American Airlines, Hotel.jp, Viator, TripLingo, Gogobot, Grasp Technologies, Lowcosttravel, C2G, 101 Holidays USA, and SignEasy, all appear in our roundup of trade news in travel technology for 21 December.
MOBILE
American serves about 20,000 boarding passes a day through Apple’s Passbook. The airline claims 1.5 million active users of the service and says that the popularity of the boarding pass function has led to an additional 1 million downloads of its iOS app. [Wired]
Today Japanese hotel and travel accommodation review site Hotel.jp debuted a smartphone app for iOS and Android that lets users upload photos and reviews to the site on the go. Created by Tokyo’s Venture Republic, Hotel.jp says that it already has more than 188,000 reviews and that mobile should accelerate its growth.
SignEasy, an app for signing documents legally using smartphones and tablets, has now added offline signing. It stores authenticated signatures in memory ready to be sent by email or stored back in the cloud storage accounts (Dropbox, Box/OneCloud, and Evernote) whenever they go online.
Liftopia has launched a fresh version of its iPhone App, which the company says is “skiing’s only multi-resort, location-based e-commerce app.” (The app lets you see trail maps and buy lift tickets and other mountain activities in advance.) One new trick: “Shake your phone with the app open for a snow-globe like animation that will reveal which ski area worldwide has received the most powder in the last 24 hours.”
Travel guides app mTrip has released an update for iOS and Android. The improvements include a fresh interface, offline maps and other navigation improvements.
SOCIAL COMMERCE
Gogobot, a social travel site with user-generated reviews and recommendations, is now adding streaming feeds of content from Travel + Leisure, a US magazine owned by American Express. See an example, here.
DIGITAL MARKETING
Viator announces “trends to watch in tours and activities for 2013.” The major agency’s most eye-catching prediction is that it will see continued 300% year-over-year growth in shore excursions.
Introducing a site aimed primarily on Britons considering taking a holiday in the US: 101 Holidays USA. The two editors who pick the vacation holidays are paid on a revenue share paid in perpetuity, a unique model in the travel media. Editors suggest the companies, who then are approached to pay an annual fee to be on the site. The company says its site is “now fully subscribed.”
DEALS AND TRANSACTIONS
Lowcosttravel sold Intuitive, a supplier of software to the travel sector, to the management team of Intuitive and NVM Private Equity, a UK buyout specialist. Lowcosttravel will now focus on its growth in Europe.
TripLingo, a mobile tool for learning colloquial translations of local languages that was named one of the “11 Groundbreaking Inventions of 2011,” has begun sharing consumer data with Grasp Technologies. “Grasp will be able to gather anonymized TripLingo use data to see what issues travelers are facing while abroad and what topics are hot. This data will help Grasp clients to be better prepared to assist their customers.”
DISTRIBUTION
C2G, maker of Cost2Drive, an online tool for planning and budgeting road trips in the US and Europe, has added weather forecasts from WeatherBug along with TripAdvisor content.Â
THANKS!
Tnooz hopes you have a happy holiday weekend.
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