Some might say it’s a storm in a negotiating teacup, but at the moment the stand-off between Expedia and Choice Hotels looks pretty serious given that both parties have lost the ability to work with another to sell rooms in about 6,000 hotels around the world.
The current state of play is that the worldwide deal to put Choice’s portfolio of properties on the Expedia platform, including hotels.com, was terminated last Thursday (October 15) and neither side looks like it will back down.
It is good to remind ourselves occasionally about what makes technology tick – humans, and not the other way round.
That thought came to me in Hong Kong last week, listening to the Honourable Sir Michael Kadoorie, chairman of Hong Kong and Shanghai Hotels, when he accepted his Lifetime Achievement Award at a hotel investment conference.
Here’s a man who knows what it’s like to run a business long-term, and one that is all about family and relationships.
Travel-planning website TravelMuse is looking for some inspiration and more monetization as it promotes CFO Russ Lemelin to CEO and assigns co-founder and CEO Kevin Fliess to a board position.
In separate interviews, both Lemelin and Fliess say Fliess several months ago broached the subject to the board of making a change to get the company, launched in beta in September 2008, to profitability.
I haven’t see any board minutes so I can’t say whether or not this is merely well-coordinated spin.
If you are tired of the lack of differentiation that seems to permeate travel start-ups from time to time, then you might appreciate New York City-based Jetsetter, which started a beta test last week.
Jetsetter’s founder and CEO is Drew Patterson, a former vice president of marketing at Kayak, who presumably knows a thing or two about metasearch and the advertising/media business.
But Jetsetter is a hotel-booking website that uses the merchant model and has no metasearch or media business.
In fact, Patterson, who generally has great things to say about Kayak, says Jetsetter works with luxury hotel partners and avoids the alleged pifalls of websites like Kayak and DealBase, where he says advertisers offer low lead-in prices with the aim of securing higher-priced conversions.
Perhaps the biggest obstacle to overcome is that of high expectations.
YouTube et al have secured a place in the hearts of marketers and other brand specialists by virtue of their ease of use and ability to create a buzz around a product or initiative with often no effort whatsoever.
But every eureka moment of enthusiasm should be tempered with remembering some of the basics.
News last week that TUI Travel is launching its own user review and recommendation site across mainland Europe indicates yet again that large travel companies are keen to get their hands on unique content.
TUI’s new Cheqqer service is interesting in that it is planning a two-tiered approach to getting content – starting from the bottom up in terms of attracting new reviews to the platform and also aggregating reviews from TUI’s myriad of brands.
Nothing wrong with that, except that two years is a long time in the world of user generated content and those with longish memories will recall how TUI’s Thomson division bought the well regarded (and well-SEOed!) Holidays Uncovered site in September 2007.
The Times reported that Amadeus and Travelport, which operate three of the four major global distribution systems, have abandoned merger talks and will pursue separate public offerings in Madrid and London, respectively, in the interim.
Hey, the two travel distribution powerhouses, owned by private equity companies, can always get back to their wooing later, The Times reports.
Asked about the report, Travelport GDS spokeswoman Jill Brenner says: “We never comment on market rumor or speculation.”
In my decade of writing about travel distribution, perhaps there has been no greater sport than speculating about GDS mergers, but I am not buying this one.
Most popular travel websites in the UK for the week ending October 17 2009.
Data includes Top Ten travel search terms and the Top Ten Agency, Airline and Destination/Accommodation sites.
Sabre has been marketing cubeless, a social networking platform and knowledge base, to corporations inside and outside the travel industry, but now, it turns out, chairman and CEO Sam Gilliland has abandoned the corner office for a cube.
OK, no real connection between cubeless and Gilliland’s cube decision other than the fact that both symbolize a sort of opening up and a laudable democratization of sorts.
And, I wonder how Gilliland’s cubemates would have reacted to a Dallas Morning News interview over the weekend and, specifically, to the following spin about Sabre’s loss of its American Airlines’ hosting contract to HP.
Orbitz gave its homepage a makeover, but unless you have a keen eye, the changes may elude you.
The new, redesigned homepage is wider and has more white space than the prior GUI. The resolution has been upped from 800 x 600 to 1024 x 768 to make the display easier on the eyes.
Once its primary differentiator, the Orbitz TLC branding is gone, which gives more prominence to the Orbitz spiel on hotels: “We know your plans change. That’s why you’ll never pay Orbitz hotel change or chancel fees.”
Here’s one of the most important facets of the redesign. With its smorgasbord of holdings, including Orbitz.com, Cheaptickets and ebookers, Orbitz Worldwide plans to transition to a sort of “universal” templating, as evidenced in the new homepage, so it will be able to speed rollouts of new features across all of its products.
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.