they often want to be seen to embrace the openness of the web and user-led technology, but control is arguably more important because video has a greater impact than words.
A provocative headline, admittedly, but data from the Technorati State of the Blogosphere 2009 report has shed some light on the aspirations of bloggers, a sizeable number of which write about travel.
Although some say that Technorati has lost its importance over the years, its annual sweep of the community attracts a wonderfully vast range of opinions from corporate, part-timers, self-employed and just-for-fun bloggers.
Personal musings (45%) still account for the largest share of digital outpouring from bloggers, followed by technology (41%), politics (32%), news (30%), business (28%), computers (25%) and music (24%).
The Internet may or may not be ruining travel journalism, as Tnooz mused, but the Web and user-generated content sure leave corporations and their leadership with no place to hide.
That’s evident from Glassdoor.com’s “Q3 CEO Watch List Report,” which enables a company’s employees to anonymously rank their boss.
United Airlines’ Glenn Tilton, chairman, president and CEO, was Glassdoor.com’s third-lowest rated CEO — among all the CEOs evaluated — and the worst in the eyes of employees among travel companies ranked in Glassdoor.com’s latest report.
The Expedia-Choice battle could be a tipping point for the hotel industry and online travel agencies as hotels seek to retain control of their inventory and Expedia, the most powerful U.S. online hotel distributor, desires to get access to as much of that inventory as possible at the highest margins in anticipation of the years ahead when consumer demand likely will recover.
Five years ago, after InterContinental pulled its inventory off Expedia websites and best-rate guarantees came into being, the hotel industry and OTAs found themselves at a sort of grudging comfort level after an earlier era when Expedia and hotels.com dictated the terms.
“The hotel industry and the OTAs are trying to find a new equilibrium,” says Robert Cole, a hotel marketing-strategy consultant for RockCheetah in Milwaukee, Wisc.
Long Tail of Travel in its full glory here with the launch of SnowCarbon – a new European website dedicated to showing ski fans how to reach the slopes of the Alps and Pyrenees in what it claims is most environmentally concious way, by rail.
The brainchild of Daniel Elkan and co-founder Mark Hodson, both seasoned consumer travel journalists with years of experience penning articles about the ski industry, SnowCarbon is primarily an eco-driven content site which provides tips and advice on rail routes, hotels and destinations.
Only destinations with a reasonable connecting rail route – not always certainty in Europe – are featured on the site.
As the always-connected traveller turns to mobile and other devices to search and book products, travel brands must finally grasp the importance of providing a seamless multi-channel customer experience.
Another year, another 2,500 articles published on Tnooz. But which stories attracted the most traffic or moved readers in their dozens to add their comments?
Tnooz is lucky and privileged to have some of the brightest minds in the industry reporting and contributing to its service almost every single day of the year.
With the rapid advancements in mobile and social media, travel companies often find themselves struggling to separate hype from fact.