Ryanair, American Airlines, CheckInToMyFlight, Southwest Airlines, IDeaS Revenue Solutions, Amazon, Living Social, and ResponsibleTravel all appear in our roundup of the stories making news and driving opinion on 26 October.
MOBILE/DEVICES
Only one airline in the world has been bold enough to charge people for the chance to download an app to book its fares: Ryanair. Amazingly, people must not be minding the £3 fee. The Irish low-cost carrier says that its iPhone/iPad app, launched earlier this year, has topped the iTunes charts. It’s now launched a booking app for Android with the same £3 fee.
Yesterday Yahoo said it had acquired the company behind one-year-old mobile recommendations app Stamped. The app, built by ex-Googlers, let friends share recommendations. Yahoo says it wants to get into the mobile-first, social recommendations business.
DISTRIBUTION
In case you missed it: A Stanford computer sciences graduate, Nikil Viswanathan, built an automatic check-in website for Southwest Airlines flights that drew thousands of visitors, but Southwest has sent a  ’cease and desist’ order that successfully shut down CheckInToMyFlight.com.
Southwest has previously used its lawyers to shut down similar Web services. Viswanathan received a job offer from Expedia, based on the work he did, but he turned it down, reports Palo Alto Weekly.
French rail booking site thello.com  is now available in English.
More signs that the daily deals bubble has burst. Amazon took a writedown of $169 million for its stake in LivingSocial, which offers flash sales on travel and other products. That was close to full amount of the $175 million investment the Internet retailer made in Living Social two years ago.
IDeaS Revenue Solutions, the seller of revenue management software, has signed a three year exclusive commitment with Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group.
New holiday search goes live on British price comparison website Confused.com. It’ll be powered by British company Teletext Holidays.
AIRLINE TECH
American Airlines has debuted an entree reservations program, which allows first- and business-class passengers a chance to review menu options before their flight departs. Travelers can go to AA.com to hange or view their meal reservations within the 30 days to 24 hours prior to departure.
American is starting the service for flights between JFK and LAX, and DFW and LGA. It’ll expand to more cities in mid-November, and all domestic flights by March 2013 and all international flights by June 2013.
WorldPay’s alternative payment services will enable airline and travel merchants to access UATP, the low cost payment network owned by airlines, through WorldPay. Details, here.
SOCIAL COMMERCE
Ten-year old British travel agency responsibletravel.com has created a Wishlist feature, which prompts travellers to make dream lists of their favourite vacation ideas and share them with their friends and family via Facebook integration.
THANKS!
Tnooz hopes you will have a productive day. Happy Eid ul-Adha to our Muslim readers. Feel free to e-mail us your tips and send proposals for guest articles.
We’d be grateful if you forwarded this to your friends — they can sign up for our free newsletter, here.
Related posts:
- The Scan: Booking.com enables Passbook via its iPhone app, and more travel tech news
- Morning Scan: Expedia migrates smoothly, Southwest has an IT fiasco, Priceline preps for earnings, and more travel tech news
- The Scan: KLM taps WorldPay, fingerprints and Facebook will mash up at WTM, and more travel tech trade news
About Tnooz
I’m sure people do mind paying Ryanair £3 for an app that lets them book Ryanair’s product online. The reason they wear it is because they want easy access to the product, and since Ryanair now dominate certain routes (especially from regional airports like Bristol), flyers have little choice. I would much rather fly on another airline because Ryanair is horrible, but if you have no choice of airline on the route you need, then what alternative do you have?
What makes it almost scandalous with Ryanair, is that it’s simply a slightly refashioned version of their freely accessible mobile site – http://m.ryanair.com/
The mobile site asks for a username and password, and their normal site won’t open on my iPhone so they are forcing people to go buy an app! It’s unethical. It’s Ryanair through and through!!