FEEL Air recently announced the launch of a long-haul, no-frills, “feel-good” air service between Stockholm and Oslo to New York and Bangkok.
I had a talk to the chief executive and founder Kai Holmberg:
Seven questions for the Virgins of Norway – known as Feel Air to most people
December 3, 2009 By 1 Comment
Day Three of Ten – How to build a user experience, not just a website
December 3, 2009 By 1 Comment
Write great copy.
Writing great sales copy for a website can be hard, but just stick to this format and you’ll be ok, or at least on the right road:
Headlines, Content and Call to Action.
Coffee break moment – Tracking 24 hours of flights around the world in one minute
December 3, 2009 By 3 Comments
Tnooz is a big fan of mashups and any graphical reproduction to illustrate how the airline industry operates.
The buzz and traffic around our recent coverage of the Casper mashup of Schiphol flights illustrates that readers are too.
So for this week’s fix of geekness, check out this visual representation of every flight around the world over a 24 hour period.
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Sabre restructures business units, forms hospitality division with mobile offerings
December 2, 2009 By 2 Comments
Privately held Sabre Holdings — heretofore organized into Sabre Travel Network, Travelocity and Sabre Airline Solutions — introduced a new business division, Sabre Hospitality Solutions, over the summer and is readying a “hard launch” of the unit in early 2010.
Felix Laboy, president of Sabre Hospitality Solutions, says the unit consists of SynXis, the CRS and hotel distribution company; Sabre media for hotels; E-site Marketing; and Sabre Hotel RFP.
One of the early fruits of the creation of SHS is that the unit has been able to blend technologies from SynXis and E-site Marketing to offer hotels mobile websites and mobile booking capabilities.
Being the Expedia CFO must be like a day at the beach
December 2, 2009 By 4 Comments
Nothing seems to ruffle Expedia Inc. CFO Michael Adler as the globe’s largest online travel agency is sitting pretty, at the top of the world.
Addressing analysts at the Friedman Billings Ramsey Capital Markets Investor Conference in New York Dec. 1, Adler calmly states how he likes where the trends are trending, and sort of sums up the whole thing thusly: “We think over the last several years we’ve proven we know how to run a travel company.”
That may be true, but there was little pushback at all from the assembled financial gurus during a Q & A with Adler. There wasn’t much said about Priceline’s gains in Europe, about adverse hotel tax rulings in the U.S., or other competitive challenges, although Adler did mention how the fee-cut frenzy turned out OK as it stimulated a lot of traffic and transactions.
PlanetEye creates online magazine, sells content to third parties
December 2, 2009 By 2 Comments
Trip planning and destination guide service PlanetEye has joined the ranks of similar sites with a new division to show off its specialist content and move to bolster existing media revenues.
The Toronto-based company recently created PlanetEyeTraveler as a standalone e-magazine brand to publish destination-specific news, information and reviews.
In addition, chief executive Jonah Sigel says, each article utilises the existing PlanetEye mapping technology which has gained the site plenty of plaudits courtesy of its unique and exclusive technology partnership with Microsoft.
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Virgin Atlantic heads to second runway with VTravelled social network
December 2, 2009 By 3 Comments
Virgin Atlantic is embarking on a new round of development work for its much-hyped VTravelled social network and says only after that will it focus its marketing efforts on passengers.
The site was launched in June 2009 to coincide with the 25th birthday of the airline and aimed to be a destination guide-trip planner coupled with sharing facilities for user generated content and photographs.
Virgin will not say how many people are registered with the site (“we have increased registrations by 55%”) but those listed on the site stretching from before VTravelled launched to December 2009 reach around 1,660.
What does Google think about on a Travel Think Day? Not much
December 2, 2009 By 3 Comments
Google hosted a private half-day conference yesterday for folk across the travel sector in the UK.
Gracing the 150 or so delegates with their presence – and presentations – were the likes of Google UK boss Matt Brittin, futurologist Patrick Dixon, and officials from Ebookers, Hilton, lastminute.com and Virgin Atlantic.
The idea behind the event is to “share insights, debate fresh perspectives and discuss best practices to harness the online opportunity for the travel market moving into 2010″.
Augmented Reality and Sixth Sense Convergence into Near Reality – includes awesome video
December 2, 2009 By 5 Comments
My Tnooz colleague Tim Hughes is a fan of the concept of Augmented Reality.
And being a bit of a geek myself I rather like the idea. But is this an end or a step on the way and if so to where or what?
Professor Chris – also from Down Under (where they clearly have too much time on their hands) – recently forwarded to me a very interesting piece from TED on sixth sense technology – wearable technology that interacts with data.
Day Two of Ten – How to build a user experience, not just a website
December 2, 2009 By 2 Comments
Get Organised:
Great websites are organised.
Before you create anything, sit down and draw a map, showing all the ways a user could possibly enter your website and how from there they will get into your sales funnel.
